It’s blackberry time in North Carolina! Blackberries all over the Triangle Area are currently laden with ripe fruit, so I went out picking at work before we opened last weekend. We’d been finding little groups of metallic gold insect eggs all over the grounds for a few weeks, and I found another little group of them while I was blackberry hunting:
Golden insect eggs
The picture doesn’t do the coloration justice at all as these are bright, shiny gold in real life, but I’m sharing them anyway. After searching around a bit, I believe these are eggs of a leaf-footed bug, an insect in the family Coreidae. I love it when I randomly come across beautiful bugs when I’m out looking for something else!
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The Dragonfly Woman 
I checked out images of Coreidae eggs at Bug Guide and they had a few. Looks right. Easy enough for me to see if any of the images might fit but how in the world were you able to narrow it down? When I find interesting insect eggs, I don’t even know how to start my search! Can’t very well type “insect eggs” into Google image search. Heck, I often don’t know how to narrow down the criteria when I’m trying to identify a moth.
I can guess how bright the eggs were. It’s hard to catch that metallic look. I found a golden tortoise beetle. I was SO excited and had to run in to show my almost grown sons. Unfortunately, they don’t share my passion for nature. My biology prof was pleased for me though when I told her. It was easy to identify as not many insects look like a drop of liquid gold. The far end of our backyard has a lot of hedge bindweed running rampant (host plant) but despite my looking every summer since, I’ve found only one other.
You didn’t happen to take the leaf home to see what species bug hatches out, did you? And just curious – do you have evergreen or Himalaya blackberries? We’ve mostly the latter but none of ours ripen till at least mid-August so I’m surprised you’re already picking them! Sorry to run on…
Those golden tortoise beetles are AMAZING! Nature is just so cool! Wish more people took pleasure in the crazy awesomeness of things like metallic golden beetles and sherbet colored moths. :)
I did not actually keep the leaf with the eggs on it, so I’m still not sure what came out of them. And the blackberries I found the eggs on are technically a native blackberry, though they’re still pretty invasive. They spread like crazy! I am in a constant war with the blackberries growing in my yard – keep beating those suckers back and they keep on going! My stupid spiky bushes don’t even have good berries…