Mistaken Identity on a Goldenrod Flower 🌼

One Goldenrod, Two Bees, and a Misunderstanding

I was surveying a patch of showy goldenrod in my yard, diligently recording through EwA Buggy each arthropod in a square-meter plot: its size, activity, interactions, survey effort, the weather, leaf damage, you name it. Then I spotted him. He was covered in pollen, looking rather stout, and clinging to a flower head with all six legs as though his life depended on it. A moment later, he launched himself clumsily toward another bloom, apparently ready for a second nectar gulp.

A beautiful, healthy male eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica): big, glossy black, and equipped with enormous eyes that nearly meet at the top of his head. In a later photograph, I caught the other telltale mark, the pale yellowish facial patch on the clypeus that males carry. Male carpenter bees have no stinger, so perhaps they compensate with bravado, patrolling their small territories and investigating anything that moves. This fellow had plainly been working the goldenrod for some time. Pollen dusted him from head to thorax, the kind of golden coating earned through determined, sustained foraging.

Then I understood why he looked so big!

Tucked beneath him, gripping his abdomen with legs and mouthparts, was a second bee. Smaller and fuzzier, it initially looked as though it might simply be riding along, perhaps even held by the carpenter bee himself. It was hard to tell who was who, or what exactly was happening, beneath all those pollen grains. But the longer I watched, the clearer it became that the grip ran the other way entirely. The second bee, a bumblebee, was holding on, and holding tight. Whatever the carpenter bee did, whether feeding, shifting his footing, or even taking off, his passenger remained firmly in place.

My first thought was a territorial dispute, two bees squabbling over a particularly fine patch of goldenrod. But the more I considered it, the less that explanation held up. I do not know of male Bombus defending floral patches against other species in the way male carpenter bees are known to defend territories. So I went looking for other clues.

I got close enough to check for a corbicula, the smooth, shiny pollen basket on the hind tibia that female bumblebees use to carry pollen back to the nest. There was none, only loose grains caught in the bee’s hair, the incidental dusting one would expect on any flower visitor rather than a provisioning load. I also tried to see his face. Males often have longer antennae and species-specific facial markings that can help distinguish them from females or workers, although the view did not allow a definitive identification. Taken together, the clues suggested a male bumblebee, perhaps a common eastern bumblebee (B. impatiens), one of the species still active on goldenrod well into September in the Northeast.

The missing pollen basket turned out to be central to the story. Male bumblebees do not provision nests. Late in the colony cycle, their principal reproductive role is to find and mate with new queens. Bumblebee mating commonly occurs on vegetation or the ground, and males can remain attached for extended periods. In some documented cases, queens have even flown with males still attached.

Nothing here was predation, and the two bees were not reproductively compatible. What I had likely witnessed was a case of mistaken identity, with a determined male bumblebee attempting to mate with a much larger bee from an entirely different genus. He did not let go, even when the carpenter bee took flight with him still attached, an uninvited passenger along for the ride.

It is a good reminder of what a square-meter plot can reveal if you sit with it long enough. I love Buggy for that. It forces me to slow down radically and observe intently. Since I began using it, I have noticed so many details that I once would have walked right past. It is a genuine scientific tool, but also, in its own small way, an enactment of Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Well, I just did.

📷 Eastern Carpenter Bee · Xylocope Orientale (Xylocopa virginica) | © Claire O'Neill; please credit accordingly.

A Little Snap in the Dark 𓆤

Click, Flip, Fly

For some time now, I have made a habit of turning off my outdoor lights early in the evening, so I do not add to the disorientation and disruption faced by the insects that share my yard. There is so much we can do to ease the pressure we put on the natural world, and much of it begins at our own doorstep.

Still, if you leave a light on for even a short while after dusk, you may find a handsome visitor: a plain, hairy, brownish beetle, perhaps about the length of a grain of rice and a half, ambling across the doorstep or lying upside down beneath the bulb. To many eyes it looks like nothing much, just another brown beetle. But look closer. It is a genuinely handsome little animal, dressed in a dense coat of fine hairs that catches the light if you get low enough to see it.

Then it does something no ordinary-looking brown beetle has any business doing. It arches its back, there is an audible click, and it launches itself into the air like a tiddlywink.

