When I was a kid living in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, I used to find these colorful beetles on milkweed plants all the time. They were particularly amusing because if you pick one up, it will make a fairly loud “eeee-eeeee-eeeee” noise by rubbing parts of its exoskeleton together. However, they don’t appear to exist in the Upper Peninsula, so I took the opportunity to catch and photograph some while we were visiting Sandy’s parents near Manchester on August 1, 2013.
Japanese Beetles (from lower Michigan)
I don’t see these Japanese Beetles (Popillia japonica) up around Houghton, but in the Lower Peninsula (and, I guess, in most of the eastern US) they are a common garden pest. These were in Sandy’s parents’ yard on August 1, 2013, busily engaged in trying to make more Japanese Beetles.
On July 30, 2013 we were downstate visiting Sandy’s parents (near Manchester), and Sam found this moderate-size beetle (about half an inch long) swimming in a mud puddle.
It looks to me like a Predaceous Diving Beetle, family Dytiscidae.
I found this rove beetle on July 25 while pushing my bike up the hill. It was longer than half an inch, fast-moving, and extremely slippery.
When it was alarmed, it would raise the rear of its abdomen up in the air, as if it were about to spray something noxious, but I didn’t notice any odd smells.
Sandy caught me this nice Abbott’s Sphinx caterpillar on July 26, 2013. This is one that we’d seen before back in 2009, and I thought it warranted further examination.
Our neighbor across the street found this medium-sized, rather colorful caterpillar eating her Hydrangeas on July 22, 2013, and thoughtfully brought it over to me to identify.
Sandy found this patch of green eggs on a lilac leaf on July 21, 2013. The patch was about a centimeter in diameter (about the size of a fingerprint).
I tried keeping them to raise up, but they never actually hatched, so this is as far as we got. The fact that it was on lilac didn’t help much, I didn’t find anyone reporting similar eggs on lilacs. From general appearance, a likely possiblitity looks like some type of Tortricid moth. This is a substantial family of smallish moths, and the caterpillars tend to roll up leaves to hide in while they eat them.
On July 18, 2013, the girls found this little grasshopper nymph that had gotten into the house. So, I perched it on a blossom of one of Sandy’s house orchids for photos.
This was no more than half-grown, there aren’t even any noticeable wing buds yet.
Our little sour cherry tree that we planted about four years ago[1] has finally started bearing significant enough amounts of fruit for us to actually harvest it. Unfortunately, this also means that there are enough cherries to attract the various fruit pests. When we picked the cherries in July of 2013, a large fraction (maybe half) had one of these burrowing around in the middle:
This Deer Fly was trying to bite me on the head while I was biking home on July 17, 2013. I managed to catch it without killing it, so that the eye colors wouldn’t fade.
This is a rather dark, almost black deer fly, unlike a lot of the other species which are lighter colored. I’ve noticed that, in general, northern insects tend to be darker colored than their southern relatives, probably so that they will warm up faster in the sunlight.