Category Archive for ‘Insects’ at Beside the Stream

Archive for the 'Insects' Category

A wasp nest

Published on September 11, 2008 in Insects. 4 Comments

I saw this wasp nest in the woods in mid-August, when it was still warm.

I got pretty close to it, but without a zoom lens you can’t see the wasps very well.

I returned three weeks later.

The weather is cooler and the wasps are staying inside more, but when they leave the hive they are moving really fast. It’s shady, and the low light combined with zippy movement makes it hard to get a good shot.

Here’s a paper wasp poised to take off,

and here’s another.

Here are two wasps scooting along in a blur, coming and going,

and here’s a photo of one wasp in superhero mode, and two that are getting ready to take off.

Their nest is made from chewed up rotted wood and spit. Some bird’s nests are made from twigs and spit. Some ants make nests of mud and spit. I don’t think of saliva as a construction material, but I’m clearly in the minority here.

Darwin’s Humble-bee

Published on September 6, 2008 in Insects. 4 Comments

Rereading The Origin of Species I was struck by Darwin’s Chapter 7 discussion of the humble-bee and the hive-bee. I only know bumblebees, but it turns out that humblebees are bumblebees by a different name. According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary 2006, humblebees are named for their hum, not their humility.

hum·ble·bee [huhm-buhl-bee] –noun Chiefly British.

bumblebee.

[Origin: 1400–50; late ME humbul-be; akin to D hommel drone, G Hummelbiene kind of wild-bee, MLG homelbe; prob. akin to hum]
__________________________________________________________________

Humble, umble and bumble are three words that look as though they’d be related, but they have three different origins.

hum·ble [huhm-buhl] –adjective

1.	not proud or arrogant; modest: to be humble although successful.

2.	having a feeling of insignificance, inferiority, subservience, etc.: In the presence of so many world-famous writers I felt very humble.

3.	low in rank, importance, status, quality, etc.; lowly: of humble origin; a humble home.

4.	courteously respectful: In my humble opinion you are wrong.

5.	low in height, level, etc.; small in size: a humble member of the galaxy.

–verb (used with object)

6.	to lower in condition, importance, or dignity; abase.

7.	to destroy the independence, power, or will of.

8.	to make meek: to humble one’s heart.

[Origin: 1200–50; ME (h)umble < OF < L humilis lowly, insignificant, on the ground. See humus, -ile]__________________________________________________________

Humble is from the Latin that gives us humility and humus.

Umbles, the liver, heart and other organ meats, is from ‘numbles’ which goes through a Middle French version ‘nombles’ to Latin ‘lumbulus’, or little loin.

um·bles [uhm-buhlz] –plural noun

numbles.

[Origin: 1400–50; late ME]

num·bles [nuhm-buhlz] –plural noun

certain of the inward parts of an animal, esp. of a deer, used as food.

Also, nombles.

[Origin: 1275–1325; ME < MF nombles fillet of venison, pl. of nomble, dissimilated var. of *lomble < L lumbulus, dim. of lumbus loin. See lumb-, -ule]______________________________________________________________

People ate umble pie from medieval times to the 1800s; after that humble pie became a metaphoric dish while umble pie morphed into steak and kidney pie (which I’ve never tried). So umbles aren’t humble, and that has nothing to do with the first meaning of bumble, a cross between stumble and bungle in 1530. Bumblebee is based on the second meaning of bumble, though, and that word was new to me.

bum·ble·bee /ˈbʌmbəlˌbi/ [buhm-buhl-bee] –noun

any of several large, hairy social bees of the family Apidae.

[Origin: 1520–30; bumble² + bee¹]

bum·ble2 /ˈbʌmbəl/ [buhm-buhl] –verb (used without object),

to make a buzzing, humming sound, as a bee.

[Origin: 1350–1400; ME bomblen, freq. of bomben to boom, buzz; imit.]__________________________________________________________

As it turns out, a bumble bee doesn’t bumble and a humble bee isn’t humble; they both are named for the buzzing sound they make while visiting flowers.

Who woulda thunk it?

Point of view

Published on September 5, 2008 in Insects. 2 Comments

After those embarrassing food photos, I thought I’d post some nice dragonfly pix.

Here is me looking at the dragonfly from the top,

and from the side.

Meanwhile, the dragonfly is eyeing the water in

the pond.

Another time I was looking at a dragonfly

perched on the tippy top of an ear of millet,

and it couldn’t see any water

at all.

A hairy little fly

Published on August 10, 2008 in Insects. 1 Comment

I thought this fly was really cute.

See its strange little antennae?

Its handsome bristles?

See how his proboscis is deep in the aster’s nectar?

It’s hard for me to tell what kind of fly this is (”little hairy” isn’t a type). If you want to know more about fly anatomy, this website was recommended by a Norwegian dipterist (an entomologist specializing in flies).

[Dipterist is from the Order Diptera (Greek di = two, and pteron = wing), possessing a single pair of wings on the mesothorax and a pair of halteres, derived from the hind wings, on the metathorax.]

I don’t think dipterist is a very useful word, but for some reason I thought those little fly bristles were particularly endearing.

A curious Orange Sulphur Butterfly

Published on August 1, 2008 in Insects. 0 Comments

This sulphur was easy to identify, and is common as rain; it lives throughout the entire US.

It’s an orange sulphur, drinking from purple clover.

