On June 13, 2012, Sandy found this rolled-up goldenrod leaf with a little caterpillar inside.
When it came out, we saw it was a pretty little thing, with black-and-white stripes.
While walking out on Clover Weevil Road[1] on June 9, 2012, Sandy found this green caterpillar with a distinctive hump on its rear. It was eating leaves from a chokecherry bush. She says it bit her hand twice, fairly painfully, while she was carrying it back to the house (although it didn’t draw blood). As you can see from the fact that it is a bit longer than my finger joint in this picture, it is slightly over an inch long.
Sam found this beetle in the living room on June 9. 2012, and was amazed by its very long antennae.
It was a pretty good-sized beetle, and the total antenna span was at least two inches.
This little jumping spider was running around the base of the outside wall of our house on June 9, 2012. I really should have shot these with the close-up lens, and with more light, but at least we can still see most details OK.
I found this little weevil (about 5 mm long) on the wall of our old house on June 3, 2012.
Weevils are hard for me to identify, because there are so very, very many of them [1]. I was saved by Blaine Mathison, who suggested that it was Pissodes rotundatus, the Small Spruce Weevil.
Sam’s lollipop seems to have some contamination.
She liked the candy part, but she said the scorpion was kind of bland.
Powered flight using wings has evolved independently on Earth at least four times[1]. But as far as we can tell, insects did it first, and have exploited their innovation like crazy. To the point where they are the most plentiful flying organisms on earth by a massive margin. And the wings are used for everything from a kind of floating aimless flight, to fast-moving and highly-controlled maneuver.
A while back, we acquired some guinea fowl, which we let run around the yard to eat ticks[1]. It actually seems to be working, the tick levels in our yard are way down. But not zero, as can be seen from these Wood Ticks, Dermacentor variabilis (also known as American Dog Ticks) that Sandy picked off of our poor old dog on June 3, 2012
Sandy found this caterpillar on one of our apple trees on June 1, 2012. It was fairly good sized (over an inch long).
We tried rearing it, but unfortunately it didn’t mature, which leaves us with yet another of those hard-to-identify green caterpillars.
Sandy found this medium-sized black moth in the house on June 2, 2012. It had probably been attracted to the house lights at some point, and then snuck inside when somebody opened the door.
It looked really, really black while it was fluttering around the house. It actually looked a lot like those big, sooty ashes that you see rise up in the air when burning cardboard boxes. But, when we caught it in a transparent plastic container and looked at the underside, it was actually quite pale on the bottom.