Longhorn Beetles

Trigonarthris subpubescens
Trigonarthris minnesotana

I have always found that finding beetles is one of my greatest satisfactions. And finding longhorn beetles is even more satisfying. I have managed to find five different species here over the years. Some I have only found once, but the flower beetles seem to be easiest to find. 

Longhorn beetles, like longhorn bees, have antennae lengths that meet or exceed the length of the body of the insect. Some of the longhorns are considered pests, but the flower longhorn beetles are beneficial. Knowing which is a flower longhorn and which is not can be very tricky.

The larvae of flower longhorn beetles live in dead trees in the forests. They bore through the wood and eat it, helping to speed up decomposition. The adult flower longhorns eat pollen from usually species specific flowers, thus helping to pollinate our world. 

In fact, all longhorn beetle larvae, flower longhorns or not, bore through wood. It is the non-flower longhorns that can cause problems because they may bore through live trees and perhaps kill them.

The flower longhorn beetle at the top of this post, Trigonarthris subpubescens, has two scientific names and no common name. "Larvae develop in decaying branches of conifers and hardwoods. Adults found on flowers and leaves of shrubs in summer. Maritime Provinces and Québec to Florida, west to Manitoba, Minnesota, and Missouri." (Evans, Arthur V.. Beetles of Eastern North America (Page 400). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.) I found it on a daylily.

Mottled Longhorned Beetle (Anthophylax attenuatus)

The mottled longhorned beetle "[l]arva develops in wet, decaying logs of maple (Acer), beech (Fagus), and cottonwood (Populus), also in living branches of spruce (Picea); pupates in soil. Adults active late spring through summer, found on male pine (Pinus) strobili (cones). Maritime Provinces to northern Virginia, west to Ontario and Wisconsin." (Evans, Arthur V.. Beetles of Eastern North America (Page 392). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Banded Longhorn Beetle (Typocerus velutinus)

The lovely banded longhorn beetle above "visit[s] flowers in late spring and summer. Larvae develop in deciduous hardwoods, including oak (Quercus), hickory (Carya), beech (Fagus), and cottonwood (Populus). Nova Scotia to Florida, west to Saskatchewan, Minnesota, Kansas, and Mississippi." (Evans, Arthur V.. Beetles of Eastern North America (Page 400). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.) I find them most often on goldenrod. It is my second most common longhorn beetle.

Red Milkweed Beetle (Tetraopes tetrophthalmus)

The cute, vivid, and most common of my longhorn beetles is not a flower longhorn. Red milkweed beetle "[l]arvae develop in roots of milkweeds (Asclepias) and dogbane (Apocynum). Adults active late spring and summer, found on host plants. Québec and Ontario to Georgia, west to North Dakota, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas." (Evans, Arthur V.. Beetles of Eastern North America (Page 428). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Round-necked Longhorn Beetle (Clytus ruricola)

The round-necked longhorn beetle also is not a flower longhorn. "Adults are found resting on vegetation in late spring and early summer. Legless larvae develop in decaying hardwoods, especially maple (Acer). Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to South Carolina, west to Manitoba, Wisconsin, and Tennessee." (Evans, Arthur V.. Beetles of Eastern North America (Page 406). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.) I have never been able to find information on what else these adults may enjoy. We found this beetle inside a leaf that had aphids inside, seen in the photo. It seemed disoriented (from honeydew?) so we were able to move it from the leaf for photos until it recovered its senses and flew away. The other little bug inside the leaf besides the longhorn and the aphids is the larva of a lady beetle, which was eating the aphids.

The Round-necked longhorn beetle dangling out of
rolled leaf of aphids, presumably imbibing honeydew.

I hope many of you are fortunate enough to find a longhorn beetle and observe its behavior. 

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Wordless Wednesday: A Daylily

Wordless Wednesday at Comedy Plus

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Tarnished Plant Bugs

Tarnished Plant Bug (Lygus lineolaris) 

This may be the best shot I have ever gotten of a tarnished plant bug (or TPB as entomologists shorthand it). It was on a daylily, which I steadied against the wind with my hand. 

These are true bugs, a real name, in the order Hemiptera. And they are a truly serious threat to food crops in North America. The problem, I read, is that they slowly become impervious to all methods, so far, of killing them, be it chemical pesticides or other means. Scientists are sequencing its DNA to forge more tools against them.

True bugs have piercing and sucking mouthparts, which you can clearly see here. In fact, there is a drop of the lily's juice dripping off of the bug's "beak." Whenever I gaze at this photo, I can imagine a great sci-fi monster movie being made with blood dripping off the beak. 

To me, they are a pretty, tiny, bug that pops up all over in the summer. In a non-agricultural habitat they seem to be under control and are no problem.  

