We found two interesting beneficial insects today in our garden, neither one in the adult stage yet.
First is a drone fly larva. You know those flies that every news outlet mistakes for honey bees and puts pictures of them attached to articles about bees? Well, they are aquatic as a larva, and have a little tail that they also use like a snorkel. I'm told fisherman call them "rattails". This one was in our vinyl pool we have set up for our goslings. It seemed like it was trying to get out of the water, so we put it in another dish with some soil and some water, and it buried into the soil, to pupate I'm assuming.
The second are two potter wasp nests, both capped, on a leaf of our lamb's ear plant. I can't tell the species just from the pot, but potter wasps are solitary, and most are predators of caterpillars, so each pot presumably contains a paralyzed caterpillar and an egg. The one pot still had some very damp mud on it, so it must have just been capped.
