With the heat of summer, we will see and hear a variety of common insects here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. All of them have beauties and intrigues that make them interesting to experience. But many of them get eaten by birds and other kinds of creatures. Following is a collection of my favorite striking and local insects.
Monarch and tiger swallowtail butterflies are my favorites of their beautiful clan. Monarchs are large and orange and black, which makes them noticeable on flowers late in summer and into September. And monarchs have an interesting life history of four generations a year, the last one migrating to Mexico for the winter. Those same migrants start north the next March, but stop to mate in the southwest United States, lay eggs on milkweed plants and die. Succeeding generations continue the trip north.
The big tiger swallowtails are yellow and black, and noticeable fluttering on flowers through summer. Their larvae eat a variety of tree leaves in deciduous woods.
Spicebush swallowtail butterfly caterpillars are green, which blends them into the spicebush and sassafras leaves they eat. They also spin webbing to close the leaf they are eating around themselves for further protection. And they have two large, dark spots on their "backs" right behind their heads. Those black spots look like eyes to intimidate birds and other critters that might eat the caterpillars. So well are those fake eyes designed that when I look into them, they seem to be looking back at me.
Eyed elater click beetles live under logs and fallen leaves on forest floors. They are about an inch long and gray, which camouflages them. And they have two large, black spots, again like eyes, but fake, on the top of their thoraxes, which intimidate skunks or birds that dig them up to consume.
We experience some insects in great masses in summer, including fire flies, honey bees, bald-faced hornets and true katydids. Each evening in June and July, we see thousands of male fire flies crawl up grass stems where they spent the day, take flight and flash their cold, abdominal lights as they fly or land on tree leaves, creating a fantasy world where fairies dance in the light of stars and fireflies. These flashing beetles, they really are beetles that do flash, continue lighting their lanterns every few seconds into the night to stir female fireflies into flashing their weaker lights in the grass. Then the genders unite to mate and lay eggs.
Honey bees are originally from Eurasia and were brought to North America to pollinate crops and make honey, which they do quite well. This species lives in colonies of thousands of sterile, female workers, a queen and a handful of drones (males). Honey bees in North America live in hives built for them, and in tree hollows and other protected places in the wild. Their high numbers visiting flowers in groups is their greatest beauty.
Each spring, fertilized, queen bald-faced hornets emerge from hibernation in the soil and each one begins a colony of offspring by making a tiny paper nest on a tree branch. She lays an egg in each of several paper cells under the paper covering and feeds small insects to the resulting larvae. When those first female youngsters mature and are able to fly, they take over the business of the hive, including enlarging the nest and feeding insects to the larvae and flower nectar to the queen, while she continues to lay eggs.
As each bald-faced hornet colony grows, their paper nest gets bigger. Female workers chew bits of wood into paper and add them to the protective nest shell and the paper cells inside. But during the frosts of autumn, the workers and drones die while the queens dig deep into the ground to avoid frost and emerge the next spring.
We hear true katydids fiddling from dusk into the dark of night in the treetops of woodlands from late July into October, when frost kills them. Katydids are related to grasshoppers, but ingest deciduous leaves. Male katydids scrape a file of one wing over a scraper on the other to make the raspy, nearly incessant "katy-did" sound which calls the genders together for mating. Thousands of katydids strumming at once creates a nearly deafening, but enjoyable and inspiring, din.
Katydids are green, which camouflages them in deciduous foliage. Even their wings look like tiny leaves to enhance their blending into their treetop niche.
Green darners are large, migratory dragonflies that zip on four transparent wings over local ponds here in summer. Each darner, as we see them careening around an impoundment after flying insects to eat and mates, has an olive thorax and pale-blue abdomen.
All dragonflies start life on pond bottoms where they feed on aquatic insects, tadpoles, small fish and other water creatures. But at maturity, they crawl up emergent plant stems, shed their larval shells and fly away. Then we see their interesting flights and lovely colors.
I've often heard northern mole crickets in their burrows in short-grass pastures, but never saw one. Their scraping of one wing on the other makes a raspy sound that sounds like the hoarse, rythmic croaking of a kind of frog down a hole. Mole crickets are well adapted to living in burrows in the ground where they are relatively safe. They don't have large, back legs for jumping like their kin, but their front legs are like shovels for digging in soft soil, which their relatives don't have.
Water striders are true bugs skiing on the surfaces of sluggish, smaller waterways, without breaking through the water tension. Their back pair of legs are like thin boats helping to hold them on the surface by spreading their weight, without breaking through. Their middle legs are also like boats, but also, like oars, that propel the striders forward to catch land insects struggling helplessly on the water's surface. And their front legs capture their food. Water striders are dark above and white below to be nearly invisible on the water.
Water boatman are also true bugs, close to half an inch long, that live in ponds. These intriguing, little insects use their noticeably enlarged, middle pair of legs as oars to push themselves through the water to eat algae and bits of dead plant and animal materials, and to escape fish and other would-be predators in the water. They are brownish, which camouflages them and they come to the surface occasionally to breathe air. They can fly from pond to pond.
These are some of my favorite insects that I look for each summer. Readers can get out and look for intriguing insects around your homes.
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