It’s that time of year again—time to put our feet up, sip adult beverages by the light of the tree, hum “The Twelve Bugs Days of Christmas,” and dream of spring. (The days are getting longer, you know.) Here are a Baker’s Dozen from 2025.

Polyphemus Moth Caterpillar

This glorious polyphemus moth caterpillar, in the giant silk moth family Saturniidae (not the same family as the moths that produce silk for textiles), is huge! And it’s going to grow up to be .    

American Rubyspot

One of the lovely River damsels.��, but this female is pretty spectacular in her own right. (The BugLady wishes she knew how she got that halo effect—probably a random sparkle off the Milwaukee River beyond—she’d employ it in more pictures.)

Ambush Bug

Seasoned BugFans can attest to the BugLady’s fascination with Ambush bugs, which lay in wait on flowers until lunch arrives.��When she took this shot, the Ambush bug reminded her of another fascinating insect, . Read here for .

Dogbane Leaf Beetles

They are – except when they aren’t.��The beetle’s color and incandescence are the result of the play of light on exceedingly small, tilted plates that overlay its pigment layer. As you walk around it, the light bouncing off both the pigment and the plates causes the colors to change with your angle (and sometimes bring up Christmas colors).��Life is physics. .��

Oblong-Winged Katydid

A splendid katydid, splendidly in tune with its surroundings!

Bee Fly

This Bee fly deposits her eggs in the egg tunnels of solitary wasps that live in sandy/bare areas, though “deposit” doesn’t quite describe the process.��She  and lobs an egg down into the opening.��But, there’s a secret sauce.��She dips her rear end into the sand in order to take up some sand grains which she will store in a special receptacle. As an egg emerges, it gets a gritty coating that may help camouflage it and may also make it heavier so that her” throw” will be more accurate.

Bumble Bee

The BugLady has pictures of a number of insects nectaring on the spiny center of Purple coneflower (Echinacea sp.), and it always looks like an iffy proposition.��The name “Echinacea” comes from the Greek word for hedgehog.

Crab Spider

Crab spiders like orchids. This one is on a Small Yellow Lady’s Slipper! They don’t spin trap webs, and orchids give them a nice platform on which to wait for pollinators, though some might have a long wait because not all orchids are pollinated by insects.��The BugLady has a color slide of a Bog candle orchid with a white crab spider fitting neatly onto a horizontal flower.��Just as there is an orchid-mimic mantis, .

Tufted Bird Lime/Bird-Dropping Moths

Tufted Bird Lime/Bird-Dropping Moths look marbled to the BugLady.��Jim Sogarrd, author of Moths and Caterpillars of the North Woods, tells a story about attempting to collect a bird-dropping moth from the side of a building, only to discover that it actually was a bird dropping.

Robber Fly

Robber flies are carnivorous flies that come in quite .��Larger species, , can gather bees, butterflies, grasshoppers, dragonflies, and even cicadas for lunch.��Others are great , and still others, like this small fly sitting on a daisy fleabane, capture mosquitoes and gnats.

Hackberry Emperor Butterflies

Some kinds of caterpillars feed on a variety of plants, but Hackberry Emperor caterpillars eat only one thing and so can live only where Hackberry trees grow—.��This one was posing under the roof overhang of the Barn, at Riveredge.��Adults rarely feed on flowers, preferring tree sap, rotting fruit, carrion, and dung, and they collect minerals from damp/muddy soil with their proboscis. . They’re not pollinators. When they do visit flowers, they don’t touch down with their feet, and they avoid putting their antennae on the flower. They only extend their proboscis into the flower, and so do not pick up nor spread pollen.  

Jumping Spider

Even people who don’t like spiders like Jumping spiders, and some keep them as pets. This one looks like the Bold jumper, Phidippus audax.

Blue Dasher

When the BugLady was a kid, Angie the Christmas Tree Angel (BugFans who are old enough can hum a few bars here) used to smile benignly from the top of the tree.��That was before the BugLady knew about dragonflies.��This guy makes an excellent substitute for Angie or for the Partridge in the Pear Tree.

