Tag Archives: pollinator

A Soldier Beetle Occupation

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Everywhere I look, I see soldier beetles.

They’re in my yard, they’re in my prairies, and now I think they’re getting into my head (figuratively speaking).  The linden tree in our front yard is blooming this week, and every flower is loaded with feeding and mating soldier beetles.  Over the weekend, my son and I went to our family’s prairie and it seemed there were soldier beetles on every plant! 

While soldier beetles are predators, they also feed heavily on pollen.  This one is feeding on sensitive briar – aka cat’s claw (Mimosa quadrivalvus) at our family prairie in Hamilton County, Nebraska.

Daniel and I were at the prairie to look for musk thistles (only found one) and check the cows (found them all).  After we accomplished those two objectives, I grabbed my camera to take advantage of the diffused light from the bright overcast skies and Daniel headed to the pond to chase frogs.  Dan didn’t catch any frogs, but I managed to get some decent shots.  Some of those photos included soldier beetles as the primary subject – they were easy to find.  Other photos included soldier beetles accidentally.  In a few cases, I didn’t even know the beetles were in the photo until I loaded the images onto the computer back at home.

While they are sometimes misidentified as lightning bugs, these are soldier beetles feeding on the pollen of a black-eyed Susan flower.  I photographed these on purpose…

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When I photographed this fly feeding on a daisy fleabane flower, I didn’t even see the soldier beetle in the background – though I shouldn’t be surprised it was there…

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These regal fritillary butterflies are out very early this year, and are fortunate that milkweed flowers are also out early. I was photographing the butterflies (including the variegated fritillary), but ended up with soldier beetles in the photo as well.

When I zoom in on the butterfly photo above, I can count five soldier beetles. Can you find them all?  One is particularly tricky to find because only the back half shows.  I think I see the leg of another, but I can’t tell for sure.  If you click on the photo and then click again, you’ll get a zoomed in image (if your computer works like mine).

If you want to learn more about soldier beetles – including how to differentiate them from lightning bugs – click here.

I wonder if they’ll chase away the moths…

Photo of the Week – December 1, 2011

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The diversity of insect species in prairies – and other ecosystems – is simply mind boggling.  One of my favorite activities with kids is to hand them an insect sweep net and let them find out for themselves just how many different kinds of “bugs” there are in a prairie.  There’s a lot more than just grasshoppers out there…

I also like to quote impressive insect statistics when I give presentations, and one of my favorites comes from a 2000 report by Richard Redak.  Do you know which group of insects has the most species in North America? (The group includes 37% of all insect species on the continent.)  I’ll make it multiple choice, and you can choose from the following:

a) beetles

b) flies

c) wasps/bees/ants

d) butterflies/moths

e) true bugs

Made your guess?  Ok, scroll down to see if you’re right.

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A flower fly (Syrphidae) on yellow/hairy stargrass (Hypoxis hirsuta) along the Platte River in Nebraska.

Surprisingly – to me, anyway – the answer is Flies (the order Diptera).  Would you have guessed that there are more than 36,000 species of flies in North America?  That means that one in three insect species in North America is a fly.  How many species of fly can you name??  Three? (house fly, horse fly, …uh….)  No, butterfly and dragonfly don’t count.

I think it’s fantastic that there are 36,000 variations on those noisy flies that buzz around my head.  Because I’ve been paying attention to pollinators recently, I know that there are many kinds of flies that are valuable pollinators – in fact, flies are second only to bees in terms of effectiveness and importance.  As a photographer, I see a lot of flies hanging around flowers and elsewhere, and I’ve got quite a few fly photos that do look fairly different from each other.  But I still wouldn’t have guessed there were that many kinds.

A robber fly photographed along the Platte River in Nebraska. I love the eyes and claws, especially. ...Just another one of the 36,000 species out there.

Why is it important to have 36,000 kinds of flies?  I’m not sure, but isn’t it great to know they’re out there?  We could discuss the diversity of the ecological roles that flies fill – and they ARE important in many ways – but for me, those things are secondary to the simple fact that they exist.  We live in a great world.

By the way, if you guessed beetles on the quiz above, it’s a great guess – and you’d have been right if the question was about the entire earth.  The tropics have astounding numbers of beetle species, and that pushes them above flies.  But in North America it really is flies.