Bug Squad

If you want to take photos of honey bees in flight, do so early in the morning. They don't move as fast and the lighting is to die for. This morning we stepped out in our yard, steaming coffee in hand, and watched the honey bees foraging among the lavender blossoms.

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.