Winter In A Flower Pot

My bug walk this afternoon was not noteworthy, and featured very few insects. Those few that I saw were the same things I see any day I go out looking for bugs these days, which is not surprising. It's also not very interesting. I got one good picture of a snow flea:

 

 I'm posting this because all of the other snow flea pictures I have posted lately were horrible. I am not going to bother with the other pictures from my bug walk, and am just going to go on to the more interesting insect encounter of the day...

I was sitting on the couch this evening, working on my computer, when I heard a loud buzzing behind me. I looked and saw a largish insect bopping around the lights on the ceiling. I watched it until it landed on the bookshelf:

 Western conifer seed bug. They like to come inside the house for the winter, where it's nice and warm. It is a Hemiptera, or true bug, and you can see its proboscis, the tube through which it feeds.

 

 I prefer for them to spend the winter outside. I used to think if I found bugs inside in the winter and moved them outside that they would freeze to death, but now I am pretty sure they just find somewhere to hunker down until spring, and they are better off hibernating or going into diapause than starving inside my house where they won't find their natural food source. So, I caught the bug and brought it out onto the porch, where I put it in a flower pot that is out there. The flower pot has some dried leaves in it, and immediately the bug crawled under one. I moved the leaf to try to get a picture of it, and the bug started crawling toward another hiding spot...

To be continued in Arachnid Appreciation:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

As I continued trying to take pictures of it I realized that there was something else that had been sheltering under that leaf. Can you see it?

 The seed bug walked right over the spider.

 I have mentioned before that there are many insects (and other animals) that shelter in leaf litter over the winter. I didn't realize that the handful of leaves in a flower pot was enough leaf litter for them. I did recover the spider with a leaf after I took the pictures. The seed bug chose a different leaf to shelter under.