BugFan Marjie says that, on the bright side, she hasn’t gotten any bug bites recently. That would be an interesting poll to take – bug bites vs below zero temperatures. Anyway, the BugLady has been busy cooking and eating and washing dishes [repeat as needed], so here’s a slightly modified rerun from the spring of 2012.
‘Tis the Season for the annual Twelve Bugs of Christmas – a baker’s dozen, actually, of oddities (and wonders) that the BugLady found during the year. Let Heaven and Nature sing!
This holiday rerun from 2011 was inspired by an amazing flight of spiders that the BugLady witnessed at Horicon Marsh in Central Wisconsin.
The BugLady is busy writing about shagbark hickory (for the Friends of the Cedarburg Bog) and Short-eared Owls (for the Western Great Lakes Bird and Bat Observatory), so here are some items about insects, some of which were sent to her by alert BugFans.
We have visited the Assassin bug family Reduviidae before, in the form of Masked hunters, Ambush bugs, and the lovely little Zelus. Today’s bug is the Spined assassin bug (Sinea diadema), whose scientific name comes from the Hebrew for thorn bush or burning bush and crown, an allusion to its “spiky head.”
The BugLady is thankful for damselflies. Oh, not always for the identification part, but for the joy of seeing them flickering through their thickety habitats and for the thrill of the photographic chase (first you have to spot them, and then the light and the background are often terrible).
Somewhere in a remote corner of Southeast Asia, in the neighborhood of 34 million years ago, a small bee originated that would change the course of the world.
Today, we call them honey bees (two words, not one). There are seven species in the genus Apis (family Apidae), and their family tree is complicated.
The BugLady is already yearning for dragonflies and butterflies and other flying objects that are larger than the Asian ladybugs, Western conifer seed bugs, and the few rogue mosquitoes that are presently sheltering in her house.
The Hobomok Skipper (Poanes hobomok), a.k.a the Northern Golden Skipper, is a common, early-flying member of the Grass Skipper subfamily Hesperiinae, whose members perch with their wings folded together when nectaring but with their front wings open and their hind wings only partly so when resting.
Introducing three unsung (but worthy) bugs, whose definitive biographies have yet to be written.
ENTYLIA CARINATA (no common name) is a treehopper in the family Membracidae (from the Greek membrax meaning “a kind of cicada”) (to whom they’re distantly related).
The BugLady has always been blown away by macro photographs of horse fly eyes. Spectacular. And excessive. (and – why??) Then BugFan Debra sent a picture of a buffalo treehopper that had pretty special eyes, too.