Bug Squad

Remember the news published several years ago about a scientist who discovered a two-inch-long bat with a tongue longer than its body, so long that it had to tuck it into its rib cage?

You're sitting in your back yard or at a park and a mosquito bites you. You're the host whether you like it or not. You just hope that this isn't an infected mosquito that can transmit West Nile virus (WNV).

Sometimes you get lucky. While watching floral visitors foraging last week in our rock purslane (Calandrinia grandiflora), we noticed a tiny black bee, something we'd never seen before.

My late father, who called me "Katydid," loved poetry. Decades after he passed, a cousin gave me a set of his books from his childhood home. One was "The Early Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes," published in 1899 by T. Y. Crowell and Company. In it is a poem, "To an Insect," and it's about katydids.

It was a pomegranate kind of day. Red, bright and wonderful. The papery-thin reddish blossoms in our yard draw both beneficial and pestiferous insects. Honey bees are there for the pollen and nectar; ladybugs are there for the pesky aphids.