It is a click beetle, one of the Elateridae. The one in my yard appears to be Monocrepidius lividus, formerly and still widely known as Conoderus lividus. The click beetles get their name from exactly this trick. A peg-like projection on the underside of the front part of the thorax catches against a matching cavity farther back. When the beetle flexes and releases the mechanism, the sudden snap can flip the whole animal into the air.

It is chiefly a way to right itself after landing on its back, but it can also be an escape move. Nothing startles a would-be predator quite like dinner suddenly popping several inches straight up.

The beetle at the light is an adult, active above ground during the summer months. What we do not see is the longer part of its life. Before it became this small brown acrobat, it spent much of its life underground as a wireworm: a hard, smooth, yellowish larva that looks uncannily like a short length of stiff wire. Like other wireworms, it moves through the soil and feeds below ground, where larvae of some click beetles can become agricultural pests.

But there is something worth pausing on in an insect that spends much of its life as a patient, wire-bodied grub feeling its way through the dark soil, only to spend its brief adult life clicking, flying, and turning up, of all places, in the small circle of light by your door.

Next time one turns up there, give it a little space. You may be lucky enough to see it right itself, with a click and a sudden spring into the dark.

🔎︎ A few papers for the curious

→ Kozlov, M. V., Prosvirov, A. S., & Zvereva, E. L. (2020). Can larvae of forest click beetles (Coleoptera: Elateridae) feed on live plant roots? Insects, 11(12), 850. https://doi.org/10.3390/insects11120850

→ Bolmin, O., McElrath, T. C., Wissa, A., & Alleyne, M. (2022). Scaling of jumping performance in click beetles (Coleoptera: Elateridae). Integrative and Comparative Biology, 62(5), 1227-1234. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icac068

→ Wang, Y., Wang, Q., Liu, M., Qin, Y., Cheng, L., Bolmin, O., Alleyne, M., Wissa, A., Baughman, R. H., Vella, D., & Tawfick, S. (2023). Insect-scale jumping robots enabled by a dynamic buckling cascade. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(5), e2210651120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2210651120

📷 Monocrepidius lividus | © Claire O'Neill; please credit accordingly.

𖥸 When the Leaf Looked Back

The Fold Is the Curtain

As most Fridays, here I am wandering on the nature trail that surrounds Long Pond. The ecology team is moving between the first and second sites that we survey, phenology, insect monitoring, bird counts. Our Friday mornings are busy! Yvonne and I trail behind Kathleen, Sarah, and Joanne, Yvonne surveying the arthropods on a northern red oak and me moving toward our black cherry. Along the way, a fungus catches my attention, and as I crouch toward it, I notice the sassafras sapling growing beside it. One of its leaves is folded closed along the midrib and held that way. Nothing dramatic, just two sides of a leaf that had decided to meet. It does not seem to be tightly closed, so I gently open it.

Two eyes look back at me, to which I respond with a shout of excitement, inviting Yvonne to join me and rejoice. Those “eyes” (false eyes, actually) belong to the late instar caterpillar of a spicebush swallowtail, papillon carolinien in French, Papilio troilus. It is green above, with a pale yellow line running down each side and rows of small blue dots across its back. On its swollen thorax is a pair of mustard colored false eyespots, each with a black pupil and a tiny white fleck that reads exactly like glare off something wet. From one angle it is a small green snake. From another, a tree frog. The bulge of those painted pupils makes the eyes seem to hold you no matter where you stand.

I had assumed the fold was simply shelter. But then, researching it, I discovered that it is more interesting than that. The caterpillar lies along the midrib and lays down a mat of silk. As the silk dries, it contracts, and the tension pulls the leaf edges up and over. The youngest ones may simply curl a leaf tip; older ones recruit the whole leaf. Inside, the caterpillar rests through the daylight hours, molts, and waits with its head pointed toward the petiole. It comes out to feed after dark.

Which means the eyespots spend most of their working life hidden. Which raises an interesting question: if the eyespots are usually hidden, when do they actually matter? A recent field experiment using artificial caterpillars found that, out on an open leaf, eyespots made no measurable difference to how often birds attacked. Inside a leaf fold, they did. So the fold may not only be a hiding place. It may also be a curtain. Whatever opens the leaf gets the eyes all at once, at close range, in bad light. I was, briefly, that predator.

There is a fungus in my story only because it put me on my knees at the right height. The sapling was lower than waist high, which is where the females prefer to lay in the first place.

