Bug o’the Week – Ground Crab Spiders
Howdy, BugFans,
Crab spiders need no introduction to these pages – several genera of delicate, flower crab spiders have appeared in previous episodes.
Well, maybe a quick review:
02.19.25
Reports from the Field
02.19.25
Bug o’the Week – The Ants of CESA Rerun
Salutations, BugFans,
The BugLady confesses that she has a list of favorites among the 766 BOTWs to date. This is one of them. Lots of fun to research and write, it was originally posted after the 2014 Treasures of Oz celebration/Ecotour. No new words; a few different pictures.
02.12.25
Bug o’the Week – Peachtree Borer Moth
Greetings, BugFans,
This striking little moth was mentioned briefly a few years ago among an array of visitors to water hemlock flowers. Here’s the rest of the story.
02.05.25
Bug o’the Week – Stream Bluets and Rivers
Greetings, BugFans,
The BugLady likes to “bug” (if birders “bird,” can “bug” be a verb for folks who are looking for insects?) along the Milwaukee River at Waubedonia Park because (surprise) it’s great for dragonflies and damselflies – she’s photographed 25 species there. Most productive are the small bays along the shoreline where water lilies and arrowhead grow and the current is negligible.
01.22.25
Bug o’the Week – Wildflower Watch – Cup-Plant Cosmos II
Greetings, BugFans,
The BugLady usually times the Wildflower Watch episodes so that BugFans can rush out and see the flower in bloom with its attendant bugs, but it’s the middle of January, and the BugLady is ready for spring. At least the Technicolor part of it (with apologies to the Cardinals and Blue Jays at the bird feeder but not to the Mourning Doves and Juncos).
01.15.25
Bug o’the Week – Texas Ironclad Beetle rerun
Howdy, BugFans,
It’s New Year’s Eve, and BugFans are probably either partying or watching reruns. Today’s BOTW is a rerun of one of the BugLady’s favorites – think of it as a Holiday Movie.
01.02.25
Bug o’the Week – The Twelve (or so) Bugs of Christmas
Season’s Greetings, BugFans,
It’s time to celebrate a dozen (or so) of the beautiful bugs that posed for the BugLady this year (and that have already graced their own episodes).
12.26.24
Bug o’the Week – Comet Darner Dragonfly
Greetings, BugFans,
The Holidays are hurtling toward us at an astonishing speed, so the BugLady figured that a Christmas green and red dragonfly would be fitting. It’s one that she’s seen, all too briefly, but not photographed – thanks to Guest Photographer BugFan Freda, aka the Dragonfly Whisperer, for the pictures (the BugLady took the one of the darner in the grass).
12.18.24
Bug o’the Week – And Now for Something a Little Different XVIII – Red-breasted Mergansers
Howdy BugFans,
Perched, as she is, on the rim of the Lake Michigan, the BugLady has a front row seat for the activities of the Lake and its residents (and, of course, she’s photographing the heck out of it – rainbows, sunrises, sunsets, storms, ships, and this fall, even waterspouts!). The Lake changes daily – hourly – in minutes. In fall, and then again in late winter, flash mobs of mergansers and gulls erupt and then disappear, following schools of small fish. It’s hard to tell whether the mergansers locate the fish first and the gulls notice, or vice-versa. Once, the BugLady watched as two Bald Eagles flew out to investigate the scrum.
This year, toward the end of November, she watched a raft of mergansers more than 100 yards long (she couldn’t photograph the whole line) – many thousands of ducks, plus gulls, diving for fish.
So – what are Red-breasted Mergansers?
12.11.24
Bug o’the Week – Blue Blow Fly
Howdy, BugFans,
Here’s a Holiday Rerun with some new words added for good measure (because who can look at something they wrote 12 years ago and not tweak it?).
The BugLady had fun photographing the deconstruction of an old farmhouse recently (in a deconstruction, everything usable gets recycled, not land-filled). On the outside walls, under the cedar shake siding, were long, skinny tubes and fist-shaped globs made by generations of mud wasps. The mud tubes that look like part of a pipe organ were made by a wasp called, logically, the ORGAN PIPE/PIPE ORGAN MUD DAUBER (Trypoxylon politum).
12.04.24