May your days be merry and bright,

The BugLady

The post The Twelve Bugs of Christmas appeared first on Field Station.

Greetings, BugFans,

The BugLady has been scouring the landscape and aiming her camera at anything that will sit still (and some that won’t). And without going too overboard on dragonflies and damselflies, here are some of her bug adventures.  

Leafcutter Bee

Ah, the one that got away.  The BugLady saw a lump on a boardwalk in front of her and automatically aimed her camera at it (a long lens is a good substitute for a pair of binoculars). The lump – a leafcutter bee – flew off after one, out-of-focus shot. The bee had paused while she was cutting and collecting pieces of vegetation to line the tunnel and chambers where she’ll lay her eggs.   

Japanese Beetle

Lots of the vegetation that the BugLady sees these days is pockmarked with small holes — evidence of feeding by Japanese beetles. (Of course, she’s also been seeing conspicuous, beetle ménages a trois on the tops of those leaves, too.) Japanese beetles made their North American debut in New Jersey in 1916, and their menu now includes more than 350 plant species. But, they are a handsome beetle!   

Water Striders

They create art wherever they go.  

Appalachian Brown Butterfly (probably)

The part of the hindwing that has the squiggly line that helps distinguish the Eyed Brown from the Appalachian Brown is gone. Life in the wild isn’t all beer and skittles. The chunks missing from this butterfly’s wings suggest that a bird chased it and that most of the butterfly got away.

Powdered Dancer

In an episode a month ago, the BugLady lamented that the river was so high and fast that Powdered Dancers couldn’t find any aquatic vegetation to oviposit in.�� A dry spell revealed some weed patches, and the dancers hopped right onboard.��

Eastern Pondhawk Dragonfly

This male Eastern Pondhawk was hugging the cattail stalk, a posture that’s not characteristic of this usually-horizontal species. Turns out that it had captured a Violet/Variable Dancer damselfly and was holding it closely between its body and the cattail.  

Crab Spider

What would a summer summary be without one of the BugLady’s favorite spiders, the Crab spider? Where’s Waldo? Bonus points if you know the name of the plant.  

Honey Bee with Aphids

It’s not surprising to see yellowjackets browsing among herds of water lily aphids. Adult yellowjackets are (mostly) vegetarians, but they collect, masticate, and regurgitate small insects for their larvae. Honey bees are hard-core vegans, so what’s going on here?  

Aphids overeat — they have to. The plant sap they suck in has very low concentrations of sugars and proteins, so they need to process a lot of it in order to get enough calories. Sap comes out of the plant under pressure, which forces the sap through the aphid smartly, and the extra liquids (in the form of a sweet substance called honeydew), exit to the rear of the aphid (or it would explode). Honeydew drops onto the surrounding leaves and attracts other insects that harvest it. The bee is no threat to the aphids, she’s just collecting honeydew.  

Fun Fact: According to Master beekeeper Rusty Burlew, writing in her blog “Honey Bee Suite,” The bees treat the substance like nectar so it is often mixed together with the nectar from flowers. As such, it is not really noticeable in the finished honey. Honey made almost exclusively from honeydew is known as honeydew honey, forest honey, bug honey, flea honey, or tree honey. Sometimes it is named after its primary component, such as pine honey, fir honey, oak honey, etc. It is generally dark, strongly flavored, less acidic, and less sweet than floral honey.

Eastern Amberwing

At barely an inch long, this improbably-colored dragonfly is one of our flashiest. 

Mosquitoes

Mosquito Control 101: “Get rid of standing water in your yard!” Check. But, the BugLady has a bird bath (her “vintage” childhood saucer sled) that she washes out and refills at least once a week… or so she thought. She was surprised the other day to see a whole mess of mosquito “wigglers” (larvae) in the water.  Worse, they probably were the small-but-mighty Floodwater mosquitoes that can make August miserable because they emerge in Biblical numbers and because they seem to be biting with one end even before the other end has fully landed. They develop at warp speed — a week from egg to wiggler, and another week from wiggler to adult. Get rid of standing water in your yard. Check. 

