The honeydew eaters

Linden trees, says Wikipedia,

"... are subject to the attack of many insects."

It's all the trees' doing; the sap flows richly and freely in its veins, easily tapped into, nutrient-rich, sweet and fragrant. Aphids harvest it, and serve it up to a throng of other insects.

Linden tree branch, with yellow jacket

Aphids, varying ages, and a molted skin.

The aphids that feed on linden are the Eucallipterus tiliae, the Linden Aphid. The new hatchlings are white or pale green, red-eyed. They develop their characteristic dark spots and stripes as they go from molt to molt. Some adults are winged.*

The thing about aphids is that they eat more than they use, and "spill" the excess. (The proper word is "exude", and the honeydew they produce is an exudate.) The nectar coats the leaves, dripping from branch to branch; the leaves become sticky. Sometimes the whole tree glistens and sweet rain falls to the ground beneath, feeding a black fungus in the grass.

And so the food chain goes, from the lawn to the tree to the aphids, to the ants that farm them and the ladybugs that prey on them, to the horde of winged critters feasting on the lot, and back to the ground to start the next cycle.

Ant on a twig

I cheated: two sizes of ants run up and down the trunk, along the branches, across the leaves. Run and run and run and run. I was having trouble getting one where I could focus on it. So I mashed a raspberry with a bit of water and sugar, and painted a stripe around the trunk, where they couldn't miss it. Five minutes later, the large ones were lining up for the treat.

Dessert bar

Ladybugs don't wait for the aphids to produce honey. They take their juice "on the hoof", with fresh aphid meat.

Medium-sized ladybug larva. The orange deepens as they grow.

Younger larva.

And a nineteen-spot adult.

Of course there are always flies.

Very small fly, unidentified.

Accidental fly. I was chasing the yellow jacket, and didn't notice the silhouette of a common fly on the back side of a leaf until later.

There's a small mob of tiny biting black flies, rarely photographed because I'm so busy swatting them before they bite, and usually being too slow.

I don't know what's hiding under this silky tunnel. Probably a pupating moth.

The wasps - dozens of them as long as the sun shines - flit from leaf to leaf, sipping nectar off the leaf surfaces, and looking for a good home for their babies, inside a caterpillar or spider.

Black and yellow mud dauber, I think.

I caught this wasp with the butterfly net, and had to chill him to calm him down. He woke up almost as soon as I brought him out; within a minute he was on his feet and heading for the door. This photo catches him just stretching and yawning.

The female wasps will build a series of one-egg mud nests. With each egg, they will deposit a paralyzed spider, then plaster over the entrance. The larva will hatch and eat the still-living spider.

The orange wasp, again. She's a ichneumon wasp, Theronia atalantae fulvescens.

These wasps prey on several moths and butterflies, notably the pine butterfly, a relative of the cabbage white. I may have seen these about and mistaken them for cabbage whites; they are very similar. The wasp also takes tussock moths and tent caterpillars.

In all the time I spent examining the tree this year, dodging wasps the whole time, I saw only one spider, and one very small caterpillar. It looks like the wasp babies are well provided.

And a tiny wasp, unidentified. It may prey on the larvae and larva food of the larger wasps.

The bark is juicy, too. I don't know what makes these tooth marks. Squirrel, maybe? An ant in the lower right corner shows the size.

Lichen on a small branch. Just because.

*Last year's post about this same tree, with larger aphid pics, is here.

Halfway caught up

I promised you everything but the kitchen sink. There's more than I knew; these are the first three packing cases.

First lot: Beaches and birds:

The duck pond at Centennial Beach. The blue tarp-covered box at the back, eating up a good chunk of the marsh, will be new concession stands/washrooms/etc.

Gull in the duck pond, with reflections of the reeds where the red-winged blackbirds nest.

This makes Laurie laugh. Can you see what it is?

Mount Baker, with Crescent Beach in the foreground.

And this made us both laugh. Someone set up a bagel tree for the crows. They hadn't found it yet.

A green winged teal, quite a distance away, in the rain.

Leaving the beach, walking back to the car, we passed my favourite purple wall, with these tall grasses (well over 6 feet) in winter drab in front of it.

Along the street behind Crescent Beach, a gargoyle guards a gate.

His little companion chuckles between the roots of a tree.

Lot 2: Critters and their stories.

A tiny jumping spider threatens the camera.

And here's my shape-shifting spider. Sort of.

In mid-October of last year, Laurie brought me a tiny, bouncy, hoppy, blonde spider, and I put her in a glass box and kept her fed. I called her Hopalong, for convenience sake. From time to time, I brought in new branches for her, checking them over carefully for insects that could serve as food, or other spiders.

Later on, she had molted, and was twice the size. Twice, I brought her smaller spiders, identical to her in all but size. She ate them. I was calling her Hoppy by now.

