A close shave for this slug

The bok choy in my garden has started to bolt, so instead of cutting a few stalks here and there, I have been cutting whole heads of it at a time. I love the perfect rosette it makes when I cut the bottom off.

This rosette had some "stuff" in it, though, and on closer inspection, there was a slug, a very lucky slug, down in the bottom of one of the stems.

I looked on the knife and on other side of where I cut, and I didn't see any slug bits. I waited, and soon I saw his antennas starting to poke out. This was the best shot I got of him before he wisely turned around and made his way back into the bottom of the rosette. I ended up putting the whole rosette out in the yard in the hope he would find his way to safety.

But I dunno, I think it looks like I took off part of his face.

And that's not the only surprise I found in my veggies.

Tiny bugs

This has to be the tiniest baby katydid I've ever seen. That's a miniature rose it's eating. The flower is only slightly bigger across than, say, an Oreo cookie. His antennae were blowing in the breeze.


These are the same kind of little red bugs as the ones I hatched the other day. Notice how round their little bellies are after a day or so of feeding.

Red eggs hatched into red bugs

These are the red eggs from this post. They hatched today, into some kind of heteroptera.




They are super-tiny, as you can see by my gargantuan index finger next to one of the hatchlings.



Here is another shot of my finger (Looks almost like a toe, doesn't it? It isn't, though.) next to the little dandelion bud. You can almost make out the teeny eggs and bugs up near the top.

I don't know exactly what kind of bugs they are, but I'm not going to try to raise these things. They're just too small. I have lots of dandelion weeds in my yard, so I draped the little drooping bud over a live growing one, and I carefully transferred the one loose bug onto the weed, too.

Someone's about to have an adventure...

... and/or lunch, maybe

Good scrapings in the compost bin

This snail has been hanging out in my compost bin. I don't mind him there. I figured he was eating some of the decomposing kitchen waste. Or maybe he was just hanging out.


It turns out, he has been eating the brown stuff from the inside of the composter lid. Over the years, the lid has alternately laid upturned with water and gunk sitting in it, and then dried out. The resulting residue must be a crusty delicacy for a snail.



His trail clearly shows everywhere his "teeth" (radula) scraped on the lid, and his head moved from side to side as he grazed his way along.


Very interesting, and much more educational than seeing my vegetable plants with gaping, slime-covered holes.

At long last, Froggie

Way back in January, I found some frog eggs. I ended up with only one viable tadpole, and he has taken his good and plenty time growing up. This week, he pulled himself out onto a plant stem in his "tadpolarium". He held on, in that same spot for about 4 days, as his tail slowly disappeared. This afternoon, he has moved to another leaf. I am taking that as his signal that he is ready to begin his life as a frog. He is super-tiny, but seems healthy. I hope he will eat the tiny flies I have been catching for him.

Coming of age

Still pale and vulnerable, a freshly molted Harlequin bug rests beside its old exoskeleton.

When the new skin has hardened, it will look like this.

Cactus bee

Inspired by fellow bug-hunter Ron H. I sought out the fuzzy brown cactus bees at the arboretum.


I like the frizzly-looking pollen in this picture, and the frizzly-pollen pantaloons the bee is sporting. But beyond that, my little camera falls short. (Yes, I'm blaming the camera.)

detail of photo by Ron Hemberger

Ron's camera captured not only the delightful "fur" of the bee, but also the surprisingly (to me anyway) triangular shape of the pollen.

Spider Zen

Perfectly posed by my front door this morning.

Nothing to see here

My first time getting stung on a bug safari tour, and by a carpenter bee, no less. It wasn't bad, really. I'd heard that it's not as painful as a honeybee, and in this case, that was true. The stinger did not remain embedded in my finger (with a small chunk of the bee's abdomen) pumping venom into me, as it would have with the honeybee.

It did smart, and my finger was swelling a little bit, but as luck would have it, there was a vendor in a booth at our plant sale who had aloe vera products. He was happy to give me a little squirt of lotion from one of his sample bottles. Within minutes, the pain was subsiding. On the way back to the children's garden, I bummed an ice cube from the Shave Ice people. By the time it had melted away, the pain and swelling was basically gone.

Bumblebee