Blooms Under Blue Sky

 If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is my thousand word into to today's blog. Blue sky, flowers blooming, springtime at its best. That's all I need to say about what kind of day it was today in the backyard. Those flowers are flowering crabapple, but not one of the two that I planted over 20 years ago. This one I think is probably an offspring of one of those, planted in the woods by a bird. I have a few of those, and this is the first of the crabapples to bloom this year.

There were a few bees on that tree (too high and fast for photos), but the most popular flower in the backyard today was the dandelions:

 A variety of bugs were attracted to the dandelions, of which I have way more this year than usual. Here is a beetle and a bee.

 This one had a beetle and two bees.

 Bee

 Beetle

The bee fly was back in the rock garden, feeding on the creeping myrtle:

Ants were busy today:

 Ant carrying a desiccated caterpillar

 Several ants wrangling with or over another desiccated caterpillar. There are different sizes of ants here, so I am assuming that they are different species, but I don't really know for sure.

 The leafy spurge is blooming, and it is always popular with ants.

 Assassin bug feeding on a click beetle, atop pine flowers

Click beetles in a mating frenzy:

 There is a mating pair here, along with a number of others who wanted to be involved in that activity themselves.

 

 Mating winter fireflies

 Beetle

Bees on the pussywillow flowers, way above my head:

 Hoverfly

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 This is the spider that lives in the package bin. Fortunately for the spider, all of the packages we have received lately were small enough to fit in the mailbox.

Tiny spider with a web high up in the peach tree (this picture was taken with a zoom lens, not the macro)