Halfrey Cottage Critter and Garden Journal

I’m not just talking about mosquitos either–though we’ve got plenty of those now too. No. Finally, we’ve got some bugs worth talking about here.

Let’s start with an overview of the primary bug-viewing area: the sun garden.

As I’ve mentioned before, our sun garden is tiny. Halfrey Cottage has a very small urban yard to begin with. And most of that is heavily shaded. There is only about a 15 x 5 patch on one side of that house (under the bay window) that gets any sun to speak of. Over the past couple of years we’ve worked to fill in this whole spot with as many native wild flowers as we can fit there. And by now it’s pretty thick with various species duking it out to see who’s going to get the most space. Right now the mountain mint seems to be dominating some of the other plants. But I think the ageratem is going to rise up again by late summer.

Most of the more flamboyant bugs prefer to hang out in the hot summer sun, in my experience. The sun garden is where I’m most likely to see butterfiles, caterpillars, spiders, mantids, wasps, bees, and other assorted insects. On summer afternoons you’ll often see me peering into the weeds to see what I can see. Let’s take a look at what’s going on right now.

For the past week or so I’ve been keeping an eye on what I assume are insect eggs of some sort, stuck to the bottom of a mountain mint leaf. I have no idea what bug might have laid these. And maybe they’re not even eggs for all I know.

This mess of bubbles on a mountain mint stem looks like eggs of some sort. I thought they were spittle bug eggs, but I did a little more reading on spittle bugs and it seems that they actually create bubbles like these to hide in. So maybe there’s an adult spittle bug hiding in there.

Our coneflowers are finally starting to bloom. There are probably my favorite summer blooms. These amazing flowers will be around until September, and they attracts all kinds of butterflies, bees, hummingbirds, and other polinators.

Coneflowers also attract clever predatory bugs that hide out and wait for the butterflies, bees, and other polinators. I have no idea what the little bug in the picture above is. At first I thought it was a green lynx spider (which I’ve seen lurking on coneflowers before). But he’s pretty clearly an insect. Kind of looks like a tiny grasshopper with striped antenea. But the way he’s waiting on the flower makes me pretty sure he’s a predator.

Today I also saw this damsel fly flitting from leaf to leaf in the sun garden. I was surprised to see him becuase I generally expect damsel flies to hang out near water.

I also saw this cool looking wasp.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2004 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.