Summer Heat: Glimpses Into the Lives of Wasps, Butterflies, Bees, Arachnids and a Very Creepy Insect
Hidden for a long time on my porch, this nest of Paper Wasps (Polistes exclamans) are the brown-eyed variety. Yes, that's right, they are referred to as brown-eyed or black-eyed, and in some references these particular ones are called Golden paper wasps.
Most of these are probably girls although this nest will begin producing queens and males in late summer. The males will fertilize the new queens who will hibernate over winter. Queens can store the sperm and when spring comes they build a nest and start developing a colony of their own. Sometimes a few queens work together with one of them eventually becoming dominant. Summer is a busy time for these insects as they must capture other insects and feed them to the larvae that are growing in the hexagonal tubes.
The larvae seal the tubes themselves when they are ready to pupate on their way to becoming winged adults. In the video you can see that some cells have a white-to-translucent tube sticking out of them. These have the pupating larvae inside. Paper wasps are not as excitable as hornets or yellow jackets and they like to nest near humans. Usually they don't present a problem unless someone intentionally or accidentally gets too close to the nest. These wasps are important also for pollination, not something that's their specialty, but in their travels they manage to transfer pollen from one plant to the next.
[I filmed this video one hot, Texas morning and after adjusting the levels I used a Photoshop Selective Color adjustment layer on the Neutrals and boosted the yellows and the magenta slightly while lowering the cyan to enhance the golden effect.]
I saw this Giant Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio cresphontes) lurking around the yard just a few days before the Texas sage bloomed. It was resting in a wooded sight and I captured a picture of it which you can see below. Of course, I don't know for sure that it's the same one I later captured in this video, but I thought it was interesting that it appeared just before the sage bloomed.
Come to find out these butterflies really like sage flowers as well as sunflower, butterfly bush, dianthus, lantana and milkweed. I didn't have much time to capture this footage and following the butterfly movements was a bit tough while trying to keep camera movement smooth. I didn't have a tripod at the time, so this is one of those times I appreciated how effective Canon's image stabilization performs.
[I used a Photoshop Selective Color adjustment layer for this to boost the magenta, yellow and reduce the cyan.]
Each year the Texas sage flower in front of my house a couple of times. The first time is usually in June, although that's often a light bloom. The next is in the July/August time and it is robust by any measure. The blooms only last a few days but in that time the plants host a a lot of bees and butterflies. The first video above gives you an idea of just how popular these flowers are with the honeybees. The second one shows one bee's journey from flower to flower . If you look closely you can see the pollen clumped on its hide legs.
[I did some Levels adjustments to these videos using Photoshop.]
This golden garden weaver (black-and-yellow argiope) is at least 3 inches long, but just to the right of it, out of the camera's view, there is a very small male, maybe about an inch and a half max in length. This spider has many aliases including golden orb weaver, golden orb weaver, the writing spider and garden weaver. It's harmless to humans and this one is extremely still. It's been in this position for at least a week and I've only seen it move once. When it did, it seemed like it slowly stretched its legs a bit and then went back to its pose.
This spider is on my porch a foot or so from the wasp nest above. Both are off to one side and I don't think anybody who comes to the door has ever noticed them. That's not many people.
[I just did some minor Levels adjustments to this to make the web stand out.]
The spider in the previous video above this one was kicked out of her nest by the one in this video. The new owner promptly went to work fixing up the web to her specifications. Here you can watch her pull the thread from her abdomen, stretch it between two points and anchor it to create the iconic orb weaver web.
Giant Swallowtail
Near the center of the picture you'll see the spider that was featured above, and to the right of that you can just see the wasp nest. I wanted to make the photograph look more like a stylized painting with heavy textures and a bit of a 3D effect.
This alien-looking creature is a Giant Texas katydid (Neobarrettia spinosa). I discovered it walking on my northern windows, and it is very big, at least 4" long and if you add in the antennae and tail it's over 6". Based on my research I think it's a girl. She eats grasshoppers, other katydids, caterpillars, lizards and even small frogs. If you were a small creature this is not something you'd like to see coming after you. Do a search on the name and you can see video of these showing their multiple mouthparts moving like some kind of machine.