Scorpionflies

These are odd-looking insects from a whole order of odd-looking insects (Mecoptera). This guy is in the Common scorpionfly family Panorpidae and in the genus Panorpa — a corruption of the Greek word for locust. The appendage at the end of the male’s abdomen explains its name, but these are harmless insects, fore and aft. One site mentioned they are wary and hard to photograph. Amen! 

Panorpa uses chewing mouthparts at the tip of its elongated rostrum/snout to eat dead and dying insects, and it may liberate insects from spider webs (and sometimes the spider, too). It is also said to eat some nectar and rotting fruits. 

He courts by releasing pheromones to attract her, quivering his wings when she comes near, and then offering a gift — a dead insect, or maybe some gelatinous goo manufactured in his salivary gland. He shares bodily fluids with her as she eats.

Carolina Locust

What a lovely, chunky little nymph!  

Autumn Meadowhawk

The dragonfly scene changes after mid-summer, with the early clubtails, emeralds, corporals, whitefaces, and skimmers being replaced by darners, saddlebags, and a handful of meadowhawk species. This newly-minted (teneral) Autumn Meadowhawk has just left its watery nursery on its way to becoming — for the next six weeks or so — a creature of the air.  

Katydid Nymph

The BugLady was photographing leafcutter bees that were visiting birdsfoot trefoil flowers. (Birdsfoot trefoil is a non-native member of the pea family that was introduced for animal fodder and erosion control and that can become invasive in grasslands. There’s probably some blooming along a road edge near you). She noticed that when the bees approached one particular flower, they reversed course and didn’t land, and when she checked, she found the tiniest katydid nymph she has ever seen. This one will grow up considerably to be a 1½” to 2” long Fork-tailed bush katydid… .  How do you find bush katydids? The “Listening to Insects” website advises us to “Watch for a leaf that moves on its own, or a leaf with antennae.” They are a favorite of Great golden digger wasps, which collect and cache them for their eventual larvae, and another website said “This is what bird food looks like.”&�Բ�����;&�Բ�����;

The BugLady found a recording of their call. They don’t say “Katy-did, Katy-didn’t” they say “tsp” or “pffft,” and they don’t say it very loudly. Bush Katydids are busiest at night, when their long, highly sensory antennae help them to find their way around. Although adult females are equipped with a wicked-looking ovipositor, they don’t sting, but they do nip if you handle them wrong. Memorably, it’s said.   

Go outside, look at bugs!

The BugLady

The post Summer Sights appeared first on Field Station.

Greetings, BugFans,

In late spring, BugFan Sara sent some “Who-is-this-and-what-is-it-doing??” pictures—small “bumble bees” were excavating the outer surface of a clay bread oven in her back yard. (The BugLady gave Sara bonus points for having a clay bread oven in her back yard.) While she was mulling her answer, the BugLady found a reference to an Anthophora bee that is sometimes referred to as the Chimney or Turret bee.  That looked promising, and her hunch was confirmed by BugFan PJ.  Thanks, folks.

Family Apidae is a big umbrella in the bee world that includes Bumble, Cuckoo, Carpenter, Digger, and Honey bees – 1,000 species of them in North America and 5,000 species elsewhere.  The star of today’s show is in the tribe Anthophorini, the Digger bees (68 species in our area and 766 worldwide).  What they all have in common is a bumble-bee-ish appearance and the habit of most species of making nest tunnels in the soil.

Chimney bees (Anthophora abrupta) are solitary bees that can be found in woodlands and grasslands from Texas to the western Great Lakes to New England (solitary bees don’t have a central hive, a queen, or workers, and each female cares for her own brood).�� They’re chunky, medium-sized bees (0.50” to 0.60” long) that can be distinguished from bumble bees by their color pattern – dark heads, pale, golden thoraxes, and dark abdomens, and by.�� with hairs around the edges, earning them another common name – the Mustached mud bee.��In 1929, entomologist Phil Rau published a paper about Chimney bees in the journal Psyche.��The BugLady is interspersing her information with excerpts from Rau’s paper, written back in the days when scientific writing allowed a more lyrical tone.

