Females do not, actually, have the orange tips on their wings, but the patterns on the underside are gorgeous.
Yellow-legged Mining Bee (Andrena flavipes). They're cute as heck so I'm gonna be stalking their foraging area.
Thank you! A proper camera (R7) with a 85mm lens :) I know some people manage great macro with their phones, but I couldn't have gotten close enough with a phone, the bees hurried back into their tunnels whenever I got near.
Grey backed mining bee (Andrena vaga) waiting for me to get away from her nest.
Herons look so incredibly cool. Until you see them from the front, of course. Gorgeous shot!
I know they're not rare or anything, but it's the first time I get to observe some.
Sorry for the shaky video, I keep forgetting to take a beanbag.
You drive through the fields and spot a dishevelled young woman hunching over roadkill, reaching into the corpse with pliers as flies buzz around her. You accidentally make eye contact just as she - grinning - drops a writhing maggot into a translucent plastic bottle.
I love it too! I wish I had noticed it when the picture was taken, because it's gorgeous.
Bees are macro on hard mode, they never stop moving. You did a fantastic job. I always end up using burst mode and prayer. Have fun experimenting!
90% "that's amazing, I had no idea it looked so cool" and 10% "what is this ungodly abomination, let me unsee this" in my experience :)
The only reason I didn't impulse buy a teleconverter to tack on my impulse bought 600mm is that it would just get me (more) underexposed pictures. But the urge is real, and we don't even have bald eagles around here.
I saw some active webrings on neocities sites!
It's based on a template, I made it for the Afternoon Tea pixel club: https://lostletters.neocities.org/afternoontea/ which you should check out :)
It seemed to be doing fine as far as "racing over plants and climbing from leaf to leaf" was concerned.
Hi! Sorry, very new at the whole "bugs" thing, and I'm still learning. I spotted this the other day (not sure of the stink bug species, possibly Nezara viridula), promptly spent hours watching macro timelapses of stink bugs hatching, going from gooey babies to hard shelled nymphs...
Now to the question which has been bugging me: is there such a thing as "too late to hatch"? Can they "harden" inside the egg and just die there (maybe in the blackened eggs)?
Thanks!
Edit:
I found another nest of the same species and took it home. So: have a top view of the hatched eggs and some first instar nymphs while I'm at it!
Some kind of stink bug. No precise ID since the identification apps say the nymphs are a species that does not match the eggs at all.
Edit: Nezara viridula
She goes into the Hell Bag for roughly 15 minutes a month, the time it takes to get her monthly Old Kitty Medicine (which comes as a jab).
She earned the Hell Bag (aka bathing bag) after requiring sedation and injuring her Human during the first home visit from the vet. Totally unrelated, but her teeth are in remarkably good, pointy, stabby condition for a 14 year old cat.
Wallonia, Belgium, today.
I stumbled upon a plant covered with small bundles of aphids, and sure enough, upon closer inspection, it had a whole aphid farming operation going on, and ladybugs had found it.
The ant tried blocking the way but fell off. Hopefully it's okay somewhere. The aphids, unfortunately, will not be.
mostlypixels @programming.dev PHP dev, sometimes pixel artist. Also takes pictures of bugs and birds to see what they look like up close.