I have all sorts of shady characters hanging out in my daylily blooms. Every year I see a few Forktailed Bush Katydids (pictured above) in my daylily flowers, but this year they are everywhere. They like to munch on the daylily stamens sometimes, but they don’t seem to be damaging the flowers.
The earwigs are another story. They like to hide in tight places, so many of them crawl up my daylily scapes at night and climb into the partially-opened blooms. They do some chewing and take a few bathroom breaks and the next morning when the flowers start to open, they crawl deeper and deeper into the blooms. All I see are earwig “behinds” and droppings everywhere. I’m sure the neighbors wonder what on earth I’m doing as I’m blowing into flower after flower or poking small twigs into them to dislodge the disgusting bugs. I don’t want their rumps (or whatever else they leave behind) in my photos because nobody needs to see this:
I also see lots of spiders. Hopefully they are preying on some of the earwigs. It surprises me how fast they are able to spin a web and start catching bugs in a flower that just opened.
Sometimes insects use my daylilies to sun themselves like this Mud Dauber did. Or maybe he was looking for a spider to eat.
And then there are my buddies, the Japanese Beetles. Daylily flowers are not their favorites, but make a fine substitute when my butterfly bush flowers are too crowded with their kin. One beetle can really mar a flower in a short amount of time.
