BugGuide for the Win!

A big thank you and shout out to the folks at BugGuide.net for their help in identifying so many of the little beasties that I see in my yard and gardens! 

Last week was a perfect case in point.  I saw a large black bee nectaring on swamp milkweed from my kitchen window and I grabbed the camera to get a few photographs.  This insect was new to me,  but it reminded me of a bee that had been recently talked about and shared in a Facebook group about pollinators.  So I looked up the two-spotted longhorned bee, the species in question, and it looked good...but maybe just a little different from what I was seeing. 

The abdominal spots were smaller in my individual than in many of the photos of the two-spotted longhorned bee in BugGuide and the long hairs on the legs of my individual were dark, not light, but otherwise it looked like a reasonably good match.  There are really a limited number of large black bees it could have been, excluding bumble bees, which this wasn't.  So I tentatively identified my photos and submitted them as an ID request.

Within a day, Dr. John Ascher had identified my specimen as a southern carpenter bee (Xylocopa micans), a species that I was totally unfamiliar with and had never even considered. I actually thought that the eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica) was the only large carpenter bee in our area so I hadn't thought to look more closely at carpenter bees.

According to the brief research I did, there is not much known about the life cycle of the southern carpenter bee.  A fact sheet from the University of Florida reports that the only nests that have been reported were in small branches of Ligustrum (1958) and red maple (1975), about 1-1.5 m above the ground.  Apparently this species is NOT an economic problem, as the eastern carpenter bee can be.

Was this an earth shattering identification?  No.  But the only other way I know to really identify many of the insects I photograph, including this one, would be to catch them and kill them, then look at them under magnification, using keys.  While that is certainly the classic way to deal with insect identification, I am gardening on less than 0.4 acre in the middle of a suburban development where new assaults seem to occur daily against the wildlife present.  Trees and shrubs are cut down and replaced with chemical-soaked lawn.  What flowers there are come from the big box stores which, around here, means they are full of neonic pesticides.  There are far more non-native plants than natives in everyone's yards, providing little food for native insects and other animals.  Often I only see one individual of a species in my yard - and, if I collected it to identify it, I might have just kept that species from keeping a toehold around here.  For example, I have not, to my knowledge, seen a southern carpenter bee here in the 3 years we've lived here - and I haven't seen another one since I saw this individual a week ago.

Why do I find it so important to know what the various insects are in my yard and gardens?  I ask myself that question on a pretty regular basis, wondering if I'm wasting everyone's time, including my own.  Then I identify a new species and learn about it, finding out that I have...

... a wasp species (Prionyx parkeri) that controls short-horned grasshopper populations and pollinates flowers...

... or a fly species, tiger bee fly (Xenox tigrinus), that parasitizes carpenter bees and balances their populations...

... or yet another syrphid fly whose larvae eats aphids.  (The syrphid fly larva is the large, brown and white blob on the milkweed stem, surrounded by its food, oleander aphids.)

The complex web of relationships in even my basic little gardens truly astounds me, and I learn so much by identifying the different species and researching a bit about their life cycles and feeding habits.   I try to share that information with others, too, hoping to encourage fellow gardeners to just relax and let Mother Nature keep the balance in their yards instead of pulling out the poisons to "keep everything under control".

In fact, thanks in great part to the insect identification help I've received from BugGuide, I've come to think that human "control" is highly over-rated and much more likely to do harm than good, especially in a garden.  What insects are YOU seeing in your garden, and what are you learning about the balance of nature all around you?  Have you dared to go chemical free yet?