Life!

Oh, the air today was full of song, and warmth, and winged things! The backyard teemed with little lives, bees and beetles, wasps and weevils, and webs, webs woven all around for spiders to feast on all of that bounty!

Unfortunately, with such a warm afternoon (in the 70s!), the insects were really active, so while I saw tons of them, I didn't get pictures of most of what I saw. But I have plenty to show you.

For the first time in quite a while I had to make a choice between a few insects to be Backyard Bug of the Day. It's a nice problem to have.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Some kind of Hemiptera. It looks like it was made out of bits of dried leaves. I'll bet it spent the winter among the leaf litter. I think it's a new species for me.

The other bugs, in random order according to how the computer deigned to upload them:

 Tiny moth in a crocus

 Interesting ant

 Beetle

 Beetle? It was moving fast, small, on the ground, and ultimately disappeared. This is the only shot I got.

 Twice-stabbed lady beetle

Since everything seemed to be awake and out and about today, I chose to rake the leaf litter out of a flowerbed. I found this beetle under the leaf litter. I suspected that it was only playing dead...

 ... and I was right. I think it might be some kind of blister beetle.

 Cricket uncovered in the same flower bed. It scurried into the ground, and this is the only picture I got. The ability of insects to disappear into the ground is impressive. I missed a lot of shots today because of that.

 Some kind of Hemiptera nymph?

Ground beetle

 Stilt-legged bug

 Some of the crocuses were kind of crowded.

 I think some of the swarms of winged things today were flying ants.

 

 Weevil. This might be a new species for me.

There were spiders all over the place today, and so many different species! Arachnid Appreciation:
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 At first I thought this was a tiny ant, but looking closer I realized it was a spider–an ant-mimic spider, presumably.

 Caught a few winged things

 It was hard to tell the spider from the other detritus and old prey caught in the web.

 You don't need to use a web to catch winged things.