“They are neither timid nor aggressive, but they certainly are self-reliant…how conspicuous they are as they noisily swing their ponderous bodies to and fro on the wing, arrive home and scramble into their burrows or come tumbling out headlong and dash off into the sunny fields, with all the exuberance of boys just out of school. They have none of the shy, stealthy ways of maneuvering, whereby some of the smaller and daintier varieties of bees and wasps hold their own in a competitive world.”

Chimney bees are generalist foragers that pollinate a wide array of wildflowers, and they’re also important pollinators of agricultural crops like cranberries, asparagus, tomatoes, blackberries, raspberries, and persimmons.  Their docility (if you handle one roughly, it’s more likely to bite than sting), home-body ways, and gregarious nesting make them interesting to researchers looking for potential large-scale pollinators.  Their allow them to reach the nectar in clover flowers.

Rau recalled watching female Chimney bees licking rust on old fence wire.  A colleague speculated that while carnivorous insects glean minerals from the blood of their prey, the nectar-feeding Chimney bees may get minerals from rust.

Chimney bees are on the wing from late spring through late summer.  Males emerge almost a week before females, and they attract females by deploying pheromones that are carried in their moustaches!  Mating occurs on flowers (she mates once, but he may mate several times).  After they mate, the female looks for a spot to excavate a tunnel, often in a clay bank above a stream, usually in the same nest area she emerged from.

Some solitary bees and wasps won’t tolerate the nearby nests of their sisters, but chimney bees prefer company. As Rau wrote, “Since they work in colonies, or more correctly remain to build on the site where they were born, the result is a very conspicuous village, sometimes a very crowded and busy town of these masonry turrets … At a busy season when many of these huge bees are bustling about with very audible hum and zip, the entire village with its many wonderful towers and industrious citizens form a spectacle which is in itself quite capable of overawing any but the most unemotional individual.”

She employs a pretty unique construction method – she brings water or mud to her site and uses it to soften the clay so she can dig.  Each mouthful of dampened clay that she removes goes into building a chimney.  Rau describes it: “With a portion of the water they would wet the hard, yellow clay, remove a mouthful of it, back out and apply it to the last ring in the chimney. The bees would carry the mud under the thorax with the front pair of legs, while the two hind pairs furnished locomotion; as the bee backed out of the nest to the opening, the ball of mud was passed to the hind legs, and she now held her footing with the front legs while with hind legs she slapped the mud onto the last layer and with many active thumps with the tip of the abdomen, punched and beat it into shape. ‘Punched’ is really the right word correctly to describe the gesture.”

Chimneys may be very short or up to 3” long, and they are oriented randomly.  No one knows exactly why she makes the chimney (other than that it’s a convenient way to dispose of the diggings) – researchers have guessed that it protects the tunnel from rain and blowing debris, that it helps with thermoregulation of the nest, that there is social significance for the community, and/or that (as Rau suspected) it helps her find

Two factors may limit the building of chimneys – drought and a lack of clay in the nesting area.  Rau wrote that “A. abrupta made nests either with or without turrets, and the turret-making activities were directly correlated with water conditions. They required water in abundance, and when it was plentiful, so too were the turrets; in droughty years they struggled on with few and small or no turrets, and their nesting activities were much reduced.”

She creates up to seven cells along the length of the tunnel (which is about 4” long), and here’s the magic part.  The walls of the tunnel and of each of the egg cells are lined with a waxy substance she makes in a gland called a Dufour’s gland.  The liquid made by the gland starts out clear, but it dries to a solid, waxy sheet that keeps moisture out of the tunnel and the cells.  She carries pollen and nectar into the cell and mixes them with liquid from the Dufour’s gland, injects an egg into the mix (which one researcher describes as a “soupy mass”) and seals the cell with clay.  The tunnel is covered with a clay plug when all the egg cells are provisioned.  A large, communal nest may contain 5,000 cells.

Because the females don’t cap their tunnels when they are out looking for water, nectar and pollen, other females may try to take them over.  Writes Rau “Not infrequently an animated fight was to be seen between two females, one evidently trying to usurp the burrow that had been made by another, and often dead bees were found at the foot of the bank.”