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Longhorn Bees

Longhorn bee, male

After nearly another week of smoke and rain, Lucy and I finally got out for a bug hunt and ran into two male longhorn bees. What the bonanza! It was still cool enough so they were quiet. I know they were males because they had the long antennae. Girls have short antennae. I don't even want to guess as to what genus they belonged to, but they are in the Tribe Eucerini, with about 212 species in North America. Bees in this tribe have, besides long antennae, a lot of hair. They also have the most beautiful eyes. I have seen them in green, as above, and in blue. They are native. They are solitary ground nesters. Their nests go down vertically with chambers for larvae branching off the main tunnel.

And that is about all I know and about all I can figure out from my reading about them. I don't even know what food they prefer. One genus, squash bees, only pollinates Cucurbita, "a genus of annual, warm-season, vining plants in the cucumber family (Cucurbitaceae) native to North and South America. It includes commonly cultivated vegetables (although botanical terms, they are fruit) such as summer and winter squashes, pumpkins, zucchini, and ornamental gourds." (North Carolina State University Extension Gardener)  Honey bees do not pollinate those plants.

I do know that I often find them on cool mornings and after a rain. After getting wet in a rain, it takes them quite awhile to dry off. I also see them nectaring later in the afternoon than most other bees. Hope you spot some!

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More Rain, More Baking, and More Bad Bugs

Ghirardelli dark chocolate chip mix skillet cookie

On Friday, I decided that Saturday would be pizza day. And whenever I make pizza, I make brownies or cookie bars for dessert. My arthritis now affects my baking, so I am taste testing prepared mixes. I got a bunch of Ghirardelli mixes and tried the chocolate chip cookie mix but baked it in a skillet (which relieves me of much standing time on the knees). It was such a success! I love the mix and I can't do better from scratch. There is no boxed mix taste, either. 

I baked Saturday even though the weather was great. I got psyched out by bad bugs on Friday—by ticks again. I hate ticks and this year the tick problem is unbelievable. Lucy, despite her flea and tick treatments, brings in one live tick a day. In the past, it has only been one live tick per season. I need to photograph each one in order to identify the species. Fortunately, Lucy has only had one embedded in her skin and she was fantastic when I took it off under the new guidelines.  Thankfully, all of the ticks have been American dog ticks; not the deer ticks with Lyme disease.

Friday night, after our short bug walk in the gorgeous weather, I found a tick crawling up my leg. That was the final straw for me. Short of Lucy and I dressing in hazmat suits, I decided to never go outside again. Ticks give me bad dreams for nights and creepy crawly skin for days.

Soon after I found the tick, Lucy came in with another deer fly riding on her muzzle. Every year, the time after black flies is deer fly time and they love Lucy's muzzle. She seldom notices them until they bite and leave her with a muzzle dotted with red splotches of blood. One deer fly bite gives me real itches for days.

American dog tick

Deer fly

And that is why I stayed in and baked instead of bug hunting.

Next was the pizza. I decided to try Gemma Stafford's dough and sauce.  The dough was easy to do but somehow resulted in a leathery crust. It was such a disappointment. I don't know what I did wrong. The sauce had the exact taste that I wanted, but was much too salty. I can easily adjust that next time. I tossed out the pizza, and it is expensive to make. It was supposed to be at least two days of meals, including breakfast. I love pizza for breakfast. 

While setting my Google Nest hub display to time the rising for the pizza dough, I found you can do this . . . 

00:17

You get a different show for each different item you ask it to time.  "OK, Google, set the bread timer for 2 hours" gives you a fun bread display.  I smiled when the timer ended:

00:06

Now it is Sunday.

Flash flood warnings, flash flood watches, hazardous weather alerts

The expected rainfall today only is four inches. That is not good. Amy and I are so bored at this point with our indoor lives that we are sending each other rain videos. This is her slow-motion rain drop video.

00:35

I made six videos of the rain from the garage. Lucy won't go out in the rain from the back door but she will from the garage. All of the noise you hear is pure rainfall. It was very, very heavy. I combined all six videos to one video. 

1:28

Being an accomplished and talented obsessive worrier, I am now more concerned about my fairly new and very expensive leach field flooding than I am about flash floods or washed out roads. Perhaps life never will be normal again.

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This Is Not My Summer

Radar last night before all hell broke loose.

It's not been a summer that I am used to. Fires in Quebec kept me indoors for two weeks because of smoke. I checked our AQI nearly every hour during those days. At one point, my Andrew had the dirtiest air in the world in Washington, DC. On another day, it was Anna living in the dirtiest air in New Haven. I kept seeing these alerts on my phone.

A smokey sunset in June.

Then there was heat. Up to 90°F (32°C); extremely difficult for Vermonters to deal with.  

