Greetings and welcome to another little open thread, this week with less fluff and more fuzz.
I’m going to have to keep this extra short this week as we’re out in the country celebrating a couple of birthdays with the family and I should be out there being sociable instead of being in here being media sociable.
Spring is definitely hard at work in the yard. The strangely mild Spring has all the fruit trees out of sync— one cherry and one apple in full bloom and the poor, long-suffering peach is putting on a brave show with what few branches it still has. I’ll try to get some better blossom pictures over the weekend. At any rate, the bees are out there working hard and although I’ve already got a fine collection of bee-butt photos I have added to it considerably. While wandering the yard I noticed that the bees were also busy on the willow tree that I’ll probably be cutting a few branches from on Sunday to make my annual, braided willow switch for traditional Czech Easter Monday wife and mother-in-law beating. When in Rome…
Where was I going with that? Oh yeah, bees on the willow tree. As I was failing to get a good bee picture among the waving willow branches, I noticed a couple of ladybugs crawling on the branches and I took my best ladybug picture to date.
I couldn’t fiddle with the composition much, what with all the wind, but this little camera of mine does manage a fair amount of detail. Here’s a cropped version:
Next week I should be fully back in the swing of things and be ready to clog Markos’ servers with my photo uploads and have more of my fluff to share.
Something I’m pondering though, on this Good Friday, is how I came to know this beautiful little insect as a ladybug— when it’s not a bug (with mouthparts adapted for sucking). It’s a beetle (with biting mandibles). Not that I knew that bugs were different than beetles more than a decade or so ago, but these wonderful aphid-chomping critters are even worse off in England where folks mostly call them ladybirds. Okay, sometimes they use their full name of ladybird beetle— but, I mean, c’mon… what were they thinking?
One of my favorite memories was being taken to the park down the block from our house by my big brother. We went deeper into the park than I had ever been before and up some stairs to the top of a small sandstone cliff where, under a pile of leaves, my brother showed me a pile of what must have been thousands of ladybugs which had gathered together to wait out the winter together and were just waking up and beginning to crawl out of their cozy leaf pile. For me, seeing ladybugs has always been a sign of Spring, a hopeful sign that the aphids won’t win this year. Back when I still had my glorious, long, lustrous locks of hair my some-day-to-be sister-in-law gave me a couple of plastic, ladybug-shaped, hair stays as a joke (her hair at the time was much longer than mine— now we both wear it short) and started off a ladybug gifting war tradition that some people (ehem, Mrs. the Werelynx) just can’t let rest.
Thanks for stopping by.
This is an open thread.