Frequently, however, the fights appeared quite alarming without proving fatal. One pollen-laden mother was seen backing out of her hole with the front leg of an intruder in her mandibles. The visitor showed no fight, but resisted with all her might; at the foot of the hole, every little gain that the rightful owner made was offset by the intruder pulling her back. At last the intruder lost her hold, and as they went tumbling to the ground they engaged in a pugnacious embrace.

After laying in the “soup” for five days, the egg hatches, and the larva feeds on the provisions and the cell lining.  They overwinter as pre-pupae, finish their metamorphosis in spring, and emerge from the tunnel.

And if all that weren’t enough, male Chimney bees climb up grass stems in the evening, grip them with their jaws, and

Ain’t Nature Grand!!

The BugLady

The post Chimney Bee appeared first on Field Station.

Let us celebrate native bees, those often unobtrusive and always invaluable pollinators that make possible much of our landscape and many of our crops.�� Unfortunately, although she’s always photographing fuzzy little bees, the BugLady is pretty inept at identifying them, and she has no pictures definitively labeled “cellophane bee.” Says Eric Eaton, in bugguide.net “Virtually indistinguishable from some of the Andrenidae mining bees. Colletes are honey bee size, and have dramatic black and white banding on the abdomen. Some andrenids have similar markings, but are usually slightly smaller. Colletes tend to nest in dense aggregations, while andrenids are not usually as populous.”

������’s . And, for comparison, , which collects pollen on hairs on its legs, and a leaf-cutter bee, which collects pollen on .

So, in the middle of April, BugFan Jill sent this “what is it?” picture of two sandy mounds that looked like ant hills, and she reported bee activity around them. If you can enlarge the picture, you’ll see a bee face in the left-hand hole, a . Adult males occupy separate nest holes. The BugLady turned to Tracks & Signs of Insects and Other Invertebrates, by Charley Eisenman and found out that the mounds were made by cellophane bees. Ant hills have openings big enough for an ant to walk into, but cellophane bees are much bigger than ants, and the openings are about as big around as a #2 pencil.

Cellophane bees are solitary bees, unlike the very social ants and honeybees, although they are comfortable surrounded by the nests of their sisters (“nest aggregation”) – sometimes by hundreds or thousands of them. The nest sites are easier to find in spring, when there’s less vegetation covering the ground.

Cellophane bees are in the wasp-bee-ant order Hymenoptera, in the family Colletidae, and in the genus Colletes, the cellophane/plasterer/polyester bees. There are about 100 species in the genus in North America and 460 globally. They’re found over much of the world in prairies and lawns, on embankments and woodland edges, and in other places where the soil is easy to excavate. They have heart-shaped faces with big eyes that angle out (), and pale stripes on their abdomens, and , with pollen-collecting hairs on their back legs. Food plants, geography, and season can be clues to identifying species.

Without further ado—cellophane?? Like other ground-nesting bees, female cellophane bees dig tunnels (and sometimes reuse and enlarge old ones), making a separate cell for each egg. She digs by biting the soil with her mandibles, aided by vibrations from her flight muscles, and she uses her second and third pairs of legs to muscle the dirt out of the tunnel. Because she is equipped with two special glands – one fore and one aft—she can build a better mousetrap. First, she spreads saliva over the inside of the cell with a short, two-lobed, fringed tongue that some sources compare to a paintbrush. She has a gland at the end of her abdomen called the Dufour’s gland, named after a 19th century French naturalist. M. Dufour was fascinated by the bees’ ability to make plastique, and some modern scientists are, too, because of its potential uses.

She smears liquid from the Dufour’s gland over the cell’s walls, and it combines with the saliva to make a cellophane-like film that is both waterproof and biodegradable, though it can persist in the soil for several years. She’s not done yet – she has a gland in her mandibles that produces an antifungal, antibacterial substance that she sprays on the wall as well. She provisions each chamber as she finishes it. .

