Bee fly

Major bee-fly, a.k.a. Greater bee-fly, Bombylius major.

Bee flies are what they sound like: flies that resemble bees. This one is the one we see most here, though there are several similar species in the family Bombyliidae.

See photos of several of them at Giff Beaton's site. (You know there are a lot of members in the family when there's a World Catalog of them.)

They hover about like small cute bumblebees, and they don't seem to mind drawing attention to themselves, the way they'll hover in the same position for quite a while. I've also seen them dart back and forth between two positions a foot or so apart -- if it were a bird, you'd say it was a mating dance, though I would assume that flies don't do that.

According to this site, "Its larvae are brood parasites and are found in bees' nests. Adults feed on nectar, using their long proboscises whilst hovering beside a flower." The whilst there should give you a clue that this fly is also found in England.

BugGuide has a species account here with more details, and some nice shots of them hovering.

I haven't found any one article detailing information about this bee-fly, but there are lots of links highlighting certain aspects of their behavior:

Drawing up sand or sawdust to coat eggs (here).

Comparing them, as generalist pollinators, to more species-specific pollinators (here).

Wingbeats in B flat? (here)

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Friday Ark is here.

Ironweed gathering

Pipevine Swallowtail, Battus philenor

I stopped to take a picture of this butterfly flittering over New York Ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis).



Then I started noticing just how many other bugs were enjoying the only non-wilted plant within eyesight.


Female Eastern Amberwing, Perithemis tenera



I could swear she was smiling at me.


Ailanthus Webworm Moth, Atteva punctella.

Ready for Halloween.



Then there was this bee. Or fly. Or bee-fly. He was lovely but I got trapped in a bee/fly-mire when trying to identify him.



Same with this skipper.

There were at least 3 or 4 other insects too small or too fast to capture. Even tinier bees. Ants. A white moth.

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Please feel free to suggest IDs if you know them!

Snake doctors

Dragonflies are tough. I can't make this one exactly fit any of the pictures on BugGuide or Giff Beaton's site. I think it's one of the Libellula species but I'm not even sure of that.

Possibly a Slaty Skimmer (Libellula incesta). (!)
Or Bar-winged Skimmer (Libellula axilena).
Or Great Blue Skimmer (Libellula vibrans).
Or I'm just fixated on Skimmers and it's not actually one of those. None of them look quite right.



I think this one is a female Common Whitetail (Plathemis lydia).

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WikiThings I learned while trying to ID these dragonflies (sometimes called Snake Doctors here in the south):

The fossil record shows a Permian-period dragonfly with a whopping wingspan of almost 30 inches (76 cm).

The largest modern-day dragonfly has a wingspan of 7.5 inches (19 cm), and the smallest reaches only .75 inch (20 mm).

They are the world's fastest insects.

They have nearly a 360° range of vision.

Libellula was also the name of some prototype aircraft with odd wing designs.

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If anyone knows what the first one is, please leave a comment or email me.

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Update:
Nuthatch has given me a positive ID: female Slaty Skimmer. And a new word: pruinose! (Having a whitish, waxy, powdery covering or bloom on the surface.) Thanks Nuthatch.

Wooly Pine Scale

Snow? No. (It's Alabama in July.)

A heron's been sitting overhead? No. (Above us only sky.)

The strange white goop on this small Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda) turned out to be Woolly Pine Scale (Pseudophilippia quaintancii).

According to ACES (Alabama Cooperative Extension System), small periodic infestations are not harmful to unstressed trees.

Of course due to a late spring freeze and the recent early summer drought, pretty much everything in north Alabama is stressed.

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Pine Needle Scale (Chionaspis pinifoliae) is another scale insect that looks like white gunk on pine needles.

Recent visitors

Red phase American Toad, Bufo americanus, in the garden.


Please stay and eat some bugs.


A nice webpage that includes info on how to differentiate similar species by cranial ridge patterns.


Cool red dragonfly: Carolina Saddlebags, Tramea carolina. Thanks again Giff Beaton.


A turtle I haven't identified yet. But now I see why they call it a turtleneck.


She was in a hurry to get somewhere.


Unwelcome visitor. One of the neighbor's cows, again. Tremendous painintherearus.

What else has been going on

Some of these¹



have been doing some of this,



while nearby, this² was found:



Toothwort³ mania began in earnest.



We had visitors⁴.



This



gave way to this⁵.



There was also this⁶, which is not the same.



And neither is this⁷.



Some excavation⁸ was going on.



But was apparently not satisfactory.



Ahhh it's almost trillium time⁹.



Tiny snails were observed, and also something else¹⁰ that I'm still pondering.



