Insect I.D. – Longhorn Beetle (of some kind)

There are over 1,000 types of longhorn beetles, so I’m not sure which one this is specifically but it’s pretty interesting. For a while we were finding these frequently on our sliding glass doors. When you touch them, they try to reach back and grab you with their harmless long antennaes. Their mouths can bite you but as long as you pick them up from behind their heads, you won’t get hurt by them. Their larvae typically like to eat rotting wood and thankfully aren’t a threat to healthy wood (like our house)! The adults feed on flowers. They’re black beetles with extremely long antennaes. The kids thought they were pretty cool!

Bumblebee on Sunflower

I have a cool sunflower plant that we started from bird seed during a homeschool science experiment. We decided to transplant it into the garden to see what it would turn out like and here it is!

 It’s beautiful right now. I took some close-up pics of the flowers and was watching the bees buzzing around them. There was a huge bumblebee that was fun to watch. It would land and get covered with pollen and then would take it’s legs to “groom” itself before flying off to another sunflower. Here are some pics. You may be able to see some pollen on the first pic on the bee and in the 2nd pic, the bee has it’s leg up by it’s head cleaning it. It looks much cleaner in this pic!

Dragonfly Nymph

Over Memorial Day week-end we went to a nearby lake to hike. While we were there we noticed lots of driftwood along the edge of the lake. As one of the kids was looking at the driftwood, they noticed a dragonfly nymph skin stuck to the driftwood. As we examined closer, we noticed some dragonflies that had recently come out of their skins and were waiting to fly away! We then noticed a dragonfly nymph who was getting ready to molt and become a dragonfly.

I picked up the nymph on a stick and carried it along with me. I wasn’t paying too much attention to it when I glanced down at it and noticed it had split it’s skin and the dragonfly was emerging! It was really neat watching this kind of ugly thing split and watching this dragonfly crawl out! Not the most beautiful thing in the world but quite amazing! We watched it come out and I was going to hopefully watch it get it’s wings pumped out and watch it fly away, but unfortunately while I was hiking it must have fallen off the stick. Hopefully it was ok and flew off later! Here’s our pic of it coming out of it’s nymph skin!

Insect I.D. – Ebony Jewelwing Damselfly

Our family enjoys canoeing on a river nearby here. Recently when canoeing we have seen huge numbers of damselflies that have black wings and bright blue / green bodies. These damselflies fly with more a flitting appearance and are all over fallen trees, branches and brush in the river or on the edge of the river. It is beautiful to see them flitting all over!

In reading about these damselflies I learned that they live in shady river areas and like to perch on fallen branches and logs. They then fly out to eat tiny insects before returning to perch. They lay eggs inside soft stems of plants just below the surface of the water. The eggs hatch out into larvae called naiads who overwinter in this state and then climb out of the water, split their skins (molt) and become a damselfly the next year.

Spittlebugs!

Yesterday when I was out walking I noticed the foam of spittlebugs on the weeds near our house. Plant after plant had spittlebugs on them! It had been a while since I had looked at them so I decided to take some pics and check them out!

Foam of the spittlebug on a weed

I honestly think that these spittlebugs are pretty cute! It’s amazing how they create their little foam hide-outs!

Here you can see the green spittlebug on the foam after I disturbed his home a bit. His tiny eyes are just little dots!

 

One more spittlebug pic. Here he climbed up a little higher out of the foam on the stem.

After taking the pics, I went inside to check my Pet Bugs book by Sally Kneidel. I found out that spittlebugs are the nymph stage of froghoppers. Pet Bugs goes on to say that if you want to take care of one and watch it grow, you can dig up a whole plant and transplant it into a pot and keep track of the little spittlebug. They go through 5 instars (stages) before becoming a froghopper. So we may dig up a plant and keep track of one of these guys for a while to watch the changes progress!