Most ground-nesting bees collect pollen and nectar, form it into a dry “loaf,” and lay an egg on the outside of it. Not the cellophane bee—the provisions she provides are liquid. She suspends her egg from the wall or ceiling of the chamber, closes it off with more cellophane, and then fills the hole with dirt. When it hatches, the larva falls into the liquid and develops there, floating in its sweet food supply, insulated from soil moisture and, said one source, even from invasion by plant rootlets. It pupates in the cell.

Despite all the female’s efforts to conceal and waterproof her offspring’s’ nursery, there’s a group of cuckoo bees that specialize on invading the cells. enter the nest during the preparation stage and leave eggs in a chamber. The larvae hatch, kill the cell’s owner, and eat its food. It’s called kleptoparasitism—“parasitism by theft”—though not all kleptoparasites kill the unfortunate owner of the chamber directly.

There are various species of cellophane bees on the landscape throughout the growing season, and some are among our earliest insects. Males chew their way out of their cells first, dig out of the tunnel, and spend a few days feeding and buzzing the area, a few inches off the ground, waiting for females to emerge. The whole show is over in just a few weeks. One source said that these are not long-range flyers—they usually live and die within 500 feet of where they started. Most species produce only a single brood—spring-flying species overwinter as adults, and later-season species spend the winter stalled in the pupal or prepupal stage.

Spring cellophane bees are often abroad before the wildflowers, so they depend on early-blooming trees, especially maples and willows. The summer species are more likely to visit wildflowers.

People are (reasonably) alarmed when they see a mass of wasps/bees flying around near the ground. Cellophane bees don’t have an aggressive bone in their bodies – no drive to defend a communal nest—so you won’t get stung unless you happen to step on one barefoot, and as always, males don’t sting at all. They have such a short flight period that even the exterminator sites advise you to just wait them out.

The Unequal cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis) is a common spring species in Wisconsin and the eastern half of the country, and bugguide.net tells us that it has been introduced into many world regions. It’s been recorded on wild cherry, shadbush, pussy willow, wild currant, blueberry, maple, viburnum, and a few early wildflowers.

Unlike many of the bugs that the BugLady researches, there is tons of information about cellophane bees. Still curious? See and .

Pretty cool, Jill – thanks!

The BugLady

The post Cellophane bee appeared first on Field Station.

Let’s celebrate the (almost bugless) Season with a dozen bugs that were photographed this year. Down through the centuries, various regional versions of the classic Christmas carol have included hares a-running, ducks quacking, badgers baiting, bulls a-roaring, biting cows, bears a-beating, cocks a-crowing, asses racing, starlings, plovers, goldspinks (goldfinches), sides of meat, ponies, deer, stalks of corn, cheese, windmills, and an Arabian Baboon. Never any bugs, though, so it’s up to us.

The BugLady wondered (innocently) if this BUMBLE BEE TRIO was sharing body heat one afternoon in mid-October, but BugFan Thelma explained the facts of life. Even though the air was cool and their season was winding down, the two, smaller male bees still had hopes of a final tryst. We can all help track the range of bumble bees in Wisconsin by sending our bumble bee pictures, ID’d or not, .

WHITE SLANT-LINE MOTH – Moccasin-flowers/Pink lady’s-slipper orchids are typically pollinated by native bumble bees that, lured to the flower by color and odor, push their way into a slit in the slipper, hoping (in vain) for a tasty reward. The moth may be biting off more than it can chew.

GOLD-BACKED SNIPE FLY – Is there a more elegant fly than this one?

NURSERY WEB SPIDER on tiptoe. The Nursery web spider family (Pisauridae) includes the fishing spiders, but not all Pisaurids hang around the water’s edge (the BugLady once found a nursery web spider in her rhubarb). They don’t spin trap webs; they find prey as they move across the landscape. Their name comes from the shelters females make (and guard) for their egg cases.

The BugLady stalks SIX-SPOTTED TIGER BEETLES – small, emerald sparks on dirt trails – as they stalk spiders and small insects. Some beetles don’t get the memo; there are two, four, six, and eight-spotted SSTBs. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders says that they fly ahead on the trail and then turn to face us, but the BugLady has an awful lot of pictures of the rear ends of SSTBs.

