In the summer of 2011, we all took a weekend trip to Madison, Wisconsin[1]. When we got back, on July 11, we found this beetle in the car, crawling on our luggage.
It could have been picked up anywhere along the way, but most likely it got into the car either when we stopped to wade around and look at fish in Lake Tomahawk, or when we visited the Watersmeet Trout Hatchery[2]. Both times, the car was parked for some time right next to a whole lot of trees with the windows open, and either place would have been a prime opportunity for a beetle to slip in.
And here is our annual Christmas butterfly[1] – in a bit better shape than the one from last year.
I’ve been stalking these for years, and I finally caught one. This one was flying around the feral apple trees in the back yard on August 14. I had to chase it all over the yard with the insect net, and it almost got away at the end, but I eventually snagged it when it landed in the tall grass.
Here’s a lacewing larva that we found on a clover blossom on July 18, 2011. It was about 8 mm long, and pretty hard to see until we got it on a sheet of paper.
I’ve had pictures of adult lacewings before, but the adults aren’t as clearly predatory as the larvae. Just look at those mandibles, this is obviously the sort of creature that spends its life murdering aphids.
Sandy found what looked like a very small (8 mm long) slug on July 15, 2011. It was eating a leaf on one of our little plum trees. Its most obvious un-sluglike feature was the fact that it was out and about in broad daylight.
Rather large but very spindly orange-brown insects, like this one, are regularly drawn to our porch light in the summer. They look superficially like crane flies, but they aren’t.
It is an Ichneumon wasp, in the subfamily Ophioninae, and it’s either one of the ones in the genus Enicospilus, or a Short-Tailed Ichneumon in the genus Ophion.
Mantises are such large, photogenic insects that I really wanted our daughters to be able to see one. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen one in the wild here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (although they are reasonably common in the part of the Lower Peninsula where I grew up). So, we decided to raise some from purchased eggs. We got ours from Arbico Organics [1], who specialize in biological pest control agents. The egg cases were for Chinese Mantids, Tenodera aridifolia. They sent us three egg cases in a plastic tube for, I think, about $10 plus shipping.[2] After incubating them for nearly 6 weeks, this is what we got:
There were well over a hundred baby mantises from each egg case, so we ended up with an embarrassingly large number. They were cute, spindly little fellows, each maybe a centimeter long.
This little black cricket was captured along with a bunch of other bugs with a sweep-net at the beginning of August 2011. His intended fate, along with the other larger contents of the sweep net, was to be food for the praying mantis that we raised from an egg case[1]. 
He was pretty wily, though, and managed to avoid being eaten by hiding out in the soil and litter at the bottom of the mantis cage. He also evidently found plenty of food there, being a detrivore, and he lived in the cage for months.
We have a lot of spotted knapweed [1] growing alongside the road. In June, pretty much every stalk of it has a blob of spittlebug spittle on it, with one or more of the green nymphs inside. This year, Sam collected a stalk with a nice spittle blob on it, and put it in a vase of water so that we could see what an adult spittlebug looks like. Here’s what one of the blobs of spittle looked like as of June 29, 2011:
On July 26, I was walking between buildings on the Michigan Tech campus when I saw this very large (and fortunately very dead) horsefly lying on the ground:
How large was it? Well, its body was a full inch long, which for a fly is positively monstrous.
In an earlier post, I had pictures of a lady beetle that had been caught by a spider in our windowsill, and promised to get to the spider later. Well, now it’s time for the spider:
