Locust Borer on Golden Rod

Today I helped with removing the ham radio antennae from the top of Meg's school. While on the roof I spied a Monarch migrating by. Afterwards I headed out on a hike to see if I could find some Dainty Sulphur butterfly I mentioned on a recent post.  Struck out again on finding any Dainty Sulphurs. My other goal was to get a really good Honey Bee photo for the state fair, hoped to find some big sunflowers to shoot them on, failed on that also.

I did however add a new species of butterfly to the Falls Lake list a Long-tailed Skipper. Falls Lake which now stands at 96 species of butterflies second only to Weymouth Woods with 98 species.

I had much excitment when I found a Locust Borer, Megacyllene robiniae feeding on golden rod. Had only seen one of these in Virginia back in 2005 when I was spending the fall tagging Monarchs at the Eastern Shore of Virginia. These are considered really bad pests on Black Locust trees.

 Locust Borer, Megacyllene robiniae

 My trick to getting these photos was to set the camera in manual mode and set the focus to about 1 1/2 inches and shoot from 1 1/2 inches away. This Locust Borer ignored me entirely and let me take a lot of photos, these two photos were the best ones.

Honey Bee gathering nectar on golden rod. Around here golden rod is considered a good late season nectar source for the bees, although many complain it stinks like rotten socks and the honey is not very tasty.

Viceroy, the mimic of the Monarch. This one was tiny, never seen a Monarch as small as this Viceroy. Getting photos of these butterflies one has to be patient and wait for the right one to come along, they do a lot of chasing which is not very good for photographing them. The lighting was back lit making the butterfly look dark, so I popped up the flash and the flash lit it for me. Patient let me explain that. I have seen maybe 100 Viceroys on the past 5-6 walks, this one was the only cooperative one I found. More on patience, I saw maybe 1000 butterflies today and the Viceroy was the only one that even produced a decent photograph. I did get a Monarch on goldenrod but the lighting was bad. I could have crawled up to 2 different puddle parties of Cloudless Sulphurs and Sleepy Oranges, but have lots and lots of puddling photos.

Melon rinds and butterflies!

This past week I had dropped a water melon rind next to the big Miss Huff lantana bush.Most of our melon rinds either go out the back door or into the compost bin. Anyway I dropped this rind in hopes of getting butterflies on it. You see below the results.

The orange butterfly is a Viceroy and the other is an related species the Red-spotted Purple. This brought me a lot of excitement and even though we have lots of willows (the host plant for both species) we rarely get Viceroys here. This also brought to mind that just over a year ago in South Carolina I saw a hybrid Viceroy, Red-spotted Purple with half the wings being like each species. I did not get a photo as the camera was 50 ft away in the car....

Here is the Viceroy again, you can see my page on them here. She posed nicely and I was able to get a few inches away with my little G11 camera.

More of the Red-spotted Purple with a Tawny Emperor (above). The camera flash kind of enhanced the ventral view a bit don't you think? The record here stands at 22 Red-spotted Purples on a half papaya that I got form the grocery for a quarter since it was nearly past prime.  See my page on Red-spotted Purple.

Below is an Hackberry Emperor, I had two of these landing on the single melon rind along with 3 Tawny Emperors (a record number here BTW), the Red-spotted Purple, Viceroy, Question Mark, Gemmed Satyr and Carolina Satyr!

OK below is a dragonfly that I got photos of in Southport, NC, the last time I got photos of this one was in 2003.

This is a Four-spotted Pennant (Brachymesia gravida) they can only be found near brackish water, so you have to be along the coast to find them. Getting the ID is easy as it is the only dragonfly you will encounter along the coast with all white stigmas on the wings.

 

We found about 7-8 of these along a sand bar along with a small breeze. The last time I found one of these I was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes  in a still place with only one very uncooperative Four-spotted Pennant.