These are my favorite bug photos I have, more will come eventually as the year warms up. Every bug photo might come with my thoughts on said bug. Hopefully I'll remember where they were found as well and list that. Most of these bugs were found around the midwest US, though some likely won't be native to the area.
07.17.24
I'm not the best at IDing arachnids on a good day, let alone trying to ID a very very small and very very fast little guy. However, the way it moved and looked at a glance, I almost thought it was an ant; I'd guess it's some type of ant mimicing spider! There are only a handful of species native to the midwest, so I'd like to find some more at some point for my collection.
07.02.24
This is my wonderful son Digit, named in memory of my first mantis, Toe. This was the first time he actually caught a mealworm and ate it :) He is growing so fast :)
Fun fact! Mantises are closely related to Blattodea; they were essentially roaches that learned to eat only meat.
05.10.24
Face deep in dandelion, living it's best life. Took a walk after seeing it, came back and it was still just hanging in the flower, still face deep. Very good friend and useful pollinator.
05.10.24
A very polite young lady working on her nest! This photo is pretty low quality because I didn't want to disturb her when she was at her nest and more likely to get defensive. Despite this, she did allow me to put my phone less than a foot away without any trouble.
04.19.23
Took a bee keeping class a while back, so here's some honey bees! These ladies were always so polite so I never wore a bee suit through the entire class. This frame was full of brood, and those lumpy longer extrusions are queen cells! Colonies start preparing new queens when they're about to swarm or their current queen is failing/dead. Any 'female' larvae can be converted into queens. Assigning binary sex to bees doesn't really work, as their morphology is largely based on how they're fed and oriented in their larval stages. Queens and workers have the same chromosomes, but their morphologies and sexes are distinct. However, if a hive's queen dies, often a worker will effectively transition into a queen to fill the role of uniting the hive (mainly through pheremonal changes, but they can lay unfertilized eggs as well which hatch drones) until a new queen is pupated.
04.13.23
Here's a handful of carpenter bees! These guys were fighting it out at a wood bench for their territory. These three had already been pretty badly injured from their fighting, so I took them home to pin. Male bees do not sting so it was safe to put them in my pockets on the bus. You can tell if carpenter bees are male based on their wide eyes and big yellow/white spot on their face.
09.09.22
Prettiest lady in my photos fr. She was incredibly polite and let me get in real close to take her picture. Many wasps like her are generally pollinators in addition to being predators of common pests, providing two important services to an ecosystem. They're super cool and don't deserve nearly as much hate as they get, not to mention how dangerous it can be to attribute human morality onto animals.
08.02.22
I'm so angry that one of the prettiest true bugs is also one of the newer invasive bugs in the US, which is why this one is dead. I know I just said not to project morality onto bugs, but please do kill on sight if you're in the US. They're absolutely beautiful, and it's tragic that I can't appreciate them in a context where they belong.
07.03.22
Pictured on a squash vine.. When I first saw her I kept my distance thinking it was a mystery wasp whose temperment I didn't know. She ended up being a type of clear wing moth, which often mimic stinging hymenoptera (I was as gullible as a bird). Sadly that also meant that by the time I got around to identifying the image, she had probably already laid eggs on one of our plants and I couldn't do much about it save for checking all of our squash plants for eggs.
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