A Few Insects on our Lawn

     During the last several days, starting about the 18th of August, I noticed a few kinds of interesting and attractive insects on our lawn.  I've seen these species of insects before in our yard, but not so abundantly as now.
     We have a large vine of deadly nightshade on a planted viburnum bush.  Right now that vine has several purple-petaled flowers with yellow stamens protruding beyond the petals, and green, yellow, orange and red berries.  The different colored berries indicate they don't all ripen at once.  And part of the attraction of this nightshade vine are the many furry, black and yellow bumble bees that visit the blooms to sip nectar and collect pollen.  These are sterile, female, worker bees that take nectar and pollen from the blossoms to feed their younger, larval sisters in their nests in clumps of grass in the ground, while the mother of them all, the queen, continues to lay eggs in that grassy home in the soil.
     Meanwhile that day, I saw several digger wasps feeding on nectar in clumps of tiny, pale lavender spearmint flowers.  Digger wasps are three-quarters of an inch long with a one inch wing span.  They are black with deep-orange abdomens. 
     Adult digger wasps visit flowers to sip sugary nectar and females dig in the soil to find the larvae of green June beetles, which live under ground in our yard.  Female digger wasps sting each larva they find to paralyze it and lay an egg on top of it. The resulting wasp larva eats the June beetle larva, pupates in the ground through winter and emerges the next summer, ready to feed on flower nectar and reproduce themselves.
     But the most intriguing of these interesting insects in our yard are the cicada killers that are in our neighborhood in abundance.  There is a colony of female cicada killers that worked together in a patch of clay soil with sparse vegetation to dig out several branching burrows in the soil, each one with a few cells at the end.  Each female digs with her front legs and kicks out the soil with her rear ones.
     Meanwhile, we have annual cicadas all over our lawn.  They had been brown grubs sucking sap from tree roots for at least one year.  Then they dug out of the ground during some nights in August, leaving quarter-inch holes in the soil, and climbed trees, shrubs and other objects.  After a while, the back of the exoskeleton, or shell, splits open on each grub and the adult cicada, complete with wings and horny plates under their abdomens on the males, emerged.  After several days, many empty shells still cling to the objects the grubs climbed up.    
     The next day, and for several days after, the cicadas fly about in the trees looking for mates.  Males vibrate the flaps on their abdomens to make the buzzing, whirring sounds we hear during the day and early evening to attract females to them for breeding. 
     I see both the chunky, dark cicadas and large, yellowish-orange cicada killers zip about among the trees and bushes.  The cicadas are finding mates, but the female cicada killers are trying to locate cicadas to sting and paralyze.   
     When each cicada killer catches and paralyzes a cicada, she flies the victim to a tunnel, takes it down to a cell, still alive, and lays an egg on it.  The resulting wasp larva feeds on the paralyzed cicada, pupates through winter in its cell and emerges the next summer when the cicadas are active.
     Those five kinds of insects on our lawn, the bumble bees, June beetles, digger wasps, annual cicadas and cicada killers, are fairly obvious during their time each summer, and quite intriguing to experience.  They are all part of food chains of who is eating what.