As across much of the world, there's a lot of insects in our neighborhood in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania during summer months and into early autumn. All insects are intriguing, even otherworldly, but some kinds more so than others. They make our neighborhood interesting.
Every summer we experience a few kinds of insects in abundance on our lawn. Hundreds of male fireflies flash their cold, fairy lanterns at dusk and into the night from mid-June until well into July, with a peak of courtship flashing around the beginning of July. Dozens of female worker honey bees visit the white clover flowers in our lawn to collect nectar and pollen. And many annual cicada males whine in the trees as part of their courtship during August days and evenings. August evenings wouldn't be complete without the shrill, pulsing trills of male cicadas.
And we have several other kinds of insects in our neighborhood that make life a bit more interesting. A few kinds of bees add intrigue. A few years ago we were removing a wooden, enclosed bench from a small garden. Under it was a field mouse nest of grass that was being used by a small group of bumble bees. A few workers and larvae were in the nest at the time. I covered the nest with a board, but the bees abandoned their disturbed home.
We used to get female carpenter bees under an old, wooden porch railing. Those bees chewed round holes the diameter of their bodies deep into the decaying wood under the rails. There they deposited a ball of nectar and pollen, laid an egg on top of it, and sealed off he entrance. Each larvae ate its ball of provisions, pupated in the hole and later emerged as a mature bee.
Every summer I find several round holes in the soft, thin leaves of our red bud tree. Apparently, we have one or more leaf cutter bees here. Females of this kind of bee raise young in the hollow stems of roses and other species of shrubbery. They use the rounded bits of leaf they cut to line each nest in the hollows and to seal each cell from the others. The larva in each compartment eats its ball of nectar and pollen, pupates and emerges as an adult bee.
And on our deck just this summer, 2015, I've noticed up to 16 female worker honey bees at once in a flower pot filled with enhanced potting mulch that is soaking wet from recent rains. Apparently, the bees are there to get water and minerals from the mulch. It's interesting to see their constant comings and goings.
Some summers I plant parsley that female black swallowtail butterflies lay eggs on. The resulting beautiful larvae eat the parsley down to the ground. Then they pupate and later come out as adult butterflies ready to breed and spawn. Meanwhile, the parsley grows new leaves.
A few times on September evenings over the years, several migrant monarch butterflies have landed for the night on our tall Norway spruces. But the next morning they are again fluttering southwest toward their winter home in certain mountains in Mexico. The miracle of the monarchs is that these great grandchildren of monarchs that left those mountains in March of that year go to the same groves of trees on the same mountains their great grandparents came from, though they never were there before. How do they know where to go and where to end their migrations. We don't know. It's one of the great miracles of life on Earth.
We get a couple of interesting moths in our yard every summer. I've seen a few striking white-lined sphinx moths in shrubbery on our lawn. And I saw one crawl from a woodpile in the yard where it probably pupated. Sphinx moths are small with swept-back wings for fast flight. And this species does have several white lines on its wings.
The lovely and appealing hummingbird moths visit flowers on our lawn to sip nectar. This type of moth is a paradox. It resembles a large bee, hovers at blossoms like a hummingbird and is a daytime moth.
A few times over the years at home, I've seen clusters of several white caterpillars on our red-twig dogwood bushes. But I was always stumped trying to identify them. Then one day, by accident, I realized these were not caterpillars at all, but rather the larvae of common sawflies. But they looked like caterpillars, ate dogwood leaves and crawled off to pupate in the soil.
We have a couple kinds of interesting flies on our lawn. One is the diminutive, iridescent and attractive long-legged flies that prey on tiny insects on foliage. The other is several iridescent green bottle flies that pile on dog droppings like turtles sunning on a log. They get nutrition form those droppings, but are also vulnerable to the predations of yellow jackets, which is a kind of predatory hornet. Adult yellow jackets sip nectar from flowers, but feed paralyzed insects to their larvae in their underground, paper nests; paper they make themselves from dead wood.
We have two major insect predators on our lawn- hanging flies and praying mantises. Hanging flies are large and yellow, hang by one foot from a leaf and use their other legs to snare passing insects from the air. Mantises walk over foliage and stalk their victims. They grab prey with their large, "toothed" front legs.
We've had a few insects on our pussy willow bushes over the years. A couple years several giant willow aphids on the woody stems of our pussy willow bushes. They are camouflaged there while sucking sap from the tender bark. Some years several pretty, red and black-spotted lady bug beetles and their larvae live on our pussy willow stems where they catch and eat smaller kinds of aphids and other tiny invertebrates. And at some point during late July and into August every year, several annual cicada grubs emerge from the ground at night and climb those pussy willows, and other shrubbery, to come out of those larval shells as adult insects with wings. The next day the adult cicadas fly away, leaving their empty, larval shells on the stems.
One year, there was a colony of female cicada killers in our neighborhood. Cicada killers, which are a kind of wasp, prefer bare ground in clay soil to create their underground nurseries, and that is where that neighborhood colony had theirs. I could see cicada killers bringing in paralyzed cicadas and walking those victims down into their burrows. There they laid an egg on each cicada for the wasp larva to eat.
By the end of July and through August and September, the green and camouflaged snowy tree crickets and other kinds of tree crickets chant or trill, according to the species, each evening and into the night. Those are males fiddling with their wings to entice females of their respective species to them for mating. That wonderful fiddling is a major part of late summer and autumn.
Check your own neighborhood for interesting insects. There's probably more of them out there than you suspect.
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