Then the smoke came back; it was not as bad, though, but I did finally get an air conditioner because of it. You can't live in a house closed off from smoke in heat like that without air circulating.

Finally, the rain. It started on Sunday night and continued until Wednesday. You may have heard about the floods in Vermont. Everything closed up on Sunday night because of the forecasts. Our capitol city, Montpelier, an hour south of me, is still under water. 

The worst that happened here was the Barton River, an ancient ox-bow river that quickly floods roads. For two days Amy and I were cut off from everything because Route 5 was flooded from Barton Village to Orleans Village, about 8 miles. There has been no traffic by my house because nobody is out. Business and schools were closed all week.

Rain clouds across from Amy's house in Orleans.

The flood times can be scary for me. I am on the side of Barton Mountain with at least 3 brooks on my property draining into a state mapped wetlands across the road. I am nowhere close to the river. Usually all things are in balance. But in 2011, during the devastating rain of Tropical Storm Irene, my brooks flooded my road. The flash flood took out my driveway. I was anticipating a repeat of those bad days, but it did not happen. I did get some washout of the driveway, but it isn't bad. The worst part of the week was being cooped inside. And last night.

A bit of a washed out driveway.

Yesterday, the entire state watched for incoming thunderstorms from New York that could trigger more devastating floods. The governor even told us to stay home from 4PM to 8PM. And we all did. The storms got to my house around 8PM and they were bad. Lightning struck on the mountain and across the road. The noise was painful and scary. But no fires started from the strikes and the wind did not bring down trees here. The first photo of this post was of radar five minutes before the storm hit.

00:26

Amy caught video of the storm at her house.

She watched the wrong direction, though.

I got out of the house so infrequently this past month, because of heat and smoke, that two swallowtail caterpillars that Jody was saving for me (a male and a female) eclosed without me.  😢  I am really looking forward to a normal life now.

Jody's swallowtails

Lucy and I finally got outside today. It is a perfect summer day, 75°F, sunny, and low humidity. This is what we are used to in summer. It was a long wait for a day like today. We only were able to photograph one bug and one Cessna flying overhead violating my airspace. Today, I'm going to make a skillet cookie and pizza. I should have no power outages—I lost power six times this past week. I hope the worst is over.

Tarnished Plant Bug (Lygus lineolaris)

The plane.

Here is an interesting article from the Washington Post on Vermont's rain.  

The exceedingly low odds of Vermont’s flooding disaster, visualized

By John Muyskens, Scott Dance and Simon Ducroquet. There may be a paywall for you if you read the Post often.

I found this Tik Tok video of the Barton River. My thanks to Cheryl Garcia for making it. I can tell exactly where the shot was taken on High Bridge Hill.

@cherylgarcia76 Rte 5, north of Barton, VT. #vermont #flooding ♬ original sound - Cheryl Garcia

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Review: Drowning

Drowning by T.J. Newman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From the book's publicity:

Six minutes after takeoff, Flight 1421 crashes into the Pacific Ocean. During the evacuation, an engine explodes and the plane is flooded. Those still alive are forced to close the doors—but it’s too late. The plane sinks to the bottom with twelve passengers trapped inside.

More than two hundred feet below the surface, engineer Will Kent and his eleven-year-old daughter Shannon are waist-deep in water and fighting for their lives.

Their only chance at survival is an elite rescue team on the surface led by professional diver Chris Kent—Shannon’s mother and Will’s soon-to-be ex-wife—who must work together with Will to find a way to save their daughter and rescue the passengers from the sealed airplane, which is now teetering on the edge of an undersea cliff.

There’s not much time.

There’s even less air.

Have you ever seen The Poseidon Adventure (1972)? If you have, there is no need for you to read this book. The same characters are here, updated, and the same plot unfolds deep in the ocean. The dialogue is just as predictable (even derivative) and the ending is the same. 

I was so disappointed in this book. The reviews and promotions are outrageously good, so I quickly grabbed a Kindle copy for my "summer read." That read took less than one day. Now I need a new summer read. 

I never fell in love with the characters because they were not fully developed. But the writing disappointed me the most. I like complicated prose that makes me pause and re-read and appreciate the beauty of a phrase. None of that was here. The book is a straightforward narrative that requires no thought by the reader—which is why it is such a fast read. The repetition and cliches also accelerated my reading. I didn't need to finish the novel because I knew how it ended. I did finish it, though, because I was hoping against hope that something original would happen.

I will give Ms. Newman credit for her research, though. It must have required months of study to learn the physics of the ocean, aircraft, and ships. 

I am absolutely sure this book will become a movie. Ms. Newman's first book, Falling, will be. So bide your time for the movie when it streams. Perhaps they will title it Poseidon 2024.

View all my reviews

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