Insects
I’ve read that besides their voracious appetite for aphids, Ladybugs have an average of 400 different sex partners over their lifetime. Besides Ladybug love, many other insects were pollinating the flowering plants at Desert Harbor Retreat.
Following the ducks is a bit of “macro madness” — I found various interesting critters in the iris and roses. While I was out moving hoses to hook up drip systems, this female mallard hopped up on the neighbor’s wall. Then she hopped back down, and I could hear her making little quacking noises. When I looked over the wall, she was marching off with four ducklings in a row behind her.
Even with frost damage and aphids, our roses are looking pretty good.
Our roses are starting to bloom and the ladybug larvae are working on the aphids.
Along with the Canon F-1, I ended up with three lenses: a Canon EF 35-105mm (digital), a Canon EF 35-80mm with macro (digital) and a Canon FD 135mm (film). The lenses were described as “For parts or not working…” I dinked around with each lens — cleaned up contacts, loosened up things that seemed to tight, tightened up parts that seem too loose, cleaned the elements the best I could, and then I tried them out. I tested the 35-105mm and 35-80mm on a Canon 5D and a Canon 1Ds (both full frame digital bodies), and the 135mm on the Canon F-1 (35mm film body). There are two photos produced with each lens in this series. I believe I got the broken lenses working pretty well — can you guess which lens was used to produce each photo? “If you can’t be handsome, at least be handy” and produce beautiful photos!
I followed a honey bee around with my macro lens as it made its way through the peach blossoms.
It’s the time of year the sugar ants start prowling the kitchen for anything we have left unsealed. With the reemergence of sugar ants comes a lot of other insects, arthropods, myriapods and arachnids — what most people refer to as creepy crawlers — and with this reawakening of the “creepy crawlers” out comes my macro lens.
Today’s photo is of a Lithobius forficatus, commonly known as the stone centipede. We have lots of these 30 legged centipedes in the garden where they stir around in the soil mostly under rocks and wood eating lots of pests. One pest that centipedes eat are roly-polys or pill bugs, which are actually crustaceans. I don’t know of other predators in the garden that eat roly-polys. For those of you who are herpetophobic or ophidiophobic, larger centipedes will kill and eat small snakes and lizards. Centipedes also eat spiders and insects.
I saw a headline that NASA was paying people $18,000 to lay in bed for 70 days. I didn’t take time to read the article, but I started thinking about how it would be impossible for me to lie in bed for 70 days when I can hardly lie down for 20 minutes to ice the incision from surgery this morning.
We checked in at the hospital at 6:00 am, and got back home about 11:00 am from getting a couple of hernias fixed. I have a pain pump hanging off my shirt, have had a bird on my shoulder most of the afternoon, a bag of ice in my pants off and on, and a gathering of big, fat, bad kitties temping me to pick them up. The pain pump is filled with a local anesthetic that will keep the surgical area numb for a couple days to enhance healing, and reduce the need for narcotic pain killers. I haven’t had any pain so far, and so I have been feeling rather perky. When I do lie around on the deck, I watch and photograph critters, clouds and the the occasional Osprey that flies by.
I got up close and personal with a ladybug after going out to check the water level in the Rio Grande at 7:30 am. The river was back to normal with no indication that the water got higher than in was in my photos from yesterday’s blog. I was going to go out and see what the water level in the river was when I woke up at 2:00 am, but it was pouring rain, so I stayed in bed. We got another 3/4 inch of rain over night giving us a total of 9 inches for the year.
The white flower was blooming on the levee in the early morning and the rain drops on the roses where like viewing the world through tiny crystal balls with my macro lens.
Sandias, lizard, flowers (SLF). Laurie saw a baby lizard in the leaves under the bonsai stand on the deck. It was really cute and like most young folks these days, seemed to love being photographed as it moved out closer to my macro lens and hammed it up a bit. There was an alert for a missing child in Corrales this afternoon which had the Chanel 7 chopper circling around above us. I drove out to see if there was any action around the fire station, but nothing much was going on, so I drove north and got nice light on the Sandias. There was an alert on our phone when I got back that they found the missing child. Laurie planted a bunch of different flowers that started coming up in July, but the hail storms beat them down to the ground. They finally recovered and we now have a garden full of cosmos and other flowers. The birds and the bees are very happy.
Off Center & Not Even 