Bugs

Our sweetest pollinator loves the flowers in our garden. You can see honeybees visiting all the colorful blooms throughout the day. If you look closely you can see her poke her little tongue out to gather nectar, and you can often spot tiny pollen grains all over her legs and body.

Did you know there are 24 different species of bumblebee that live in Colorado? (Me neither!) I just love how much pollen this guy has gathered from our sunflowers. It's a wonder he can even fly!

These lovely native bees are wonderful pollinators for our garden. Unlike honey bees they are solitary and live in small holes in the ground.

Paper wasps gather fibers from dead wood, plant stems, etc., and mix it with their saliva to make a papery nest. Unlike yellow jackets they are not aggressive and tend to mind their own business in the garden. We tend to see these a lot on our corn stalks and sunflowers, likely gathering nest materials.

As mean as she looks, she's actually a friend to our garden. Young wasps grow up eating crickets and grasshoppers, then as adults they eat nectar and pollen. This wasp has been spotted many times visiting our mint and oregano blossoms during the morning harvest. In fact we see this her so often that the third graders have nicknamed her "Black Beauty". They aren't aggressive to humans but will sting if threatened.

This is one gnarly looking bug but luckily they are a beneficial insect to have around. They are also called assassin flies because of their greedy appetites for other insects like grasshoppers and beetles. The grasshoppers seem out of control this year so it's good to see nature finding a predatory balance.

A very common butterfly with beautiful striped antennae.

These lovely butterflies are great pollinators. Look for them "puddling" in damp places.

Skippers are delightful! A very common butterfly, they like hang out in open areas, yards and gardens.

The tiger moth has bright colors to warn predators that they are not tasty at all and that they should back off. As caterpillars they are very fuzzy/spiky, like the salt marsh caterpillar below. Look closely at the beautiful, feathery antenna shape that moths share. These hairs have scent receptors that can detect smells from far away.

This furry leaf-eating moth was found hiding on our corn stalks, however their preferred foods as caterpillars are aspens and cottonwoods.

We spotted this gorgeously hairy caterpillar hiding under a swiss chard leaf in late September. He will make a cocoon for the winter buried somewhere in the leaves and dirt, then emerge in spring as a downy white moth.

Everyone's favorite garden bug. These friends will eat aphids, a common garden pest.

Don't they look like little monsters when they are young? If you want to see something really remarkable, watch this time-lapse video of a ladybug's lifecycle from egg to larvae to beetle.

June bugs come out when the weather gets warm and they love to eat all the leafy greens they can find. They are very common in Colorado

A relative of the June beetle above, these beetles prefer sandy soils and like to eat plant roots, but thankfully haven't caused us any damage. Like their name suggests you tend to see them flying around in June.

Yuck, this is another one of the bad guys and we were so sad to find it in our garden. They are native but they can cause a lot of damage to crops like corn, cucumbers, and beans.

There's an assassin at Red Rocks! He is so interesting we included the text from wikipedia:

"The common name bee assassins derives from their frequent habit of sitting and waiting upon flowers and taking bees as prey. The bright colors are aposematic, likely a warning to larger predators that a painful bite can be delivered. "

Colorful and pretty, but don't be fooled; he's a member of the stink bug family. This is not a beneficial insect but one that likes to eat crops. They prefer cruciferous vegetables which makes sense why we found him on a badly nibbled kale plant. Hand picking is the best control method.

These are bad bugs to have in your garden, and unfortunately we do have them. They lay their eggs on the squash vines and leaves and then they can quickly kill off a plant. We can combat this infestation by removing leaves with eggs, hand picking the adults, and most importantly by rotating our crops each year to eliminate their food source.

When disturbed stink bugs will release a foul smelling chemical to ward off predators, much like our mammalian cousin the skunk. Stink bugs like to eat a variety of plants including the tomatoes, asparagus, beans, and corn we are growing.

I was surprised to discover that this "new bug" in the garden was actually a young green stink bug in its nymph stage. As they grow bigger they molt several times, each time looking more and more like their future adult selves. The whole process takes about a month.

Wolf spiders are a common sighting in the fall as temperatures get cooler. While their enormous size can be quite startling, there's not much to fear unless you are a garden bug. These agile hunters are great to have around to take care of pesky pests.

A spider as exotic looking as this one deserves a fancier name than "garden spider". She is an orb weaver, making very large webs with a distinctive zig-zag pattern in the center called a stabilimentum. She is harmless to humans but is very skilled at catching insects in her beautiful web.

Spiders give a lot of people the heebie jeebies, and jumping spiders can jump can be very unnerving! The jumping has a purpose though. Unlike web-building spiders that patiently wait for insects, these use their mighty legs to pounce on their prey. They will attach a small strand of silk before making the jump as a safety line to get back just in case they miss or fall.

Our 2nd grade harvesters had a little thrill as they looked for cucumbers and instead found a daddylonglegs hiding among the leaves. She a beneficial predatory arachnid (not an insect) who eats soft-bodied bugs like aphids.

These beneficial insects prey on other plant-eating bugs. Also called a thermometer cricket, one can determine the temperature outside by counting the number of chirps over 13 seconds and then adding 40.

What a treat to find Manny the Mantis! They are one of the most beneficial predatory insects and they will eat everything from aphids to beetles to grasshoppers. We hope he stays forever.

Katydids are excellent at disguising themselves from predators because their bodies look just like the green leaves around them. We call this adaptation mimicry. It makes you wonder how many other bugs are hidden in plain sight.

Aphids are a very common garden pest which like to suck the sap out of plants. One of their main predators are ladybugs which we are lucky to have in abundance.

Although this one is tiny, grasshoppers are voracious eaters and can do a lot of damage to leaves. The 2019 season has seen a lot of grasshoppers munching on the garden but it's nothing our plants can't handle. Plus they make a great snack for birds.