It took some doing; she was incredibly good at hiding in plain sight, but eventually I got some decent photos and sent them in to BugGuide, both the baby pics and the adult ones. Confusion ensued. How can a spider change species in the course of a monitored life? The baby was a Theridion; the adult was a Philodromus. After a certain amount of to-ing an fro-ing, we decided that Hoppy, the Philodromus, must have come in on one of the branches, hiding so well that even though I examined them all with a lens, I never saw her. And, of course, she had eaten poor Hopalong.

She's got her comeuppance. Last week I brought in new branches for her. I looked them over extremely carefully, finding two pinhead black spiders, and a plant louse or two. I saw her two days later, scooting down a branch; that was the last time. After a couple of days, I took the branches out and cleaned the box, looking for her. No Hoppy; instead, I found this crab spider, an Ozyptila, another of the spider clans that blend in perfectly to their background to ambush their prey. In the detritus at the bottom of the box, I found the mangled remains of a Philodromus, sucked dry.

The current resident, fat with Hoppy's juices.

Turn about's fair play, I guess.

One more story: remember this?

Not an igloo.

I found this on a drying maple leaf towards the end of last October. Then, it was just a silky ball, with no sign of entrance or exit. I put it in a sealed plastic container and left it outside to winter. I checked it a couple of times; nothing seemed to be happening until two weeks ago, when I found the ball perforated and empty.

In a corner of the container, a dead wasp lay, all scrunched up.

Previous resident of the not-igloo.

I still have to resize photos to send in to BugGuide, for identification, which I will do by Monday.

Lot 3: Practicing on Element 10.

I've been plugging away at this, challenging myself with more difficult tasks each time. Here are a few things that look like they might be useful once I get proficient at them.

A complicated photo of a trail through the bush at Crescent Beach, with too-dark areas, and burnt-out whites. I learned to manage each section separately. I'm not too happy with the result, but next time I should do better.

I'm happy with this. An adult bulrush bug, 4.5 mm long; the same species as the "cutie" nymph. This is a composite of two photos, one with the head in focus, the second with the back a bit better, but a blur where the head was. This technique has real possibilities.

I cleaned up and corrected colour and lighting on a 10-year-old photo that was too dark to see. It's a Gray Jay, near a cabin in Chase,  BC.

An experiment. The osprey was 'way over to the side and top of the photo; the trees far below. Most of the photo was empty cloud. I used the compression feature to squish the photo together, removing most of the cloud in the center. This was fun, but I don't think I'll use it much.

I did a poor job of removing the entire messy background and replacing it with the grass from another photo. Got rid of half a mallard in the process. A simple select and blend command sort of worked, but I had to finish it off with the healing tool. This will be useful once I get the hang of it.

Now, back to work. Lichens, next.

Spider-hunting wasp

I've said it before, and probably will again; this why I love blogging! On the first of my Rock Flipping Day posts, I showed a photo of a "fly" that I found underneath a rock. And a second photo that I captioned, "What made this?"

This morning, there was a comment on the post: "Your fly is a wasp. ...  Pompilidae, or spider-hunting wasps."

Of course, I looked up the Pompilidae. I found them on BugGuide, and studied the description. Among other characteristics I couldn't verify from my photos, there was this,

... the Pompilidae have the pronotum extending back to the tegulae, the pronotum thus appearing triangular when viewed from the side and horseshoe-shaped when viewed from above.

And sure enough, in my three-quarters view I could see the triangle. In the other, the horseshoe shape. I went on to read the section on food:

Larvae feed on spiders. In some groups the females sting and paralyze their prey and then transport it to a specially constructed nest before laying an egg; in others, leave the paralyzed spider in its nest and lay an egg upon it.

So this was why I found the wasp under a rock inhabited by two large spiders; it's either a new-hatched wasp, or a female looking for a spider to lay an egg in. (And the ones that needed to escape were the spiders, not the wasp, as I had supposed.)

There's more! I browsed through BugGuide's image pages, looking for this particular wasp; spider wasp with orange abdomen, black antennae. I found several, in Texas and Florida, probably not the same species as this one. And then, after a dozen or so pages, I started running into photos of clay or mud cases, the "nest" where a wasp would lay one egg, with a paralyzed spider for larva food.

They look like this one.

I found what appears to be the same species as mine, Priocnemis oregona, from Oregon to our south, and a match from Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island, northwest of here, classified as simply Prioncemis. There are no samples of egg cases for this species in the BugGuide pages, but these, from Tennessee are typical, although bigger than most. Some are closed, some open;, one even has a larva inside it.

So there we have it; a correction leads to the solution of a mystery.

Oh, and here's the spider that's potentially the next batch of larva food:

A bit bigger than the wasp, but stealth, speed and venom may best size.

Thanks, James!

The seasons are out of sync

Seen on a short walk from Centennial Beach to the car:

Fresh rose hips. Usually associated with the end of summer, beginning of fall.

Cottonwood "snow". We expect to see this in the spring. With a fallen chestnut flower; the tree blooms once the weather warms up. By early fall, the nuts should be ripe.

Wasp nest. Out of place; I sat on a log in the shade, and found this in the weeds just behind me, barely a foot off the ground.

Bee heaven

We went to Centennial Beach without checking the tide tables, and found the beach reduced to a narrow strip of stones. We turned inland and dawdled through the dunes.

This area, just south of the park area, is mostly loose sand, anchored by sea rocket and scratchy dune grasses. Here and there, low-growing purple beach peas find spots sheltered by old logs; escapees from landscaped yards, poppies, euphorbia and huge mounds of evergreen rose bushes, line the inland edge.  The sea rocket is in full bloom now, covered with small, pale flowers, their colours eclipsed by the bright yellow and orange of the bees that feed on them.

Native orange bumblebee, Bombus melanopygus*.

Another bumblebee, in yellow and black. An older bee, probably, going bald.

The flowers are productive; note this bee's full pollen sac on his leg.

A different species, probably. The abdomen is black, with faint stripes. Possibly the Eastern bumblebee?

On euphorbia, a wasp I don't recognize.

In the center of a rose, more yellow and black stripes. Another wasp?

No. This one's a honeybee, Apis mellifera.

*Note: all bee/fly/wasp IDs are tentative. I am often wrong, and appreciate corrections.

A flash of blue

Thousands upon thousands of mallards. Throw in a couple more thousands. Driving in to Reifel Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary, we see glimpses of the slough to the side of the road; usually a few ducks and geese sleep there. Sunday, the water was hidden under a feather quilt of ducks. From the parking lot to the far paths and waterways of the Sanctuary, mallards swarmed like ants.

Except for the chickadees, the small birds were staying under cover, away from the jostling mob. When we came to a blind where we often stand to watch, we just glanced in the doorway. On the far side, beyond the slotted windows, were more mallards, no LBBs.

But I'd seen wasp nests under the roof before, so I stopped to look at the building itself. A brilliant blue ... tiny thing ... zipped from wall to fascia board, to wall, to roof. Looked like a fly. Laurie and I spent about 10 minutes just trying to press our shutter buttons before it bounced away again.

Blurry photo; no time to focus. Just point and click.

The wall was festooned with spider webs. After a bit, I was telling the fly to please, please, please, get tangled in a web so he'd stay in one place for more than a second. He came close, but missed them all.

Finally! Got it!

It's a Cuckoo wasp, about 1.2 cm long, probably one of the Chrysidinae. These are kleptoparasitic wasps that come in a variety of bright, metallic colours; reds, greens, blues, golden yellows. They're found worldwide, with over 3000 known species in the superfamily, Chrysididae.

Kleptoparasitic. The word speaks for itself; "klepto" - theft, "parasitic" - living off the labours of others. These little wasps lay their eggs in the nests of larger wasps and bees.

The egg of the cuckoo wasp hatches after the larva of the host species. The cuckoo larva then attaches itself to the host larva, and waits patiently as the host larva eats and grows, reaching the “pre-pupal” stage. At this point the cuckoo larva begins consuming the host larva, eventually killing it in the process. The mature cuckoo larva then pupates and emerges from the nest as an adult cuckoo wasp sometime later.

An alternative life history is found in some species where the cuckoo larva eats the host’s egg or young larva, then scarfs down the food stored for the host (paralyzed insects, spiders, or pollen and nectar). (From Cuckoo for Cuckoo Wasps, from Bug Eric)

The hosts whose nests the wasp invades are bigger, more aggressive, dangerous. The wasp survives, in part because of its extra-thick exoskeleton. And they can roll themselves up in a ball like a pillbug, protecting the delicate underparts. I'm thinking their speed may give them an advantage, too; beside "our" wasp, a bee would seem to be a big, lumbering slowpoke.

One more thing, from Bug Eric;

That durable cuticle is pitted, grooved, and otherwise sculptured, creating facets that reflect various wavelengths of light and give the insects their bright metallic colors. Pigments have nothing to do with their jewel-like quality.

Among the spiders that weren't catching Little Boy Blue, we saw this one:

Fat spider, with a belly as big as a wild crabapple. If you click on the photo, you can see how she holds the web with hooks on the end of her legs.

Taken from half an inch away. At least she stayed put. The spinnerets at the end are still holding the latest addition to her scruffy web.

BugGuide has photos of the Cuckoo wasps, and info. Here's another info page. And Bug Eric's blog. The post I quoted from is here. He has more details and links there.