Note: All links leave to external sites. Howdy, BugFans, The BugLady is always ambivalent about photographing flies, even when they pose nicely. There are a whole heck of a lot of species of Diptera (“two wings”) out there – 17,000… Read More

Note that all links lead to external sites. Howdy, BugFans, Robber flies are a very cool bunch of flies that we have visited a number of times in the past. To appreciate the array of sizes and shapes and colors… Read More

Howdy, BugFans, The BugLady has been stewing about this one for a long time. The flies appear on cue, on mild days in March and April (which they can do because they overwinter as adults). She takes their pictures, gets… Read More

(Note: All links below are to external websites and leave the UWM website.) Howdy, BugFans, OK – the last of the Water Hemlock series (unless/until the BugLady discovers the ID of a really smashing ichneumon wasp that was also working… Read More

Greetings, BugFans, The story of this fly (whose name is considerably longer than the fly itself) demonstrates why the BugLady loves BOTW. Could she dig up a lot of details about how this little beauty lives its life? She could… Read More

Black flies are also called turkey gnats and buffalo gnats, and people who live in black fly country have a whole bunch of other names for them that can’t be repeated here. Entomologists call them true flies (order Diptera) in the family Simuliidae. There are more than 1,800 species in the family worldwide (100 in North America; 30 in Wisconsin), and most of them belong in the huge genus Simulium. What do they look like? Their hump-backed thorax and down-tilted head makes buffalo gnat a good nickname. BFs are tiny (5 to 10 mm) and dark, with clear wings, many-segmented antennae, and big eyes (and teeth, just kidding).

May is American wetlands month, so we’ll end it in the swamp, in the company of Marsh Marigolds, the flowers that turn newly thawed wetlands a riotous yellow from the last days of April through much of May. Skunk cabbage and pussy willows may whisper the arrival of spring, but marsh marigolds crank up the volume. The BugLady should have started this project two weeks ago when the marsh marigold was at its peak, but the truth is that despite the masses of flowers it produces, she seldom sees many insects on it, and the ones she sees are as likely to be resting as dining.

Another week, another zebra. The BugLady had fun chasing this dynamite little insect along the banks of the Milwaukee River at Waubedonia Park in mid-summer (it likes to perch on the undersides of leaves). She had never seen one before, but after a few false starts, she discovered that it’s a Zebra Caddisfly.

The BugLady loves these fancy little flies and their habitat preferences, for the damp and the dappled are similar to hers. Dance flies are abroad in June and are one of the BugLady’s “nemesis bugs.”