Good? Bad? Ugly?

I look at -- and notice -- insects completely differently since I went to the Mercer Educational Gardens to learn about beneficial insects last week. Now I see all kinds of uniquely colored and shaped critters. I'm pretty certain that there are more varieties here than in Colorado where I mostly worried about grasshoppers and wasps (or hornets, I can't seem to get that straight). The problem is that I'm even worse at identifying insects than I am at identifying weeds and plants.

Here's some of what I learned:

• There are 100,000 species of insects in North America and only 10% are bad guys
• Most Hymenoptra (bees and wasps) are good
• The Bald Faced Hornet and the Vespid Wasp are bad
• The larva of a Firefly is a Glow Worm
• There are 20 different kinds of Lady Beetles (a.k.a. Lady Bugs)
• The Mexican Bean Beetle looks like a brown Lady Beetle but it eats beans, not aphids
• The Spined Soldier Bug is a good guy that sucks the juice out of bad bugs
• It looks like the Brown Marmalated Stink Bug that sucks the juice out of fruit
• The Ground Beetle looks like a Cockroach but is a good guy that eats Slugs
• The Damsel Fly is a Mosquito vacuum cleaner
• All Spiders are good -- they eat the night flying insects
• You don't have to order beneficial insects from a mail order catalog -- they will find you if you don't have a perfectly manicured yard
• The more plants you have with pollen, the more beneficials you'll have
• The best property for beneficials has a diverse selection of plants
• Linda, the previous owner of this property gets an A+ for building a garden that attracts beneficial insects

Today while I was weeding, I saw several kinds of tiny insects all over a pollen-laden flower spike and wondered if they were good or bad. The thing is, you need the bad ones to attract the good ones. I wished I had a super ultra macro camera that I could have used to take pictures of them. Not so I could try to identify them out of 100,000 candidates. But just so I could post on the blog. They had unique coloring and unusual shapes.

Bumble Bees on Milkweed

Some familiar looking flowers bloomed last month. They resembled a flower that was categorized as a noxious weed in Boulder open space because it was spreading and crowding out the native species. But here, the plants were carefully arranged around the bird feeder and grew to over 5' tall. The bees were crawling all over the blossoms and each other to get to the pollen. Now the flowers have gone to seed and the pods look exactly like the Milkweed that Boulder volunteers had dug up and tried to eradicate . My research says that Milkweed is highly prized because it attracts butterlies. I only saw bees crawling all over it.

I've seen some magnificent butterflies in the last few days. They're big enough to be photographed with  my macro lens but they refuse to stay still long enough for me to run in the house, find my camera, turn it on and get back in time to take a picture.