I found this huge mayfly hanging on the side of one of the campus buildings on June 22, near where I park my bike. This was only about 50 feet from Portage Lake, so that’s probably where it came from.
The body proper is a bit over 3 cm long, and if you include the tail filaments it is almost 7 cm, which for a mayfly is pretty big.
We were invited to a picnic on July 3, and our hosts mentioned that their cherry tree had an infestation of something that looked like tiny spiders. So, I went and looked at it, and saw that practically every leaf was covered with these tiny bugs:
At the beginning of June, we all went down to the little pond on Springbrook Lane looking for tadpoles to raise into frogs. We didn’t find any, but we did find some other stuff, including this rather aggressive-looking individual:
Sam caught this for me on August 8. I think she said it was on the outside of a window trying to get in. Anyway, it is a very large, striking crane fly with a wingspan of well over an inch. It’s unfortunately missing half of its legs, but that’s just the way things go with crane flies[1].
Every fall, thousands of these large, slow-moving, kind of nondescript flies appear in clusters on the siding of all of our buildings, trying to find a way in to any crevice that they can.
They aren’t really after anything, other than a place to hibernate for the winter. Once they find a spot, they settle in until spring, at which point they once again appear in large numbers as they emerge, mate, and fly off.
I found this beetle in the bare ground next to our garage on August 10. It is similar, but not identical, to some that we found eating a dead mouse about three years ago:
Often called “Fruit Flies”, but real fruit flies are something else, so “Vinegar Flies” avoids confusion
Pretty much every year, around tomato harvesting time, we get some problems with these. Mainly because we end up with a lot more tomatoes than we can eat kind of stacked up in the kitchen, and it only takes one of them getting infested by these gals to pretty much fill the kitchen with hundreds of tiny little flies. For some reason, this year they particularly liked to hang out on the potted orchid in the kitchen:
“If it doesn’t say Sunkist, you don’t know what you’re getting“[1]
Sam and I were out in the yard next to the herb garden, when Sam said, “Look, caterpillar poop!” and pointed at the sage patch. Sure enough, there were caterpillar droppings on the sage leaves, and looking a bit closer we found a good-sized, nearly featureless green inchworm eating the sage. I thought this was unusual, because nothing local seems to eat sage. So, to try to identify it we brought it in and put it into a jar with some sage leaves, to try to raise it to adulthood. And, like a fool, I didn’t photograph it right away. Next thing we knew, it spun a cocoon,
Around June 6, S_ noted that one of our small plum trees [1] had a significant infestation of these scale insects:
Yes, I know that they don’t look much like insects, but trust me on this. I think they are probably one of the Lecanium Scales, possibly European Fruit Lecanium Scale, Parthenolecanium corni. Which, in spite of the name, actually seem to be a native North American species that is also found in Europe. It isn’t clear to me whether they were transported to Europe early on, and then found there before an entomologist described them here, or whether they were always present all around the northern hemisphere.
This was a good year locally for Monarch butterflies. We have a lot of milkweed growing around the place, and in particular there is a smooth-leaved variety growing back in the woods that the Monarchs really like. Around the middle of July, it was to the point that practically every milkweed plant had at least one Monarch egg on it, and the young caterpillars were everywhere[1].
