Following Orders

I'm drawing a blank here today. So tired. Can't think of anything interesting to say... Well, I can say this - I only took about 150 pictures today, and about half of them were of flowers. So you can guess how well I did at finding bugs.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 When I saw this fly on the side of the house right when I walked outside to do my bug walk, I said to it, "Don't move," which is what I usually say to bugs that I think will fly away before I can take their picture. Usually they fly away, but this one stayed. I think it took that directive a little too seriously, because it was still in that same spot when I went back into the house at the end of my bug walk. I don't know what kind of fly it is, but I did try to look it up. The fact that I still don't know what kind of fly it is should tell you how that turned out. I posted this picture on facebook, and though it didn't get many comments, they were all positive, and I realized that I have, in at least a small way, succeeded in my mission to make people see that bugs are amazing. This is a picture of a huge fly, which I think most people reflexively hate or are repulsed by, and people thought it was cool! Hooray!

 Now, this fly was on the side of the house, too, very near the other one. It moved quite a bit, so I never got a good picture, and then it flew away entirely. But I am posting 2 bad pictures so you can see how cool it was.

 Look at those eyes!

 Can you find the caterpillar in this picture? I'll give you a hint - it is not in focus, because when I took this picture I didn't know that it was a caterpillar. I did suspect, so I checked after I took it, and...

 Here it is, incredibly tiny looper that matches the color of the flower.

 Moth

 Hemiptera

 Insect egg

 There is a huge boulder in my backyard, and these tiny bugs zoom all over it in a manner that it oxymoronically both random and synchronized.

 Weevil

 Hemiptera. I was trying to just take a picture of this daisy.

 This is the tree that is growing through my back porch. A few days ago the leaves were covered with tiny ants. Today there were just three ants of a bigger species...

 ... but the undersides of most of the leaves are covered with aphids.

I might have better luck if I managed to get out there when the sun is out, but this year the sumac flowers don't appear to be quite as popular as they were last year. There are, however, at least three species of insects on this bunch - a wasp, a beetle, and something else I can't see well enough to tell, but is probably a wasp.

 After my bug walk it began to rain, and then the sun came out briefly, so I went outside to look for a rainbow. I found the rainbow and this small milkweed beetle (I think that is what it is).

 I wasn't going to take this moth's picture, because I posted a picture of one the other day (the large lace moth), but it sat in the same spot on the back door, right near the door handle, all afternoon and evening, even though we kept going in and out that door. So for its perseverance I thought it deserved a picture.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Somewhere along the line in my life I picked up the idea that spiders don't eat ants, because ants have formic acid as a powerful defense. Clearly, this is not true. I mean, I know they have formic acid, but it is obviously not keeping spiders from eating them, because I have seen ants as spider prey several times in recent weeks, of more than one species of spider, even, so it's not like there is one spider that has special abilities to resist formic acid. I don't know where I heard or read that bit of information, but it is demonstrably false.

Sometimes when I look at crab spiders I imagine them with tiny signs that say "Free Hugs."