Night In The Garden

The sound of chainsaws in the distance is ruining my joy in being outside during the day lately, but fortunately there are bugs to be found after dark. Not many at the moment, because we have suddenly entered into a phase of autumn temperatures, but when I went out after dark to pick the last of the peppers in the garden for dinner, I found something crawling in the grass:

Woolly bear caterpillar. It was crawling, but then when I tried to take its picture it curled up in a defensive ball.

Since I was out there with my camera I decided to look around to see if anything else was there...

We have marigolds in the vegetable garden, and ironically, they are there to ward off critters, but they were full of them tonight:

Well, they were full of earwigs.

 

 Actually, there were earwigs all over the place.

There weren't any sleepy bees on the flowers, but there were a couple of night-shift pollinators, like this moth...

... and this mosquito.

It is a male, as you can see from its feathery antennae. Therefore, not a blood-sucker, just a nectar-sucker.

A couple of days ago I took these pictures:

I tossed out some spoiled grapes last week, and it was a lousy toss, so instead of making it into the woods a large bunch of them got hung up on the back porch tree, where they have been hanging ever since. They are very attractive to wasps...

... but for some reason, even though there's a whole bunch of grapes there, they all have to crowd together on one grape.

This one paused to clean its face on a leaf after eating.

Arachnid Appreciation:

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Here is the one photo I took this afternoon, because I spotted this bee... and then noticed the spider. The spider blends in pretty well with these flowers, as its abdomen is similar in color to the center of the flowers. Obviously the bee thought so, too.