Fat and Skinny of it all!

My friend Michael and I found the caterpillar in the soil in the native section. The fat caterpillar is a granulated cutworm. The skinny guy is a hesperiidae, probably a fiery grass skipper caterpillar; they eat lettuce. He was found in the native section near the poppies. They were released near them because they were torn from the ground and replanted into the ground to help it grow. So they were put into the native section. by Michael and Bianca

Say can you tell me the time?

Schinia mortua

Moths are our friends

Discovering Butterflies

This is a fiery grass skipper. This is the adult butterfly of the larva we found in the garden in the fall. They are in the family Hesperiinae their scientific name is Hylephila phyleus. The larva like to feed on grasses such as bermuda and crabgrass. They like open sunny areas, including lawns and fields.

Moths Galore

Broccoli caterpillars

The caterpillars are green and curl up their back and stay still. You can find them under the broccoli leaves they leave holes in them when they eat. They are fast crawers they can be an inch long they are small not very small they look like they are ready to strike and bite you but not really they do not bite but it looks like it.They are very strange. Jessica

Garden Pollinators

Common Checkered Skipper

Carpenter bees keeping the flowers pollinated

The carpenter bees we filmed(right) were considered to be females. The male(above) was stunned and was released in the garden on June 8,2009. His stinger was missing from his abdomen he was not able to fly. The carpenter bee is known to bit out wood from unpainted wood to make a nest. By Michael

Yellow Jacket Worker

Adult yellow jacket eats the nectar, and the larva
eats pre-chewed insects. Born in North America. Habitat, Meadows, edges of forested land
it also lives in stumps and in fallen logs. The body is stout ,slightly wider than the head.They are yellow and black the wings are smokey. I found the sidewalk when going in class from Garden time we have lots of yellow Jackets around here.
They protect their nest and can sting when you are near their nest and can be in house roofs,
in barns, trees, bird houses, wind chimes, and they can be anywhere just be careful. By:Jessica

Pterostichus aka Ground Beetle

They have shiny black

Amara aenea aka Sun Beetle

I was hula hoeing and I saw a bug running I almost killed it and I picked it up and said his name is Speedy. I let it go in the in dirt. Marco and I both found sun beetles in the garden. We were trying to identify them. The adults are known to eat developing seeds from mostly grasses. They were crawling around when we found them. By: Marco and Michael

Gray Hairstreak - Gone but not forgotten

• One spring day my friend Jessica and I went to school and we were going to our teacher's garden

and she has the prettiest garden in the whole school. When we were there we found a little, tiny,

and small butterfly that was almost the same size as a my dad's finger nail. But really it was so so so small. by Kayla

It is a small gray wings with Orange tips. I, Jessica almost stepped on it

when my friend Kayla told me to watch out it was so small. It was in the garden on the side walk

floor dead. Laying inside the wing are Orange, I think?? He or she is very pretty it is very soften the body....by Jessica

2 and 2 are 4, 4 and 4 are 8...inchworm, inchworm

This active little green guy is from the class Insecta, order Lepidoptera, family Geometridae. This Geometridae was found by Rebecca and Kaithlyn hanging out on the broccoli plants.

Rebecca,
I found him when I was pulling weeds. Kaitlyn didn't see him at first. He was very well camouflaged. At first, I thought the grass was alive. Then I knew what it was. It was a huge green wormy Caterpillar.

Kaitlyn,
I identified the caterpillar when Rebecca picked it up. It was green like the plant it was on. It had stripes that were white. The caterpillar moved like a cut worm that's why it looked like a cut worm. The caterpillar was small and moved cool. The caterpillar eats on broccoli.

Ladybug, Ladybug

Today it appeared that all the hard work we have done all year is starting to pay off.  We are finding more and more critters in the garden.  In the past few week beneficial insects making our garden their home.  This ladybug was keeping itself busy on one of our many sunflowers in the Butterfly Waystation.

Ladybugs are classified in the class Insecta, the order coleoptera, the family of coccinellidae, they are also known as Ladybird beetles.  The name Ladybird is from the English and has been used since medieval times.  There are more than 400 species of ladybugs.  So we will leave our identification as a ladybug,  what a daunting task to figure out what kind of ladybug.