I’ve been meaning to post better pictures of the Blue Mud Dauber Wasp, Chalybion californicum for years, ever since I posted these pretty lousy pictures way back in 2009. So, in July of 2013 I caught not one, but two wasps to photograph. The first on was found dead on a windowsill on July 5;
I see that this one didn’t get written down in my log book, so I’ll have to go by memory and the date stamp on the image files. The pictures were taken on July 5, 2013, and I think that either I found it dead in the road, or Sandy found it dead on the sidewalk.
On July 4, 2013, Sandy found this fairly huge jumping spider on one of our cherry trees. It was just about half an inch long, which for the local jumping spiders is kind of a monster.
Here it is next to a dime, for scale.
This crane fly is yet another insect that came to our porch light on July 4, 2013.[1] It was a pretty large one.
The way that the abdomen tapers to a point, I’m pretty sure this is a female. Male crane flies tend to have bulbous abdomen tips, frequently with claspers.
While we found this bug on the wall on July 4, 2013 at the same time as we were using the porch light to draw moths, I’m not entirely sure that it was drawn by the light itself. It may have been drawn by the availability of prey.
On August 15, 2013, Joe (one of our graduate students) told me that he had seen a large, green moth downtown. From the description, I suspected that it was a Luna moth. I’ve been wanting to get pictures of a luna moth for this site for a long time. Unfortunately, by the time I got to where he had seen it, it was gone. But fortunately, he had taken a picture of it with his cellphone, which he kindly sent to me. And here it is:
Here are a bunch more moths from around our front porch light on July 4, 2013. Rather than dole them out in individual postings over several weeks, let’s just run through them all at once. I think a lot of these are duplicates of moths that I previously posted from past years of turning on the porch light[1]. Like this one, which is another one-eyed sphinx, possibly a direct descendant of the ones we raised from eggs a while back..
Here’s a very pretty moth that came to our porch light on July 4, 2013 (along with a bunch of others that we will be getting to in later posts). It was quite obliging about being photographed, first perching on the front door weatherstripping for a profile view
Predatory stink bugs reared from eggs – I’m calling them “Webworm destroyers”
On July 7, 2013, Sandy found this clutch of eggs on a branch of a spruce tree in the yard. They were in the process of hatching out tiny stink bugs.
Now, this is hardly the first time we’ve found stink bug eggs, but on previous occasions I found that it is surprisingly difficult to get an ID on the eggs and nymphs. So, this time I decided to try rearing them to adulthood to see what we got.
Here is a horse fly that I caught on July 2, 2013 when it was trying to bite me on the back of the head[1]. I only squashed it a little, so it was still in OK shape for photographing.