It is nearly the end of August, and this caterpillar has already run out of season, although nothing about it looks urgent. Day length is the cue, and for this species the threshold has actually been measured: somewhere around fourteen and a half to fifteen hours of light at our latitude, less as you go south. We dropped below it here in the first half of the month. Whatever happens next has been settled by the light before I ever knelt down.

So it will stop feeding, turn yellow, and walk off the sassafras, several meters if it needs to. Then it will girdle itself to a stem. Not down into the leaf litter, which is where I would have guessed, but onto a slender stem, thinner than a pencil, low among the leaves and just above the ground. In midsummer, a chrysalis formed on a green stem can come out green. This late in the year it will very likely be brown, because the shortening light seems to override whatever the larva's eyes report about the substrate. Eight months on a twig, out in the open, being a dead thing.

I folded the leaf back, left it there, and moved away happy to know that this caterpillar had made it that far and was on its way to pupation. I wished her a safe winter, and him a successful adult life.

🔎︎ More about swallowtails

→ Postema, E. G. (2025). Eyespot peek-a-boo: leaf rolls enhance the antipredator effect of insect eyespots. Journal of Animal Ecology 94: 814-822.

→ Hazel, W. N., & West, D. A. (1983). The effect of larval photoperiod on pupal colour and diapause in swallowtail butterflies. Ecological Entomology 8: 37-42.

→ West, D. A., & Hazel, W. N. (1996). Natural pupation sites of three North American swallowtail butterflies. Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society 50: 297-302. 

→ Stichter, S. (2014). Spicebush Swallowtail. The Butterflies of Massachusetts. 

📷 Spicebush Swallowtail · Papillon Carolinien (Papilio troilus) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

Reading the Season at Hatches Harbor

 August 28, 2026 | Survey session of the day at Hatches Harbor

As usual, I documented the phenology of target species, including oaks, birches, Prunus species, and many local herbaceous plants, while also recording arthropod plant interactions. Here are a few lovely field highlights.

I found a couple more of those fantastic caterpillars on sweet goldenrod, beautifully dressed in goldenrod flowers: Wavy-lined Emeralds, along with a plethora of spiders waiting in ambush.

That crab spider, perched in the flower head of a hyssop-leaved thoroughwort, was already in position when I passed by in the morning. Three hours later, on my way back, it was still in exactly the same spot. It had barely moved. Now that’s patience!

It was peeping time too. I lost count of the number of ambush bugs (Phymata) I saw mating on both goldenrod (Solidago species) and goldentop (Euthamia species). One pair was particularly glorious, with the female feeding on a fly while the male was doing his business. 😄

Fowler’s Toads were on the move, a multitude of fruits, including these shining sumac fruits, were ripening, with some already dispersing their seeds, and coppers were flickering low over the ground.

Such a beautiful day to be out, fully in the moment, looking with intention. 🌿

📷 © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly | For the session list of species recorded at that location see here, Pheno Lite records here, and Buggy records here.

Finding My Way Back to Words

Between Two Languages

Some have asked when I started writing.

In my twenties, I wrote. I was drawn to philosophy and even considered entering hypokhâgne, a French preparatory program for the competitive entrance examinations to institutions such as the École Normale Supérieure. My philosophy professor encouraged me to pursue it. I was fortunate to do well academically in both literary subjects and science. That opened doors to some of France’s most selective institutions and gave me a choice of futures to explore.

I was pragmatic. I chose a career in science because I believed it would allow me to make a living and become a self-sufficient, independent woman. Philosophy seemed to demand something else entirely: not only dedication, but exceptional brilliance. Could I sustain that? Could I withstand its demands over time? I was not sure. It intimidated me. It scared me, even. So I chose the safer path.

Then life happened. A new country. A new language.

That may have been the hardest transition. You learn a new language, lose a little of your own every day, and eventually find yourself less at home in the language you were born into, while never quite at ease in the new one. I could no longer write in French at the level I once had, while my English remained below the standard I expected of myself. I had not exchanged one culture for another. I was learning to live in the space between them, carrying deep roots in one while forming another layer of life, thought, and voice in the other.

The precision of words has always mattered deeply to me. I could communicate in English long before I felt I could truly write in it. Writing has always come more naturally to me than speaking, though. It slows my thoughts to the pace of language. It gives me time to search for the exact word, to bring an idea into focus until it says precisely what I mean. But language is not only vocabulary or grammar. There is another difficulty: culture.

