mthew

Male perching on Common Milkweed pod. Female ovipositing on Common Milkweed pod. Have not seen this before: usually they lay on the underside of the leaves. Especially on young plants, before they flower, much less fruit. A couple more eggs. I spotted this one for my last Green-Wood Members’ walk. A couple of days later,…

Best-dressed Invasive. Spotted Lanternfly/Lycorma delicatula Color splotch! Black Swallowtail/Papilio polyxenes Pure killer. Eastern Cicada-killer Wasp/Sphecius speciosus Off the rack? Apantesis moth wing. Can’t touch this. Great Golden Digger Wasp/Sphex ichneumoneus Pin-stripe equivalent Macaria genus moth. Red Milkweed Beetle/Tetraopes tetrophthalmus resort wear. True bug formal. Lygaeidae family. Geometric… Oblique Streaktail/Allograpta obliqua Basics… Yellow-legged Mud-dauber Wasp/Sceliphron caementarium

Look inside those bindweed flowers. Here we have two beetles and some tiny ants, probably Monomorium minimum. This looks like Loew’s Lady Beetle Scymnus loewii. First I’ve ever seen. Conotelus obscurus? A sap-feeding beetle. But presumably in the nectar? And what’s all this then? An aggregation of thrips!

This is some kind of sticky trap for Spotted Lanternfly on a mature Ailanthus tree in Owl’s Head Park. I don’t know if this was the work of NYC Parks or someone freelance. Last nymph stage emerging. The trouble with this sticky stuff is that everything sticks to it. I saw flies wasps, true bugs,…

A small patch of bare, hard-packed earth is a fairly rare thing around here. At least three species of ground-nesting bees were using it. American Miner is the only one I feel confident about identifying. Not all the bees make it. A Pseudomethoca velvet ant, which is actually a wingless female wasp, was most unexpected.…

Bombus away! This was two days after the visit detailed yesterday. It was less humid and windier. Two-spotted Bumble Bee/Bombus bimaculatus European Drone Fly/Eristalis arbustorum Eastern Carpenter Bee/Xylocopa virginica An unknown skipper. Great Black Digger Wasp/Sphex pensylvanicus Great Golden Digger Wasp/Sphex ichneumoneus Euodynerus hidalgo ssp. hidalgo Painted Lady/Vanessa cardui One of those sweat bees… Eastern Cicada-killer Wasp/Sphecius…

Mexican Grass-carrying Wasp/Isodontia mexicana Bombus Megachile Sachem/Atalopedes campestris Hump-backed Beewolf/Philanthus gibbosus Common Eastern Physocephala/Physocephala tibialis Hidalgo Mason Wasp/Euodynerus hidalgo Lunate Longhorn-cuckoo Bee/Triepeolus lunatus Two-spotted Longhorn Bee/Melissodes bimaculatus Bombus Four-banded Stink Bug Wasp/Bicyrtes quadrifasciatus. (Males have five bands.) Pycnanthemum.