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¹Virginia Bluebells, Mertensia virginica
²See this earlier post if you're curious about the redrock fossils.
³Dentaria spp. Or is it all Cardamine now? I get confused.
⁴Canada Geese, Branta canadensis. I would say, "I know that you knew that already, I'm just trying to be consistent," but since there was a woman on a game show last night who did not know that the northern neighbor of the US is CANADA, for crying out loud, I'm not taking any chances.
⁵Hepatica or Liverleaf
⁶Rue Anemone, Thalictrum thalictroides
⁷Jacob's Ladder (Polemonium reptans) with Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) flower
⁸I'm guessing Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus), but I'm not sure.
⁹Trailing Trillium, Trillium decumbens
¹⁰Little groups of tiny, tiny rocks are held together and to the larger rock surface like glue. Is something alive in there?

Stings

When I was a kid, we called the wasps that make these nests Dirt Daubers. Or rather, Dirt Dobbers. Outside the south they are apparently known as Mud Daubers. (1, 2)



It took me a minute to realize what seemed so strange about finding one of their nests in the woods. I think it's the first time I'd ever seen one that was not attached to something manmade. We normally see them on buildings, under eaves or elsewhere out of reach of the rain.

Apparently, the Daubers aren't aggressive and don't sting often. Plus, they lay eggs on Black Widow spiders that they stuff into those pipes as food for their offspring. So, Daubers = on my good side.

Paper Wasps = on my bad side. The previous "just shoo them out the door" policy is history. The last one that got that treatment repaid me with a sting on the proximal interphalangeal joint of my index finger.



I looked up the medical name so that I could be specific about how painful it was.

According to Dr. Justin O. Schmidt and his insect Pain Index, the sensation is rated at

3.0: Caustic & burning. Like spilling a beaker of Hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.

Schmidt is an stinging-insect expert -- if you run across an article on African giant stink ants, it's likely to have his name on it somewhere.

But his index is limited to bites and stings from insects. Nobody has done the important cross-indexing with spiders, snakes, platypus, jellyfish, and so on. Because you might just think pepsis wasps or bullet ants were bad, until you came across the Australian jellyfish that can cause Irukandji syndrome.

Behind closed doors

Snout butterfly

It's all anyone ever mentions.

Poor Cyrano of butterflies, with his enormous... panache.



But that eye!

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A very agreeable butterfly:
Easy ID -- the only species with elongated labial palpi (the "snout"). Plus, the two front legs on the male are tiny, while the female's are normal.
Easy to predict mass migration -- long drought + lots of rain = lots of snout butterflies, especially in the southwest.

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Side Notes:

Libytheana bachmanii.

Mass migrations. We drove through one of these in south Texas in 1996.

Photos with wings open.

There is actually a Cyrano Darner.

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More critters at the Friday Ark.

Zorak?

(Click for extra-large version of beady eyes.)

Do you suppose praying mantids have religious disputes?

Is there a pope of European mantids, and if so, have mantids in Islamic countries declared jihad against him?

Chinese mantids - was there a Confucius among them? Are Indian mantids divided into Hindus and Sikhs?

And, are the Carolina mantids likely to be fundamentalists?

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Cool pics of Flower mantids: here, here, here, here, and here.

I just have to throw in the bizarre Wandering Violin mantis.

Scribe

I don't have to read it.



I wrote it!

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Black and Yellow Garden spider, aka Golden Orb Weaver, aka Writing Spider (Argiope aurantia).

Submitted to the Friday Ark.

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I don't check my sitemeter obsessively like I used to. But it can be barrel-o-monkeys funny now and then, so I try to look from time to time.

"Chicken nest boxes" has taken a back seat to both "white fuzzy caterpillar" and "yellow fuzzy caterpillar" as top search terms.

Apparently, googling "Alcohol and rambling pic" brings first Woody Guthrie, and then me (a post in which I rambled and offered that many alcohol laws were dumb). The ways of the internets are strange indeed.

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It's taking me a while to get back up to speed with all the blogs I read. But I noticed that a few of them had featured the same meme in the past month.

It's one of those "Things I have done" lists and I'm not going to reproduce the whole thing, but here are the things I've done that neither Stu, Ron, nor Chris have done:

11. Visited Paris
75. Gotten divorced
90. Gone to Thailand

I was going to add

108. Piloted an airplane

but that would probably be cheating. My uncle just let me take the controls for a little while.

One side of my family is a flying bunch. My mother flew an airplane before she drove a car. One uncle was an Air Force pilot, and another uncle and three cousins flew small planes for fun & profit. One of those cousins became a Delta pilot.

On the other hand, my Dad was afraid to fly. I used to tease him about it all the time. Especially later, after I had flown and really enjoyed it. Then somehow I developed a fear of it too. I can fly in a plane. I just really, really, really don't want to.

I'm rambling again.