FORKTAIL AND LESTES – the first Spreadwing (Lestes) damselfly that the BugLady saw this spring was a Slender Spreadwing dangling in the clutches of a mature female Eastern Forktail (the slate-blue damsel on the right). Forktails are tough – a few days later, the BugLady photographed another forktail holding a Powdered Dancer, also larger than she was.

ROBBER FLY – Isn’t she spectacular!! A fly this spectacular should really have a common name, but she doesn’t (although one photographer calls her an Orange robber fly). She’s Asilus sericeus, an inch long robber fly that’s found in the eastern half of the country, often dining on butterflies and moths that have come in to nectar on flowers. The BugLady is always blown away by those long, angular legs. Starting soon – a three-year Citizen Science project designed to find out more about the distribution of robber fly species in Wisconsin. The BugLady will post more info later.

Every fall the BugLady gets questions about the large, flightless, slow-moving MELOE BEETLE, a.k.a. Oil beetle or Short-winged Blister Beetle. Look but don’t touch – they’re named “blister beetle” for a reason. When they’re alarmed, Meloe beetles flop over and play dead, but they also ooze caustic stuff from their leg joints, so don’t touch the “dead” ones, either.

COMMON WOOD NYMPHS emerge in early July and fly around the grasslands into September. We can’t appreciate their nuanced coloration as they pass (there’s some variation , and ), but they really are monochromatic marvels, painted with shadow and texture.

SCORPIONFLIES are not in the fly order Diptera but in the order Mecoptera and the family Panorpidae. The BugLady often finds these jumpy little insects on leaves that have bird poop on them – they are mostly scavengers that feed on droppings and dead/dying animal matter (they’ll even rob spider webs) as well as pollen and nectar. This is a CSI bug – they will visit corpses, and their presence indicates that the body is fresh. Both ends are interesting – the face has a conspicuous elongation called a rostrum, and although the males’ reproductive structures look , they’re harmless.

At just under an inch in length, EASTERN AMBERWINGS are the smallest commonly-occurring dragonfly in Wisconsin (there are scattered populations of the even-smaller Elfin Skimmer, ). Many of our damselflies are longer, but they are far slimmer than the amberwing. The BugLady finds it extraordinarily easy to take out-of-focus shots of amberwings.

GREEN STINK BUG: Note that the BugLady said that this is an “almost bugless” season. Every year at about this time, the BugLady is visited by some insect, usually a mosquito, that should have been dead weeks ago. Oh, the BugLady gets that the small, cold-tolerant Chironomid midges will dance in the air deep into fall, but it’s been snowy and extra-cold around here, folks, since the beginning of November (a week ago, right after the BugLady’s alarm went off, the TV weather guy announced that it was 3 degrees out. She reacted appropriately). So where had this Green stink bug, photographed outside the front door on November 27, been hanging out? Or the spectacular Herald moth () that landed near her computer on November 23? Or the crane fly that she found on December 12 in the sink? Or the spider whose web descended from the conifers to her windshield wiper on the balmy (37 degree) morning of December 21? A Christmas Mystery.

Best Wishes for the New Year.

The BugLady

The post The Twelve Bugs of Christmas 2019 appeared first on Field Station.

The first of the spring reruns, an episode from April of 2010.

“Pussy willow” is a name that refers specifically to a willow shrub called Salix discolor but is commonly applied to several small willow species (and few of us can actually tell them apart, anyway). It blooms early and copiously; the sleek, fuzzy, grey buds (an early stage of the male catkins) soon mature, producing pollen-bearing structures and attracting bunches of early spring pollinators. Especially mining bees (family Andrenidae), which are among the first flying pollinators of the year.

Ants, bees and wasps that live communally get most of the press, but there are more than 1,200 kinds of solitary bees in North America (500 are Andrenid bees) and a considerable number of solitary wasps. Mining bees are medium-sized (honey-bee-sized) bees, some of which may be seen when there is still snow around the edges. Some are bright-colored and others are drab, and many species are identified by the flowers they visit.

