It's So July

It rained today, not that you'd notice. Actually, it has rained the last several days, but let me tell you what the rain is like here for the last month or so. Imagine that you are thirsty, and you say to someone, "Hey, I'm thirsty!" Then that person says, "Oh? Open your mouth and stick out your tongue," and when you do that, they smack your tongue with a damp washcloth and say, "How's that?" That's the kind of rain we get - not enough to even get everything wet, but just enough to be gross and inconvenient. After a rain, if I turn the rain gauge upside down, two drops will trickle down the side, exhausting their entire water supply before they even get a chance to drip out. You can see the mark of every single raindrop in the coating of dust on your car. And that was all the rain we got today after a forecast of a wet day. So later this week we are supposed to have four days in a row in the high nineties, with humidity making it feel over a hundred. I have a feeling they're right about that one, but what I want to know is, why are they always right when they predict horrible heat and humidity, but they are always wrong when they say we're going to get rain?

Don't mind me. Summer is not my favorite season.

And I don't think I am going to be finding a lot of bugs this week.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I'm not even going to bother looking these up. They are too small to see any real detail, and there are too many beetles for me to want to try to figure out what they are. They are tiny, and they like purple coneflowers, that's all I know.

 There wasn't as much action on the purple coneflowers today when I did my bug walk, but it was getting on toward evening, and the backyard was mostly in shade, and you find a lot more bugs on flowers when it's sunny.

 I caught a glimpse of a bee under the petals of one of the flowers. I have never seen that before.

 I don't know why it's there. It could be hiding from that ambush bug... but probably not. Actually, I thought if I looked under there I might see that it was in the clutches of an ambush bug, and had been dragged there, but...

 Nope, just hanging out. It lifted its middle leg at me when I peeked under the petals. Like it was waving.

 Bees - and other bugs - do this thing with their legs when you get too close sometimes. I am sure it is meant to be threatening in some way, or maybe they are trying to make themselves look bigger, but I just think it's cute.

 On a purple coneflower stem (also hidden by the petals), one of the hoppers that was Co-Bug of the Day last week. So I guess I did see it again.

 Sometimes I take pictures of bugs without meaning to. Pokeberries with a REALLY small bug.

 Buffalo tree hopper

 I saw these two bugs on this leaf together, and was thinking happy thoughts about how bugs can often coexist...

 ... when I noticed that this one appears to have a parasite - a rather large one, relative to its size.

 Katydid

There are ambush bugs everywhere now...

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Pretty flower crab spider...

 ... with an egg sac she's guarding underneath the blade of grass.

 Mite

 Tiny spider almost impossible to see.

 Even in close, it's tiny. Also out of focus, because it's windy, and that makes it very hard to take pictures of spiders.

 Spider butt. Look, I just didn't get a lot of cooperation today!

I spotted this little scene when I was mowing the lawn. I saw the jumping spider, and the ladybug elytron obviously hanging from a web, but that was confusing, because jumping spiders don't catch prey in a web. Then when I got closer, I saw that there was another spider there.