Tom Astle

Yes! I had seen the katydid eggs on a grass stem, and noticed one had a tiny hole in it - I realized what it probably was and kept an eye on it. The next day, the wasps (and one katydid) started hatching.

Eddie and Bob are getting up tomorrow 🐢⏰

The katydid was released in the garden. These particular wasps wouldn’t hurt the katydid itself - they lay their eggs inside katydid eggs.

CORRECTION: ID'd by my bee-friend Krystle Hickman as Dufourea sp.

Was ID'd as a Dufourea sp. (by my bee-friend Krystle Hickman)

A macro photo, front three-quarter view, of a small dark bee, sprinkled liberally with tiny white pollen grains, perched on the smooth yellow petals of a flower, against a bright blue sky background.

Is this desert flower (sun cup, Camissonia sp.) small? Yes, under 2cm. Is this bee (maybe Lasioglossum sp.?) even smaller? Yes, 5-6mm (zoom in!). To get a blue sky background behind a plant under 15cm. tall, did I have to lie sideways on the ground and get sand in my ear? Also yes.
🌿🐙📷🌼 #BugSky

A macro photo of a rich pink flower with a bright yellow throat, with a touch of green in the background upper right.

I don't post a lot of flower photos (unless the flower has a bug in it), but I do make exceptions. Here's a close look at the Red Rock Canyon Monkeyflower (Erythranthe rhodopetra; rhodo=red, petra=rock), a rare endemic found only in, you guessed it, Red Rock Canyon State Park in California. 📷🌿🌸

A macro photo of the folds of a peach-colored flower, covered in many tiny dewdrops.

A phone pic, vertical orientation, of a patch of large white flowers with yellow centers, growing out of desert sand, in morning sun. Two faded blossoms in the foreground are pale pink. Mountains and blue sky are in the background.

Extreme closeup of tiny dewrops on a faded desert evening primrose flower (Oenothera sp.), Mojave Desert, California. The large flowers start out white and fade to pale pink; wilted blossoms like the one in closeup can be pink or peach.

A phone photo, vertical orientation, of a desert landscape in the slanted light of morning. In the low foreground and into the middle distance are bright yellow, dandelion-like flowers growing intermittently on the sand. The flowers are known as scale bud (Anisocoma acaulis). Larger shrubs, mountains, and a bit of sky are in the distance.

--this one is seasonal and solitary, with no hive. A lone female mates, digs a burrow in the ground (hence "mining" bee), provisions it with pollen, and lays her eggs. Then she seals up the entrance and never sees her offspring. One of my favorite spring species. Mojave Desert, CA, yesterday. 🌼

A macro photo, front three-quarter, elevated view, of a bee inside a pale yellow, multi-petaled flower. The bee is overall dark metallic blue-green, and has a face covered in fuzzy white hairs, bedecked in small round pollen grains.

🐙🌿📷 This wee bee (Andrena olivacea) is a native mining bee. Less than half the size of a honeybee, it looks dull and dark from a distance - but is beautiful up close. It's one of over 1600 species of native bees (which honeybees are not) found in California alone. Like almost all bee species--

A friend (who specializes in native bees & photographing them) and I had this talk yesterday in the California desert. I showed a feral honeybee hive to a couple hiking where we were. They had no idea that honeybees didn’t belong there. My friend said she’s had this convo a billion times.

A photo of a small butterfly perched atop a plant with, curled, holly-like, gray-green leaves and brownish patches. The butterfly is upper left, seen from the side with wings folded. The forewings are orange with white marks, and the hindwings have a row of dark spots along the rear margin, with white and orange below. The body is dark with lots of bluish-white hairs.

Western Pygmy Blue butterfly (Brephidium exilis) on one of its host plants, desert holly (Atriplex hymenelytra, a type of saltbush) in the Mojave Desert yesterday. They're the smallest butterflies in North America, with a wingspan just over half an inch. #BugSky 🐙🌿📷

In the desert this morning I saw (and heard) a pair of prairie falcons mating, then watched one of the pair (I think the female because of the large size), do a couple of relatively close circles overhead. Luckily, my telephoto lens was safely at home in a cabinet. 📷🦉🔭

Yes - I’ve had a swarm move in to a bird box in my backyard, it was quite interesting.

Feral honeybees (honeybees are not native to North America, but feral colonies are established in many places) in the desert this morning. I was gonna go ask them why they were so swarmy, but decided against it 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

A macro photo of a slender, tiny wasp atop a batch of katydid eggs. The eggs, which look like brown lima beans, are tiled along a brown grass stem. Four have roundish holes chewed through their sides, where parasitoid wasps (like the one perched on top of them) chewed their way out. The wasp is metallic-copper colored with a yellow abdomen band and large eyes.

A macro photo of a group of katydid eggs, which look like brown lima beans, tiled along a brown grass stem against a pale green background. In the upper right, a tiny wasp's face is peeking out of an escape hole it is chewing from the inside of a katydid egg it has parasitized. A second egg, lower left, has a hole in it where a wasp has already hatched and flown off.