Mining bees are important native pollinators. The adults eat nectar (many are picky consumers of just a few plants) and they provide both nectar and pollen for their larvae. They are “buzz pollinators” who set up a vibration that causes a flower to release its pollen. Apples and other fruit trees, several species of orchids, and blueberry/huckleberry are among the plants they favor. Mining bees were “The Bee” in blueberry-growing areas until they were replaced by European honeybees, which in hindsight turns out to have been a flawed idea—with their hanging, bell-shaped flowers, members of the blueberry family are best served by the buzz-pollinators. Dramatic declines in honeybee populations in the past few years have demonstrated the downside of relying on a single pollinator for the majority our food crops.

Like another spring bee, the bumblebee, mining bees have a densely hairy head, thorax, and legs, a defense against cold. Along with the fuzzy upholstery (her hairy body also comes in handy for collecting pollen), standard equipment includes pollen baskets/combs on the hind tarsi (back legs), smoky wings, a large head with a short, pointy tongue, and chewing-lapping mouthparts that are perfect for collecting pollen and nectar.

The modus operandi of female mining bees is to excavate a vertical tunnel a few inches deep in dry/well-drained ground, either level or sloped (they like road and ditch-cuts). The entrance is the diameter of a #2 pencil (remember those?) or slightly larger, and there’s often a tell-tale dirt pile at the hole’s entrance. Each tunnel has a number of side branches that end in chambers, and she waterproofs the chambers using a material she produces from a gland in her abdomen. The pollen and nectar she collects is divided among the chambers and is rolled into balls within each chamber. When Mom is satisfied that a chamber is adequately provisioned, she lays an egg on the food pile and the chamber is sealed. The larvae stay inside the chamber after hatching; they eat and pupate there, transforming into adults by fall, but not emerging from their tunnels until spring. They live for about a month after emerging.

Female mining bees are not aggressive, you have to work pretty hard to get stung by one (it can be done, if you grab or step on one), and males can’t sting at all. Although solitary, mining bees will tolerate the nearby tunnels of other bees, but a group of tunnels is not a colony in the true sense of the word. Sometimes when grass develops bare patches, mining bee nesting activity is blamed; but, in fact, the area was already bare, and that’s why the mining bees picked it. The presence of mining bees hovering just above the ground in suitable nesting areas or in large mating displays can be unnerving to some people (but not BugFans). If you are one of those people, control can be achieved non-chemically simply by watering the lawn. At any rate, conspicuous displaying and foraging activity decrease after the eggs are laid. And they are pollinating your plants!

BugFan John asked the BugLady the other day what the difference is between bees, wasps, yellow jackets, and hornets. The BugLady has looked this up in the past – there are some technical, anatomical characteristics – but the details keep falling out of her head. So – a quick review to muddy the water a bit:

• Bees are plump and fuzzy and darker in color than the rest. Their legs are flat and wide and they have bristles on their front legs that help them groom their antennae. They collect nectar and pollen in pollen baskets. /field-station/a-honey-of-a-bee/ Sting? For defense.
• Wasps are members of the family Vespidae (except when they’re not, like Ichneumon wasps – “wasp” is kind of a mushy word). Bee-colored (yellow and black), but not fuzzy, they fold their wings lengthwise at rest. /field-station/a-tale-of-two-paper-wasps/ Sting? Yes.
• Yellow jackets are a type of small wasp. They look like a honeybee but are smooth, not hairy, so they can’t collect pollen. They have barbed stingers and can sting over and over. /field-station/german-yellowjacket/ Adults are social. Sting? Yes. Aggressive? Yes.
• The term “hornet” refers to members of two genera, Vespa and Provespa, in the Wasp family Vespidae. /field-station/bald-faced-hornet/ There are some anatomical differences shape of the head and of an abdominal segment) between them and the other Vespid wasps. Sting? Painfully. Aggressive? Very.

Besides that, there are a number of flies, like syrphid flies, that are wasp/bee mimics. Flies have two wings; bees, wasps, etc. have four.

The BugLady

The post Mining Bee rerun appeared first on Field Station.