They seem to prefer citrus as they are on other container citrus that are interspersed between different types of fruit trees -- they ignore the other trees. When disturbed they will slowly hover until finding another citrus to land on. They are slow clumsy flyers and not easily startled, unless handled and they can skedaddle darn fast.

Any ideas?

Interestingly, there WAS a predator fly hanging around them and munching on some kind of gnat or what-not.

Patty S.

I have "Garden Insects of North America" but it's really hard to use for this type of thing. Quite good if there's actual insect damage but when they are just flying around... not so helpful

Patty S.

Josh

Rhizo: Thanks so much! It does appear to be a midge.

The Chironomini midge here looks very close to the middle one of mine above.

>>> Do you live near a pond or a lake?
There is a small estuary about 1 mile (as the wind blows) north of here fed by the San Joaquin River. Other than that, our city is filled with ponding basins everywhere, almost everyone lives within 1 mile of one. Although they are dried up now, the late season rainfall may have left some with enough muck for perfect breeding grounds.

Never seen them before but I know much more about them now. I know the city takes action against the throngs of foreclosed homes with swimming pools serving as breeding grounds for insects. That is, unless the skate borders got to them first.

I think that everyone who is even just a little bit interested in the good and bad insects (and others) around us should own at least one good field guide. They can be helpful in narrowing down an insect to a specific group...maybe making it possible to use What's That Bug a lot more efficiently.

I happen to like the Audubon Society's guide to North American Insects and Spiders, and have recommended it many times.

Along the same topic, my citrus always have these spiders in them. They are very common on my trees and ones I see in nurseries, but I may have to pickup that Audobon Society book or perhaps Bugman's guide at the WhatsThatBug site.

They are usually the size of a nickel and don't seem to create major webbing for traps, but I've seen smaller spiders residing in messy disorganized webbing. They frequently are guarding dead moths, flies, etc like in this photo (which was quite large, but you can see a medium sized photo by clicking the pic to photobucket):

Any ideas?

Interestingly, I've seen hundreds of these spiders over the last few years and they all look identical (except size of course) and just before reading your post I found a totally different one, mostly black like many of the google pics show them.

Thanks Rhizo!