Rumpelstiltskin's handiwork

Eastern amberwing (Perithemis tenera) male.

Friday Ark.

Stalking the Earth

I bought a birthday card once with a dinosaur on the cover. Inside, instead of "Happy Birthday," it read, "Congratulations on another year of stalking the Earth."

In birthday terms, I've probably been stalking for more years than I have years remaining to stalk. But it's amazing what can still surprise.

I saw a velvet ant this week. I don't think they're particularly rare, but this makes only the third time I've encountered one.



She was in a hurry and wouldn't pose at all. When I looked up the latin name, Dasymutilla occidentalis, I read that they make an odd sqeaking/squealing noise when captured. So now I'll have to try that next time I see one. They're also called cow-killers because of an extremely painful sting, though I haven't found anyone who has first-hand knowledge of it.

During the weekly cat walk, George investigated a humongous fungus. A champion champignon!



I don't remember ever seeing a mushroom this large. Some wild critter had left small scratches on the surface - it must have been curious too.

Hubby found a spider hiding between some rocks in the creek.



Turns out there are fishing spiders! Dolomedes tenebrosus or scriptus. I think this is the latter. The leg span can reach 3 inches (7.6 cm). I like spiders reasonably well, but I think I'd have to put this one out if he came in the house... I've seen enough spy movies to know that a spider that big and hairy would definitely want to crawl all over my face in the middle of the night.

What new thing did you discover this week?

The Shadow Knows

Can you tell what the shadow knows? I've darkened it to make it more visible. Scroll down for the answer.






I thought I'd look up the latin name and mention it here.

Then I found out that there are 83 different kinds in Alabama.

So I said, "Forget that."

Because they all look more or less exactly alike.

OK well not really, but almost.

And I am not that dedicated.

Not enough to plow through a lengthy key.

Especially when the subject in question slipped away after only a couple of blurry, non-diagnostic photos.









Ready?





Arr!

Check out that right claw.

I got really tickled reading the common names of some of the Crayfish of Alabama.

First of all, nobody here really calls them that. It's crawdads to you, bub. Even crawfish suggests that you're just putting on airs.

There are a few normal, descriptive names:
Bigclaw Crayfish
Boxclaw Crayfish
Twospot Crayfish

But several of them sound awfully sinister:
Phantom Cave Crayfish
Devil Crawfish
Rusty Grave Digger (Ooh!)

And some are considerably more evocative than you'd expect, for crawdads:
Lavender Burrowing Crayfish (Really? Lavender?)
Cajun Dwarf Crayfish (Napoleon complex)
Depression Crayfish (The Sad Sack of Crayfish)
Lagniappe Crayfish (With free gift!)
Ambiguous Crayfish (Maybe I'm a crayfish, maybe not)
Ditch Fencing Crayfish (Tiny épées at 20 watery paces!)

Odd bugs

I started out composing this post by whining about how I couldn't identify these bugs, even with the aid of BugGuide. Then I remembered to search on the plant name too, and voilà! Jagged Ambush bug, Phymata erosa.

These individuals weren't too happy about being observed, and crawled away to the underside of the flower when I tried to get closer.

More pics from BugGuide.net.

Recalled to life

The cicadas (Tibicen sp.?) are emerging. So am I.


Glad to finally be above ground.

Camo

I'm about to leave for a gardening conference and don't have time to look up this caterpillar. If you know the ID, feel free to leave a comment. See you next week!

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In the meantime, check out I and the Bird!

Springy

Red admiral butterfly on Sweet cicely. (Vanessa atalanta on Osmorhiza longistylis.)

This is the same type of butterfly from last year's butterfly wrangling post.

I know that they are widespread, but somehow it still surprised me to see a picture of one on a blog from Israel that I ran across recently. (Lots of nice flower and cat pics there too.)

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Technical note: Yesterday's bluebird post was MIA for most of the day due to Blogger problems, sorry!

It will probably be Rurality Lite for a while due to several things (none of which are bad news). Some obnoxious bragging coming up soon about one of them.

Eek

Who besides me is thinking of Bladerunner now?

For more critters, visit The Friday Ark.

Strange weather

It's been cool again the last couple of days, but last week you'd have thought spring was well underway.

The honeybees (Apis mellifera) must have thought so too.

Except that when they were tricked into leaving the warm hive, there were no flowers. So they had to substitute... chicken feed?



I doubt that there's nectar in the layer ration pellets. But something must have attracted them. They seemed lethargic though. Torpid. I thought that the chickens, who in warmer months chase moths and flies all over the yard (to great comic effect), would make a quick meal of them. But they just ignored them.

Then out by the pond, I felt about as slow as the bees.



Why is the mud walking?



Finally it dawned on me that it was a snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina). Guess he realized it was too early to wake up.