Assassin

Some days I walk out the back door and within seconds I find a bug for the day. I have mixed feelings about those days. They are great because, YAY, I found a cool bug! It's always good to find a cool bug (well, maybe not always. There are circumstances under which you don't want to find any bug at all, but when you are actively LOOKING for a bug, it's good to find one). But then there's the question of whether or not to bother walking around the rest of the yard. What if I find another really cool bug and then have to make a decision? What if there's nothing else interesting at all, and it was a waste of time? Okay, that never happens - there's always something interesting even if it's not a bug. And unless I am in a hurry because I have somewhere to go, or it's raining, I will always finish the walk. Because there's always something interesting, or beautiful, and it's just really nice to be in my yard.

As you may have guessed, I found a good bug today right at the start of my bug walk.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

This is another 'true bug' or Hemiptera, but I don't think any of my pictures really showed the proboscis so you can see it. I think this is an assassin bug of some kind, but I could be totally wrong, and it could be a bug that just sucks the juices out of plants.

And this, girls and boys, is why you never trust a random person on the internet for insect identifications.

I can't identify the Backyard Bud of the Day, either:

It's a bush, and sort of lilac-esque? No idea. I didn't plant it, it's just growing in my yard. It will have pretty, tiny, white flowers soon, though.

I thought you might like an update on another recent Backyard Bud of the Day:

So, maybe you are not waiting in breathless anticipation for the irises to bloom, like I am (though breathless might be an exaggeration. I am still breathing). It looks pretty, doesn't it?

The Daily Dandelion is another flower on the brink. Fun thing about dandelions, they kind of go through a bud stage twice, once before the flower blooms, and once before it goes to seed. This one is almost open for a second time...

And now for our Bugs in the Backyard Educational Moment...

I am sure you have heard of ant farms, but did you know that it's actually a very fitting name (in the wild an ants' nest is called a formicary. Yes, I am a font of trivial information), because ants don't just survive by raiding picnics, some of them are farmers. Or to be more precise, ranchers.

There are some species of ants that herd aphids, feeding on a fluid that the aphids secrete that is called honeydew (I don't know if secrete in this sense is a euphemism for urinate. I hope not). They control the movement of the aphids by means of chemicals that come from their feet - the scent trails direct and control the aphids (think about those smelly feet for a moment...). Now, I don't know why those ones with wings don't fly away, but I do know that ants will chew the wings off to keep them from doing so. Why they don't fly away before that happens is beyond me. They seem pretty docile at the moment, though. Except for the wing-chewing off, it's all pretty interesting.

I prepare to write this blog each day by going through the day's pictures and writing down the file numbers of the ones I want to use. Today my notes are more than usually cryptic and my handwriting is more than usually illegible, so I don't know what these next pictures are of...

 Ah, tiny caterpillar.

 And fuzziness. Now my note makes sense. It must say fuzz, not firr. (What can I say, I always got C's in handwriting).

This one was marked better, so I know it's a butterfly. Or, as it says in my notes, Bfly.

 Can't see it? Head on, when you're staring them down, butterflies are hard to see.

Especially when they are tiny. I think this is the tiniest butterfly I have ever seen, just barely bigger than my thumbnail. It's rather unprepossessing from this side, but the tops of the wings, from the fleeting glimpse I had of them, are a pretty blue.

Speaking of pretty, here's a couple of blooms for you:

 Eh, maybe pretty is not the right word. This flower is rather unprepossessing as well. It's name is not so nice, either - cancer root.

This one's prettier, wisteria. I can't wait for the spring some year in the future when my wisteria will have more than one bunch of flowers on it.

And now for today's Arachnid Appreciation photo. I would put this somewhere in the mid-range of creepiness for you arachnophobes, so decide for yourself whether to keep scrolling...
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Another fluff-infused web, but the spider is living with it, and has caught something, so it's working all right. I like the iridescence of the web/fluff.

Until tomorrow...