A macro photo of a tiny, green, newly-hatched katydid nymph perched atop a fingertip, against a green and blue-green background. The fingertip and katydid are lower right, and one of the katydid's extremely long antennae stretches all the way up to the upper left corner of the frame.

From a few years ago: katydid eggs mostly parasitized by tiny wasps. When a katydid hatches, the egg opens like a clam shell; but as you can see (pic 2), if there's a parasitoid wasp inside, they chew their way out. Btw, the baby katydid on my fingertip hatched from the same egg clutch. #BugSky 🐙🌿

During their search for food, most insects head specifically for the flowers that promise the highest reward. Researchers from the #UniKonstanz and the @uni-wuerzburg.de have now studied how bumblebees process information about their food sources. Full story: t1p.de/mndcd

A photo of a spider suspended from a web strand that's attached on the left to a single dry brown stem. The background is bluish gray sky. The spider, in the lower right third, is mostly black, with a row of red dots along the side of the abdomen.

A black and white photo, vertical orientation, of a few sparse dry grass stems and many tiny spiders in a web attached to the grass. The bright sky is the background, with a thin slice of grassland out of focus in the bottom of the frame.

A cool and quite pretty little spider, Parawixia bistriata, that I saw in Brazil in Emas National Park. This spider lives in social groups of up to several hundred. Pic 2 shows a small portion of the communal web. 🐙🌿🕷️

Macro photo of a brown stink bug in face view on a leaf, guarding a tightly-clustered bunch of eggs that are shaped and colored exactly like a full tray of dark beer with foam on top.

Finally, the bug is back with a round of the Guinness.

A large-ish mainly dark red beetle in a yellow wildflower covered with pollen Beetle from Wikipedia: Lytta magister, the desert blister beetle or master blister beetle, is a species of blister beetle found in southwestern North America. Lytta magister Typically 16 to 33 mm (0.6 to 1.3 in) in length, L. magister has a striking red head, legs and prothorax, with black elytra. They can be found in great numbers in the Mojave and Colorado Deserts in spring, and are often seen in swarms. Females lay eggs in holes in the desert soil. The larvae are insectivorous, mainly attacking bee nests. They consume the immature host along with its provisions, and can often survive on the provisions alone, thus they are not obligatory parasitoids but rather food parasites that are facultatively parasitoid, or simply predatory. Adults feed on flowers and leaves of brittlebush. Though they are not venomous, they can in fact bite. Wildflower from Wikipedia: Chylismia brevipes is a species of wildflower native to the American desert southwest known by the common names yellow cups, Mojave suncup, and golden suncup. This is a hairy annual with tall stems often reaching over half a meter in height and surrounded by basal leaves which may be simple or composed of several leaflets. It produces an inflorescence which has one to several blooms in it. The flowers are bright yellow, often with reddish speckling at the base of each petal. The center of the flower has a long pistil and several shorter stamens with large anthers. The fruits are hanging capsules which may be several centimeters long.

More from Death Valley

Desert Blister Beetle (Lytta magister) warming up for the morning in a Golden Suncup (Chylismia brevipes).

Fossil evidence comes to life ~ beetles were Earth’s first pollinators. Still doing the good work (after waking up).

🌿

I did see it near a hedgerow

Love this place. I’m partial to the giant grasshopper facing off against the giant scorpion

A side-view closeup photo of a grasshopper on a brown, thorny twig against a mostly-blue sky. The grasshopper has a boldly-barred, black-and-yellow abdomen, green and pink wings, legs, and thorax, and black eyes with yellow polka dots.

Grasshoppers are not just plain green or brown; many are among the most colorful of insects. Check out this glamhopper from 2018 in Madagascar: #bugsky 🌿🐙

Three treehoppers facing the camera, green with a black line running the length of their bodies. The one in the middle is upright. The other two are hanging on to her, sideways. Treehoppers are shaped like tiny tilted pyramids to appear like shoots or thorns.

Three treehoppers 🌱

Yeah. One female, two competing males. Genus Alchisme, the most common treehoppers living in the hedge.

#treehoppertuesday #insect #macrophotography

Five petal white flowers with purple patterns and exserted yellow stamens

Loeseliastrum schottii (Schott’s Calico) blooming today at Desert Gardens in Anza-Borrego #nativeplants 🌿

I love these flowers. Few others are the insect magnets that they are 🐝🪰🐞🦋🪲🌼

Incredible creature!

Why are they taking curling away from me 🥌

Pretty ant 🐜

Grasshopper Glacier, Montana Disappears Grasshopper Glacier in 2025 Sentinel image with almost no relict ice remaining. To the northwest Wolf Glacier is still an active glacier. Grasshopper Glacier, Montana is in the Beartooth Range in C…

Grasshopper Glacier in teh Beartooth Range of Montana disappears after losing area rapidly from 1966 to 2015 revealing a new alpine lake.
glacierchange.blog/2026/02/21/g...