Bugs in Time

Today was another race against darkness to get my pictures done. I left early in the morning (by my standards), and came home tired just before dusk. Fortunately, I found what I was looking for fairly quickly.

I think today I will post things in the order that I found them.

Daily Dandelion:

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Zoomed in here, it looks like this bug has a parasite. I am not sure if that's what that star shaped thing is, but I see it occasionally on bugs. It is so, so, so tiny, though, that I never see it until I look at the pictures on the computer, so I've never known to try to get a closer shot of it.

Here's a Backyard Bud Update - I featured this one a while ago, and it's progressing:

Backyard Bud of the Day:

I think this is amaranth.

Backyard Bug Behavior of the Day:

I don't know what this ant is doing, whether these bugs are some it is herding, or if it was just examining them for some other reason.

You can see that the background is getting darker in the pictures as night falls...

Speaking of Backyard Bud Behavior...

This is a praying mantis egg case, and from the strings that are dangling out of it today, which I don't think were there yesterday, I think the baby praying mantises hatched from it today. I am sorry I was out and missed that! There are a few others around the yard that don't seem to have hatched yet, so I will keep an eye on those.

Very conveniently, I found a spider after I found all of the other things I was looking for, so I can end with Arachnid Appreciation:
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Just in time for night.