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Insects

Last week we promised you a look at some of our favorite fluttering beauties. After some serious thought and lively discussion, here are our top ten choices...and one runner up. 

Keeping a healthy, robust butterfly garden throughout the fall is an essential tool in not only maintaining our current butterfly population, but also to hopefully increase it. Here are just a few suggestions Embassy designers suggest to their clients.

I am sure that you have heard by now  --  “the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has found that adding the monarch butterfly to the list of threatened and endangered species is warranted but precluded by work on higher-priority listing actions. With this decision, the monarch becomes a  candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act…(U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Press Release, Dec. 2020)”  Essentially that means that as the number 8 candidate on the list, data on the monarch butterfly will be periodically reviewed until it either reaches the top of the list, recovers or becomes extinct. With the numbers of both Eastern and Western Monarchs dramatically plummeting across the entire North American continent, many question the ruling.

Neither an insect nor a “true bug,” this fierce-looking arachnid is a common visitor to the garden. Black and yellow garden spiders (also known as Corn Spiders or Zipper Spiders) and their impressive orb webs (up to two feet in diameter), …

By Sandra Nelson   My butterfly weed has been taken over by bright orange bugs. At first glance, I thought they were lady bugs attacking aphids–  about the right size and shape  —  but before long I knew something else was at work. Almost overnight they had changed into slender insects with long black legs …

  By Sandra Nelson   Wasps, as a family, have gotten a bad rap over the years. They have been branded as destructive and aggressive, working together in mobs intent on harming every human within the reach of their seemingly enormous stingers.     While some wasps, especially social ones, are nuisance insects, a large number …

  By Sandra Nelson   One of the more unusual species of the insect world, scale insects are both fascinating  and frustrating.     Ranging in size from microscopic dots when hatched up to a half of an inch as adults, all of the 8,000 described scale varieties share some common characteristics. As juveniles, scale …

  By Sandra Nelson   Throughout my childhood, this was the defining (and to be perfectly honest, somewhat creepy) sound of summer to me… …the raucous calls of hundreds of emerging cicadas.   But the noise wasn’t the whole story  —  the crunchy abandoned shells scattered all over the place repelled me; I couldn’t wait …