bugs

In the sunny sideyard, checking plants for aphids- none on the tithonia or milkweed yet, instead I've been wiping them off the underside of pea leaves. I did find the shadow of a small insect on a milkweed leaf, was about to swipe it off, then looked closer-

It's a monarch caterpillar- first instar! I haven't seen a monarch butterfly in the yard, but one must have visited.

Saw a white something on the gladiolas across the way- which are growing very thick and healthy, btw.

I looked closer-

A small white moth, with tidy black spots. Looked it up- probably the american ermine moth. Which unfortunately can be a minor pest and its caterpillars would probably horrify me- they live commnally in webs (tent caterpillar webs give me the creeps).

My garden is oddly still, this year. There are small flies and wasps, the ubiquitous cabbage moth (I've managed to slap two) and I've seen the dragonfly a few times. No bees. I successfully excluded the carpenter bees from using my decking as homes- there were three that kept coming back (much fewer in numbers than last year!) and I kept squirting water at them (from a distance), plugging the holes they were working on with steel wool and two gave up and left. The last bee was very stubborn but then I plugged its hole-in-progress with wood glue, and it left too.

Now there are no bees. No bees at my flowers, no bees around the borage. I miss them. I just didn't want them gnawing holes in my deck supports- I like them in the garden! I'd hoped they would find old wood elsewhere to chew into- and still visit my plants. And surely I had other bee species, not just carpenter bees? I seem to recall seeing a smaller one, like a mason bee, earlier. They don't come by now. Did my measures against the carpenter bees make them communicate alarm, so the other bees stay away? I guess the other possibility is that my neighbors used something on their lawns that did in the bees. They're not even visiting my clover- and I have a lot of clover blooming front and back right now.