Looking Closely

Normally around this time of year I would be posting pictures of blooms from the peach tree in our backyard. I love the peach tree, not because of its delicious peaches, though - the peaches from the tree are gross. I have read/heard from numerous sources for years that in order to have good tasting fruit you can't just grow fruit trees from seeds or pits, you have to graft branches from a good tree onto your tree. I don't know why this is, but it is a fact that we did not plant our peach tree, it grew from a peach pit that was tossed out into the backyard, and the peaches on it are gross. The reason I love the tree is because ever since I was a child, every time I have ever tossed out an apple core, a peach pit, a pear core, a plum pit, or a cherry pit, I have hoped that it would grow into a tree, and finally, finally one did! Also, it has very pretty flowers. But not this year. This year the peach tree has perhaps 3 flowers on it. It's a little hard to tell, because the branches are all very high, but I think there were 3 flowers. It could be as many as 5. I figured that our tree was just not doing very well, but the top story on the front page of the newspaper today was about Connecticut's peach disaster. The headline read, "Peach Crop Fails." While we were all basking in the gloriously mild winter, the buds on the peach trees in the state's peach orchards were not hardening off as they were supposed to, so when we had that cold snap in February with temperatures below zero and high winds, the peach buds were destroyed. There are orchards that will have no peaches at all. It is apparently unprecedented. I am sad about this, for the sake of the farmers and because I like peaches. It does make me feel a little better about my tree, though. There's nothing wrong with it, all the peach trees are having the same problem.

There is this tendency in the news media to try to find the bad side of any situation, at least where the weather is concerned. I have noticed over the years that whenever you have a stretch of unusual weather, particularly unusual weather that everyone is enjoying, the media have to find the bad thing about it - a winter with no snow, and oh, no! The ski resorts and snow plowers are going to starve to death! A winter with a lot of snow that makes the plowers and the ski resorts happy, and oh, no! Towns will go bankrupt from the snow plow budget. A lot of sunny weather - oh, no! All the crops are dying on all the farms! And no matter what kind of strange weather we are having, for some reason it always seems to be a disaster for the apple crops. You would think from the way the media cover it that apple trees are the most fragile of all plants, and our entire economy depends on them. Cold winter? Oh no, the APPLES! Warm winter? Oh no, the APPLES! Hot summer? Oh no, the APPLES! Wet summer? Oh no, the APPLES! Frost, rain, snow, drought, sun, clouds, flood, whatever, Oh no! The APPLES! I don't think I have ever heard of the apple crop being completely destroyed like the peaches this year, in spite of the news hysteria, so this seemed very serious. I mean, this was top story, above the fold news. So when I read the article about the peaches today, I was fully expecting it to say that the apple crops were also destroyed, but much to my surprise, the article said that the plums and APPLES seem to be fine (which is the case in my backyard, too - the flowering crab apples are flowering, but the peach isn't). So... go figure. At least we'll have the apples this year.

We are having some unseasonably cold weather now, but it is not the kind that will ruin any crops. In fact, it comes with some rain, so that's good for the plants, especially when we are still behind in rainfall so far this year. But today that rain cut short my bug walk, and I think three days in a row of cold and rain has sent the bugs into hiding. And yet, I did find a Backyard Bug of the Day, and it was a new bug for me, which is always exciting.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I have no idea what this is. I don't even know where to look it up, because it doesn't really resemble anything else. It appears to have fully grown wings, but its elytra are very short.  It doesn't look like a beetle, it doesn't look like a Hemiptera, it doesn't look like a cricket, it doesn't look like a fly, or a bee, or an ant, or any bug that I already know so that I can figure out where to look for it. It is pretty cool at this point for me to find a bug I have never seen before, and this is two days in a row, because while I have seen weevils before, yesterday's weevil was a new one for me.

 Really long antennae, too.

I had to cut my bug walk short because it was starting to rain again just before I found this, and I was feeling bummed that I only found one bug and had to head back to the house.

 Then I looked at my pictures on the computer, and laughed at myself for thinking I have such great observational skills. Here's the thing about macrophotography. When you are trying to focus on a particular point in the picture, you tend not to notice a lot of the other things within the frame. Like the other bug RIGHT NEXT TO the bug you are taking a picture of. I think it's an aphid.

Then I noticed in the first picture I took of the bug, that there are possibly three other critters on this tree bud.

I think that yellow blur in the middle is the bug from above.

This looks like another - another aphid, perhaps.

 And this looks like a spider or a mite (sorry, arachnophobes, for not putting this in Arachnid Appreciation and hiding it from you, but you can't possibly be afraid of that! If you are, scroll fast).

I spotted only one other bug when I got back to the house:

A moth hiding from the weather.