Stripey legs

Thought I'd do some macro today and I can almost never resist one of these rather cool looking Sycamore Assassin bugs.  In this shot, you can clearly see his proboscis which in this case is used to inject his victim with a liquefying potion so he can suck them dry.  Hey, nature is a cruel mistress!  These are great things to have in your garden as they eat a lot of pest insects ... unfortunately, they don't know the difference between a "good" and "bad" caterpillar, so they also feed on monarch butterfly cats.  Which is what led me to fostering the caterpillars this fall...

Which leads me to the latest new in the Monarch Diaries...Two more caterpillars pupated to their chrysalis form this morning.  And I got to see both of them.  Maybe one day that will lose some of it's magic, but right now it is just miraculous to watch. I had to relocate both of them from rather precarious places in the enclosure and both now are residing in small containers inside.  Yea, Hubs is just thrilled about that...NOT.  The three original chrysalids are nearing the point where they will either become butterflies or be declared failures.  Hoping for the former, although one of them looks debatable.  

I found another mid-sized caterpillar meandering in a patch of milkweed in the garden, so I scooped him up and put him in an enclosure.  Not sure how I managed to miss him before this as he's getting pretty large and I check that milkweed patch every day...I won't put him in with the "general population" since it is quite possible that he may have any number of things that he could pass on to the others.  Boy, has this been a learning experience for me!  

Hubs and I are going to go out for a nice lunch today - something we don't do often enough.  Dinner tonight will probably be something simple like grilled salmon and fresh veggies from the farm.  He leaves very early tomorrow morning for the long drive to Alabama...

Happy Saturday, people.  Oh, and if you'd like to see five other shots, including a hummie, start HERE on Flickr

Thanks for stopping by...