French is shaped by strict linguistic rules and social conventions. They are not the same, though they inform one another. Together, they shape how we construct thought, argument, intimacy, disagreement, and even politeness, in ways that differ from American cultural expectations.

Our differences do not lie merely in the words we use. We approach subjects and life itself in fundamentally different ways. We reveal ourselves differently. We behave differently in public and in conversation. The expectations surrounding what may be said, how directly, and with how much explanation are not the same.

These cultural and linguistic rules permeate writing. They are present in rhythm, tone, humor, logic, and what a reader recognizes as sincere, elegant, persuasive, or clear. They also inform judgments of what is appropriate, educated, or well expressed.

There is no direct translation between two languages because each opens onto a different way of inhabiting the world.

I also had to find my voice in English, in a life far from the one in which I had first begun to write. That took years. Decades, really, of tentative writing, searching for the right words, and trying on narratives that never quite felt like my own.

Yet those years of moving slowly through the world, observing, reflecting, and contemplating were leading me somewhere I could not yet see. Eventually, those elements converged. My mind, my spirit, and my voice found a continuous thread. This time, there was no choosing. Only finding my place in the life that had unfolded. Besides, I have things to say.

And here I am today.

Delayed by Delight: A Bumblebee Stop 🌸

Jeff wondered why it was taking me so long to get from the car to the front door. After all, he'd seen me arrive through the window.

Sometimes it really does take me twenty minutes to get from my car to my front door, because something along the way stops me in my tracks, like this little beauty.

Twenty minutes, in this case. But look at him.

Most likely a male bumblebee (Bombus sp.). That pale, fuzzy "white beard" is one clue, and his large eyes are another. Unlike females, males don't collect pollen and lack pollen baskets on their hind legs. Rather than gathering food for the colony, they patrol the landscape in search of queens, often flying set circuits and marking them with pheromones as they go. I think he was sleeping on the job, and my approach woke him up. Sorry, friend.

As for species, I'm leaning toward Common Eastern at first glance, but Brown-belted and Two-spotted are still in the running. I'll take a closer look later.

It's encounters like this that remind me there's always something worth noticing, even on the short walk from the car to the front door. Hard not to stop and admire him, right?

📷 Bumble Bees · Bourdons (Genus Bombus) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

When a Goldenrod Flower Moves with Intention 🐛

The Caterpillar in the Florets

I was inspecting the flower clusters of sweet goldenrod (Solidago odora) at Hatches Harbor, looking for galls. At this time of year, I often linger over the flowers because so much is happening at that scale. A goldenrod inflorescence is not simply a display of yellow. It is a small, crowded habitat: pollen and nectar, developing seed, insect eggs and larvae, predators, parasitoids, gall makers, and innumerable lives that find food or shelter among the florets.

Then one flower cluster moved.

Not with the larger, shared sway of wind moving through the goldenrod. This was a smaller, uneven motion, a twitch that seemed to belong to one small piece of the inflorescence. Looking closer, I realized that the “florets” were partly an animal.

I am leaning toward a camouflaged looper, perhaps the larva of the wavy-lined emerald moth (Synchlora aerata). The caterpillar itself appeared yellow beneath an extraordinary covering of borrowed goldenrod. It had clipped small pieces of its host plant and attached them to its back, making a costume from the very florets in which it fed. The result was not merely camouflage by color. It was camouflage by construction: a caterpillar becoming, in outline and texture, a loose little cluster of goldenrod flowers.

Camouflaged loopers are geometrid caterpillars, or inchworms. They are known to clip flower fragments and foliage, fastening them to raised projections on their backs with silk. Goldenrods are among their host plants.

The costume is not permanent. When the caterpillar molts, moves to a different host, or finds that its existing disguise no longer matches, it replaces the decoration. What looks from a distance like passive imitation is an ongoing behavioral practice: cutting, carrying, fastening, and replacing plant material.

By the way, I found the flower galls I was looking for, consistent with Schizomyia racemicola, the goldenrod flower gall midge. I also found a little party of three small bees, possibly Andrena species, still sleeping, clumped tightly among the goldenrod florets on another stem. Another story for another time.

I had set out to find evidence of an insect reshaping goldenrod into a cluster of galls. I found that, but I also found a caterpillar remaking its own exterior from the plant: becoming, for a while, a moving piece of flower. And the giveaway was not shape or color, but motion that did not belong to the wind.

📷 Wavy-lined emerald (Synchlora aerata) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly