What Bugs Did You See in Your Garden Today?

[RhodeIslandRed5]

Hello love bugs, lol. Just needing to blow off some steam. I JUST planted 8 heirloom sweet pepper plants in my pepper garden. Ok, it was 3 days ago. They were healthy sprouts. The first day the sprouts looked happy and thriving, but I only counted 7. Hmmmm. Did I plant 7 or 8? The next day I counted 6 sprouts. ??? TODAY THERE IS ONLY 1 LEFT. The stems are there, but no leaves. Come on! What ate my plant? Is it an animal or a bug. That was a lot of work for nothing.
Oh well, another challenge for a new gardner. Advice welcomed. Happy day to all!

Oh-no! Sorry to hear that. I've had those 'disappearing plant parts' moments. Inspect the ground around your plants. See any piles of poo? Could be a hornworm. And, could be a rabbit; that's what happened to one of mine years ago.

 

[DuckDuckGooseMum]

It sounds like your garden has a wonderful little ecosystem of its own going on! I would love to have so many beneficial insects, for both my plants and my poultry.

I’ve only seen one black widow this year but I’ve seen MANY fiddlebacks. The only to spiders I kill on sight. When I take down mud dauber nests I use my hands, so I absolutely would have died if a thousand baby spiders came crawling up my arm Lovely bug finds as well. How is your injured chick doing?

I found this Sphinx moth(?) pupa and a millipede that I need to identify while putting hardware cloth up around my chicken run. I love millipedes, but absolutely can’t stand centipedes!
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Thank you very much! You're right, I guess I hadn't really considered their contributions much.
I have found many of those pupae and never knew what they were! Lol. Generally the moths are so much of a nuisance here that I never thought much of them until I spotted the Luna Moth and wow! The picture really doesn't do it justice! It was breathtaking! It was nestled in a small patch of 4 leaf clovers, which I thought was also pretty cool! I so wish that I had a photo of the brown one I saw as it was also extraordinary!
I don't see many centipedes or millipedes here. The ducks don't waste much time grabbing them up! I wish they would eat the daggoned webworms but they don't care for them unfortunately.
Thank you for asking about Henrietta. She's doing surprisingly well actually. I didn't think that she was going to make it there for a while, but she has enormous will for such a tiny little thing! She has 1 eye & she still has some "physical therapy" to do on her splayed legs, but I think she's gonna be just fine!
I hope your project went well! We're almost ready to hang the wire on our Duck/Geese run also. Darned predators! Lol

 

[boggart]

Not in my garden, but at the little lake where I take my kidlet to fish. My understanding is that the yellow one is the male and the dark one is a female.
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Beautiful!

Ok, fun thread.

Corn spider! Also known as a zig zag spider like page one.
I read they eat those rotten Japanese beetles, so I let her stay where she's at.



Annnnddddd!
I have over a dozen monarch pillars on my milkweed.
Failed to plant it yet, it's in a deck pot. Awesome to sit next to them and watch.

I’ve read that they eat their body weight in mosquitos every day! And that their natural life span in the wild is around 1 year. They’re really wonderful arachnid friends.

Wasn’t in my garden but here is a black widow.
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This is a male. The females are jet black and three times as big.

And then there is this guy. I’ve always called them jumping spiders and just recently found out that they eat other spiders.
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I’ve never seen a male black widow before, I wonder if they keep to the shadows? The females are ruthless

Hello love bugs, lol. Just needing to blow off some steam. I JUST planted 8 heirloom sweet pepper plants in my pepper garden. Ok, it was 3 days ago. They were healthy sprouts. The first day the sprouts looked happy and thriving, but I only counted 7. Hmmmm. Did I plant 7 or 8? The next day I counted 6 sprouts. ??? TODAY THERE IS ONLY 1 LEFT. The stems are there, but no leaves. Come on! What ate my plant? Is it an animal or a bug. That was a lot of work for nothing.
Oh well, another challenge for a new gardner. Advice welcomed. Happy day to all!

So sad! I love bugs but when it comes to pesky ones I just hate them. Especially mosquitos.. hope you have figured out your pest problem!

 

[boggart]

Thank you very much! You're right, I guess I hadn't really considered their contributions much.
I have found many of those pupae and never knew what they were! Lol. Generally the moths are so much of a nuisance here that I never thought much of them until I spotted the Luna Moth and wow! The picture really doesn't do it justice! It was breathtaking! It was nestled in a small patch of 4 leaf clovers, which I thought was also pretty cool! I so wish that I had a photo of the brown one I saw as it was also extraordinary!
I don't see many centipedes or millipedes here. The ducks don't waste much time grabbing them up! I wish they would eat the daggoned webworms but they don't care for them unfortunately.
Thank you for asking about Henrietta. She's doing surprisingly well actually. I didn't think that she was going to make it there for a while, but she has enormous will for such a tiny little thing! She has 1 eye & she still has some "physical therapy" to do on her splayed legs, but I think she's gonna be just fine!
I hope your project went well! We're almost ready to hang the wire on our Duck/Geese run also. Darned predators! Lol

It’s always so sad to see an innocent animal go for reasons that can be treated! I’m so happy for you that she’s doing well, and I hope she stays happy and healthy for a long time.

Here’s a dead butterfly that flew into my cute chick’s little run a few days ago. They squabbled and were very scared of it at first, until I tore it into pieces and fed it to them. The circle of life

A beautiful moth that I saw resting it’s wings in the sunshine on my garage wall. It was there that night too, so it must have been very tired

And my most crazy find.. This fat black widow caught herself a juvenile ring neck snake in one of my rain gutters! I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. It took her multiple days to drain the poor thing, and I’m sure she won’t have to eat for the rest of her life

 

[BugsToBirds]

Beautiful pictures on this thread! I've moved this year, so unfortunately I've been noting different bugs more than changes in the number of them. One of those zig zag garden spiders left an eggsack just outside my chicken shed though, so I hope to see lots of the comfortingly familiar arachnids next year!

 

[BigBlueHen53]

I saw my first zipper spider a week or so ago, those are so cool! Also saw a big ol' honkin' walking stick on my back screen door, that was neat. In the not-a-bug dept., I seem to have acquired a good-sized little ol' frog or toad in my ground floor bathroom and I'm tickled about that! He's quite shy yet, so I'm not sure whether he is a frog or a toad. Time will tell. Now if I could just find Time .... I'm sure he's around here someplace ....

 

[Liz Birdlover]

Wow, a Black Widow getting a snake? Darn, those spiders are ferocious! We have many here in Southern Delaware. I'd never even seen them before living 100 miles north. They like hanging around rock piles, slate, or cinderblocks. Also around guttering & siding by the hose bib & faucets. Nasty buggers! Hobo spiders are bad here, too. I'm sure there are recluse spiders but I haven't seen them. I see daddy long kegs & wolf spiders, but they're kinda cool. I like the little jumping spiders with blue eyes, kinda cute.