On May 28, 2011, our 3-year-old daughter Rosie came into the house after playing in the back yard, trotted up to me, and proudly held out her arms – which were covered with at least a hundred (no exaggeration) of these tiny (2-3 mm long) black ants:
We found this beetle on July 31, 2010 on the side of the house.
It was very similar to this one that I posted back in May 2009, but not identical: the previous one had a stronger metallic color, a slightly differently-shaped head and pronotum (the plate just behind the head), and looks to have a different pattern of sculpturing on the face.
Goldenrod is very common on our property, with several large patches of hundreds of plants each. And, if one examines the goldenrod stems, a lot of them will have these nearly spherical galls about an inch in diameter:
I cut one open last summer in mid-July to get a picture of what was inside. The gall was mostly solid, but in a little pocket in the middle we found this little grub:
Sam found this little (only about 5 mm long) beetle for me on May 21, 2011 (Yes! It is from this year!). It was determined to make life difficult for me by running around, so this is the best shot I could get while it was upright.
Once upside down, it seemed more or less resigned to its fate, so I could at least get pictures of the underside.
Sam and I were turning over rocks on August 1, 2010 and found this fine, large beetle. Those are my fingers it is crawling over, which makes it about an inch (2.5 cm) long.
It is very similar to a beetle that I previously posted back in 2007, and tenatively identified as Calosoma calidum (although, I see that it has evidently been renamed Callisthenes calidus since then). Except, that one had distinct gold-colored dimples on its wing covers, while this one has very little coloration in the dimples. At first, that made me think that what we had here was the related Calosoma frigidum.
We found this in the yard almost exactly a year ago, on June 21, 2010. It was 13 mm long, a pretty fast runner, and has a lean, predatory sort of look.
The body shape, head shape, and slight iridescence lead me to it being one of the Carabids. This is a very large family of mostly carnivorous beetles, that tend to be active hunters of things like caterpillars, snails, worms, and other insects.
Here’s another beetle that the girls caught for me when we went to Otter Lake on May 22, 2010. This is a pretty good sized weevil, almost a centimeter long, which is positively huge as weevils go around here. She’s had a rough life – in addition to missing part of her left foreleg, she also doesn’t have any antennae anymore.
Caterpillars with pink and white stripes
Sam and I found two of these while turning over pieces of dead log on June 14 of 2010 (almost exactly a year ago).
They looked big enough to be ready to pupate, so we tried rearing them in a jar. Unfortunately, they died (possibly because we didn’t know their correct foodplant) so we never did get to see the adult form.
Last week, Alex Wild brought up the topic of Longform Photoblogging – his was a rather long mayfly. Well, in that spirit, here is my contribution to the longform format:
On occasion, we leave the front porch light on during the night, and then go out in the morning to see what was attracted to it. This is one of the moths that came on August 1, 2010. I was particularly struck by its bulging forelegs that it stuck out in front, as if it were prostrating itself:
