I realise that ‘favourite things’ and ‘insects’ may not be overlapping categories for a great many people, but for those of you that do not regard all terrestrial arthropods* as just things to be squashed, what’s your favourite?
Mine has to be the Hummingbird Hawkmoth - Despite the texts, which all seem to rate these as common in the southern UK, where I live, they are not frequently seen, so it’s always a real pleasure to have one visit my garden.
I saw one a couple of nights ago on the verbena and stood for several minutes just watching it flit about and feed; apart from being delightfully bird-like and agile, they seem (in insect terms) pretty alert and spatially aware.
*(yeah, we’ll expand the scope of the question to include arachnids and other arthropods, just to be fair).
Ladybugs. I mean who doesn’t like ladybugs? Well maybe aphids. I saw a picture once of a ladybug taken from an aphid’s veiwpoint and they’re some bad mutherfuckers.
I like hummingbird moths too, but I think my favorite insect is the dragonfly.
They look cool, they fly cool, and they eat mosquitoes. (Never mind the fact that they eat the occasional butterfly.)
I’ve always been rather fond of hellgrammites. They’re bigger than you want them to be, will happliy bite you repeatedly and have the word hell in their name.
Ant lions, because they’re badass. When I was a kid I would play Roman emperor and make ants pay for their crimes by tossing them to their doom. My other select badasses of the insect world include dragonflies and tarantula hawks.
Lately I’ve been taking lots of pictures of the tiger swallowtails that have been visiting our butterfly bushes. Here’s one. I like both the yellow ones and the black ones. Last year we had a lot of the hummingbird moths, which I’d never seen before. I haven’t seen any this year, but we do have a lot of the ones that look like bees. I’ve been trying to take pictures of those, but I’ve yet to get one I really like - they move so fast they are a bit of a challenge.
I also am very fond of ladybugs, caterpillars, these tiny bright green grasshoppers we’ve had a lot of this summer, camel crickets, inch worms, praying mantes (which Wikipedia says is the plural of praying mantis - who knew), dragonflies …
Ladybugs are pretty, so are butterflies. Praying mantises are cool because they look like something from another world, and they have a cool name.
But my definite favourite is the dragonfly. They’re just too cool to be true. They look like sticks with wings, but they’re alive, and they fly like no other bug.
Ladybugs are cool as long as they’re not arriving in swarms. Dragonflies (aka darning needles to us as kids) are cool, especially since they eat mosquitos.
Fireflies are fun to watch blinking on and off, if you can stand being out at night with mosquitos buzzing you amid the clouds of dragonflies zipping around.
Katydids. I kept one as a pet when I was a kid. He would happily sit munching on leaves, and when I took him out, he’d fly around in some wildly acrobatic ways.
