Category: bees (Page 24 of 29)

Bug of the Week: Bugs at the Garden

Yesterday was a lovely day for a walk through a botanical garden. It’s enough to make one wax poetic.

Flowers dressing up with a bee for jewelry.

The warm brown seed beetle looks rather like the seed it was born inside.

Another kind of green malachite attracts your eye.

Captivating captive beauties.

Feels like we need some words of wisdom today. How about:

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


Bug of the Week: Solitary Bees of Spring

March is a wonderful month for bee watching in the Sonoran Desert.

Seems like every flower has a bee visiting.

Sweat bees seem to like the lemon blossoms.

Penstemons appeal to digger bees.

Fiddleneck (Amsinckia intermedia) is also a favorite.

No, that isn’t a bee. Flies like fiddleneck, too.

All these photographs were taken within a half hour in our back yard. The bees are very busy!

Do you have bees flying where you live?

Bug of the Week: Thrips

The weather is warming, the sun is shining. Time for insects!

The tiny brown slivers in this flower are actually thrips. The easiest way to see them is to dump a flower upside down onto a white piece of paper.

If you have a microscope, look at the wings of adults. Thrips have a fringe of hairs on their wings.

I tried to get a better photograph with a doubler, but it was too windy. The flowers were bobbing around.

Caught a great photograph of a honey bee with it, though. I wonder how they interact with thrips.

Have you ever seen a thrips?

(Trivia:  Thrips is unusual because both the singular and plural forms are the same word: thrips.)

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