Memory Full

 I went to Africa a couple of years ago, and the pictures from that trip are still on my camera memory card. I don't know why, I just don't want to delete them. They're on my computer, of course, but... I like having them on there. I don't look at them on my camera, and to be honest, they're not very good photos, because the camera I brought with me was not working very well. And... the images are all stored in my real memory, in my head. But I still have never been able to make myself delete them from my camera card. It hasn't been a problem until this week, when twice on my walks my camera card filled up, and I couldn't take any more pictures. Neither time did it end up being a big problem–neither time did I then come upon something amazing that just needed to be photographed. But... I am going to have to do something about it.

As you can imagine, I took a lot of pictures today. Not many of them were of bugs. A lot of them look like this:

Of the 634 pictures I took today over a hundred are closeups of dandelion seed heads. This is a seasonal obsession of mine. But I did find some nice bugs, so let's start with...

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Tiny weevil on a leaf. I was happy (and surprised) that it didn't just drop off the leaf to avoid me and my camera, because that is a popular response among beetles in general, and weevils in particular. It was really small, only a couple of millimeters/less than a 16th of an inch long. I couldn't even tell for sure it was an insect until I looked at it through the macro lens.

It wasn't very cooperative.

When I got tired of trying to get a good picture of a tiny insect that wouldn't sit still I turned and walked away, only to see another one on a leaf on another tree right next to it.

That one wouldn't sit still either. 

I've been on the lookout for sassafras weevils since the sassafras leaves have unfurled:

and here they are.

Leaf hopper

Beetle

Wasp

Lately I have been finding some odd growths on dead trees:

At first I thought they were insect egg masses, and was worried that they were some kind of invasive insect, because I had never seen anything like them before, but as I watched them evolve over a few days I figured some things out. First, I figured out that when they are new, they are squishy, and inside are a sort of peachy colored gelatinous mass. But after about a day they firm up, and the outer covering becomes brittle. They get holes in them, through which I could see that the inside had turned brown.

 

And then...

I realized that they were fungi, and inside they were full of spores. Lots of things like to eat fungi, like slugs, but also there are a lot of insects that eat them, too–if you want to find bugs, fungi are a good place to find them.

I don't know if this is a fungus beetle, but I think it might be.
 

 

I didn't notice at the time, but when I took a picture of this one yesterday when it was newly appeared, there was a beetle on it already.

 Back to bugs...

Bee in leaf litter
 

Ants on leafy spurge

 

 

One great thing about learning about bugs is that you learn how and where to find them, like knowing that in the spring, if I look on the underside of the leaves of the wild cherry tree I will probably find some lace bugs. That one was too high up for me to get a close-up, but I kept looking...

Lace bug

Ant with a tiny wasp

There were stilt bugs everywhere today:

These two are doing their best to keep it that way.

I also took my camera on my woods walk yesterday:

A mating pair of sweat bees

Another male trying to break them up

 

 

Tiny insects swarming over the surface of the stream

 

See how many tadpoles you can find in the big pond:

Bonus if you found the water strider in one of these pictures.

Things in the woods:

I've never found a snail in the woods, but a few times I have found snail shells.

Usually I see deer in the woods because they go charging off, making a lot of noise. These I just happened to look up and see them staring at me.

These two are all ready to play some leapfrog.

The big pond was full of frogs today.

The small pond doesn't even have water in it.

Arachnid Appreciation: 

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In the woods and my backyard lately there have been a lot of tiny spiders everywhere, orb weavers with webs a couple of inches across on trees, vines, tall grass, wildflowers... everywhere you look, little spiders:

This web's support threads spanned a space about four feet wide, but the web in the middle is about 3 inches across.

It is very rare for me to get a look at this side of one of these spiders. Their webs are often horizontal, and the spiders are usually on the underside of the web. So I see the bright orange half-moon on their bellies most of the time. 

Spiders sometimes hide by pulling their legs over their bodies, which is about as effective as a toddler covering their eyes so you can't see them.

I saw this crab spider as I was bringing in the mail yesterday, and conveniently had my camera with me.