This is the top view. It made me realize that I’m finding different species, but most of my butterfly photos are the same shot: the only time I catch them is that moment when their proboscis is deep inside a floret. It’s as though all I do is spy on them eating dinner.

If they’re not drinking, they’re outta there.

And then I saw this moment of interspecies communication: I’m looking at him, and he’s looking at me. What a world we live in.

Puddling butterflies

Published on July 18, 2008 in Insects. 2 Comments

Every now and then, a group of swallowtails gather on moist compost to suck the water. This time,

they had a feast. I thought I might get photographs of some frisky business, but it turns out that it was probably an all-male gathering. They were puddling, or mud-puddling.

Here’s the story: “several species of butterflies need more sodium than provided by nectar. … In many species, this Mud-puddling behaviour is restricted to the males and studies have suggested that the nutrients collected are provided as a nuptial gift along with the spermatophore during mating. ^[27]“

Puddling is an old word with many meanings, including

an obsolete method for purifying pig iron (metallurgy),

a method for producing waterproof puddle or lining an existing area with puddle (engineering),

the process of stripping soil and clay from minerals using water (mining), and

the process by which butterflies extract nutrients from damp surfaces (biology).

So that’s what the butterflies were doing together on the compost.

Here are a few shots of the butterflies at work collecting nutrients for their nuptial gift:

they’re very busy together.

(and I do mean together).

Sulphur butterflies

Published on July 14, 2008 in Insects. 3 Comments

Jessie and I took a hike where to a meadow where there were dozens of butterflies flitting around.

This is a shot of a sulphur butterfly in flight. See how its legs dangle?

Here the butterfly is whipping out its proboscis. To me it looks like this is a pink edged sulphur, but the range of that butterfly is a thousand miles north. (Here’s a photo of a pink edged sulphur from a guide to butterflies).

If it’s not a pink edged sulphur, it’s definitely a sulphur with a pink edge.

These butterflies are busy with the clover.

They consistently alight on a flower facing me with its wings closed, providing a head-on view where it’s hard to tell a proboscis from a leg.

From the side these guys are little miracle bugs.

I particularly like the bulgy green eyes.

West Coast Lady Butterfly

Published on July 7, 2008 in Insects. 3 Comments

I stopped by our welder to have him fix a pot lid, and he wasn’t there but his lavender was in full bloom and some butterflies were working the blossoms.

The West Coast Ladies are like Painted Ladies except for the four blue dots.

I have been finding it very difficult to photograph butterflies. When they’re drinking nectar, they’re buzzing around on a sugar high and never settle down.

Here one is taking a sip out of one blossom with it’s wings closed

open

closed

new blossom, open wings.

Their wings are beating even when they’re sipping, and the moment they’re through with one blossom they’ve fluttered off to another.

This non-sipping lady has a beautifully curled proboscis,

and I thought this lady was the fairest of them all.

A grasshopper instar

Published on June 27, 2008 in Insects. 2 Comments

If you like chartreuse, you’ll love this bug.

It’s a grasshopper nymph. Grasshoppers hatch from eggs, and cast off their exoskeleton time and again before they become adults.

All of the little grasshoppers are called nymphs, but when you get more precise a nymph goes through five different instars before it becomes an adult. You can tell from the wing size that this is the fourth instar–the wings are present, but don’t extend beyond the second abdominal section.

Locusts and grasshoppers differ only in density: when grasshoppers swarm, they become locusts. There are over a hundred types of grasshoppers in Colorado, and I didn’t identify this one. I can be certain it’s not a Rocky Mountain locust, though, because North America’s only swarming locust was extinct by the early 1900s.

Like the passenger pigeon and the buffalo, Rocky Mountain locusts were once among the most successful creatures on the continent. They would periodically swarm and sweep out of their breeding grounds in Rockies onto the Plains.

This 1880 map shows the permanent breeding grounds as the cross-hatched area, while the dotted area is their temporary range. They were fierce. A swarm described by Laura Ingalls in her book <On the Banks of Plum Creek> had them eating everything down to the tool handles, and in 1874 entomologists recorded a swarm that covered 198,000 square miles. The Guinness Book of World Records still cites this as the ‘greatest concentration of animals’ in the world, containing at least 12.5 trillion individuals and weighing 27.5 million tons. Less than 30 years later, the species was extinct.

No one really knows why the Rocky Mountain locust disappeared, but it is usually chalked up to grazing and agriculture. It is said to be the only time in the history of agriculture that an endemic pest species has gone extinct.

We can surely agree that the grasshopper nymph has its charms–it’s a great shade of green. Can’t say I’m sorry about losing that Rocky Mountain locust, though.

Painted Lady Caterpillar

Published on June 20, 2008 in Insects. 1 Comment

This caterpillar is hanging out in the yarrow. To identify it I looked up the plant it was eating, Achillea. The Painted Lady butterfly is listed as having Achillea as its host plant, and by gum I found a web photo of unmistakably this caterpillar identified as a Painted Lady, larval stage.

The caterpillar pretends that the top of this photo is the head, except you can see that those are ~~pseudopods~~ prolegs on that end. The six ~~insectile~~ thoracic legs are at the bottom of the photo, along with the real head.

I thought this picture was remarkable because you can clearly see the holes in its abdomen that the caterpillar uses instead of lungs. Those two bottom spiracles are visibly exhaling in this photo. And apparently this complicated little creature will resolve into this graceful Painted Lady

(the butterfly photo is not mine). That caterpillar plans to turn my yarrow into butterfly wings. Now that’s alchemy.

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