It is a beautiful day and I have the use of a macro lens for my camera! This will be a little photo gallery of my garden taken through this amazing lens..some from earlier this summer and some from today. This lens is much more difficult to master than I would have thought. Holding it steady is difficult and since I like to wander through the garden without a tripod I find keeping things in focus is the challenge.
During my wandering this summer I discovered an Anise Swallowtail caterpillar on the dill plant. Apparently these particular Swallowtails are becoming more plentiful further North due to global climate changes. I feared for its life since the plant was right beside the bird feeder so I brought it into the house and put it into a jar with lots of dill, a branch and some water. It ate and ate and ate and then hung itself on the branch with silk strings. There it hung for about a week and then it started to jiggle and jerk. I am so glad I happened to be standing next to it as it started to pupate, because that is exactly what it was doing. It looked like it was turning itself inside out...what we look like when we take a sweater off over our heads! After a bit, it turned completely green and a ball dropped off its end and it stopped moving. It turned brown over the next couple of days and now it looks like a dried stick. I hope that it turns into a beautiful butterfly in the spring and, more importantly I hope that we notice when that happens so that we can set it free. Here are pictures of it in its various forms.
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| Anise Swallowtail caterpillar on dill plant |
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| Anise Swallowtail caterpillar hanging on stick ready to pupate |
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| An old tattered Anise Swallowtail butterfly on butterfly bush flower |
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| Some kind of wasp...now you understand "waspish waist line"... |
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| Honey bee on the pink cosmos |
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| Bumble bee covered in pollen, on the orange cosmos |
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| Action at the composter |
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| Too many grasshoppers this year...here is one sitting on a spent dahlia flower |
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| Beautiful black and white wasp on the trumpet vine |
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| Honey bee at the trumpet vine flowers...it goes through the back instead of down the flower since the flower is too huge. |
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| We are plagued by snails and they eat the hostas but it's perfect to look at, isn't it? |
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| Beetle on black eyed Susan...think it knows how gorgeously it matches? |
Tomorrow I will show you cool seed pods and fungus around the property. Hope you have lots to give thanks for on this lovely weekend.
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