Contemplating Wings

I don't really get writer's block when I actually sit down to write something, but just now, I clicked to start today's post, and saw the empty space to write in an my mind went completely blank. The last couple of months have been mentally draining. The bugs in the backyard, though, don't know or care about the problems besetting human beings. They are quietly undergoing their own problems, an "Insect Apocalypse" scientists have called it, and most human beings are as unaware of the problems of the arthropod world as the insects are about the problems of the human world. And yet, the insects' problems are our problems. That they are dying and disappearing is a warning to us about the state of the natural world, and as much as we as humans have distanced ourselves from the natural world, mostly preferring to keep to our extremely unnatural one, eventually those problems are going to catch up to us. I know we have a few much more immediate difficulties to deal with, but we ignore this at our peril.

Sorry, this is what you get when I have writer's block.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Possibly some kind of ichneumon wasp, of the genus Trogus. In which case it pupated inside the pupa of a swallowtail butterfly (you can imagine the effect that had on the caterpillar trying to become a butterfly), which is too bad, but nature is harsh.

 If I had wings I am not sure if I would want them to look like a blue morpho butterfly, or like this.

Other Bugs:

 And speaking of pupae, here's a pupal case for something, I assume a moth. It wiggled a bit when I annoyed it, which is a fascinating thing about pupae. You wouldn't think they could move, but they do.

I know nobody really likes aphids, but I think they are cool:

 Well, lady beetles like them, but for a different reason than I do. This one is devouring one. It is also covered in a fungus.

 

 Ants like them, too, but not for the same reason as mine or the lady beetle's; they feed on the honeydew that the aphids excrete.

 

 Beetle

 

 I don't know what that weird thing on the right is, but the yellow speck is a springtail. I haven't seen one of those in months.

 

 Rove beetle on my husband's shirt

 Moth

 I had to take detours several times on my bug walk today to avoid walking through spiderwebs that were strung across my paths. Arachnid Appreciation:
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