Saskatchewan: The volunteer insects.

I love taking macros and most of my macros are of flowers or bugs or both. I took lots of flower macros while in Saskatchewan and found that many of them included a volunteer insect or two. Here they are!


The mosquito.



The cream and red spider. (look closely under the petals on the rightmost flower.)



The bee. After I noticed him in the picture, I took another few a little closer.





The ant.



Another bee. I was using macro plus zoom for these so I didn't notice the bee in either one until I put them on the computer.





The bees in Chris's garden.
This is one of those flat little blue and white ones.



The fuzzy one.



I love this picture with his antennae held back and together.



Disclaimer:
No insects were harmed in any way in the making of this blog.

Tiptoe through the thistles...

or you might be poked.

I love my camera because it can zoom in on birds at the top of my trees. I still want a DSLR, though. Digital zoom can get you there and get you close, but it doesn't have the focusing ability of a separate telephoto lens so you can't get that real "feathered" look that is so great when taking pictures of birds. So I'm going to continue to save my pennies and buy myself the DSLR. I keep changing my mind, but it's the birds and insects that make me want a DSLR so bad. With this in mind I have decided to start saving up my money and, in the meantime, I am going to start checking out features and issues so I can make the right choice when I do decide to finally spend the money. Sometimes it makes me want to get another film SLR just until I can afford the camera I want, or more importantly, the lenses I want. That being said, here are my offerings for today.


The birds at the top of the tree.


I love thistles. Yes, I know they are weeds, and pretty poky weeds at that, but I love the plants and I love taking photographs of them. I have one in my yard that is about 4 feet high, so I stood next to it and took macros of the flower heads. I love the spiky round heads on this plant. I was amazed when I put these pictures on the computer, though, because around each of the flower heads is white webbing. I had never seen this before and, at first, I thought they had contracted some strange plant malady, but on closer inspection I see that it is webbing.












There were several of these little spiders and they had built webbing around the spikes to catch the aphids and other insects that came to feed on the plants. Very innovative!



Here you can see some of the hapless insects. Each flower head had at least ten trapped insects, but it was hard to get in the right spot to get a clear picture of them.