Magnolia

This is one of the many flowers on our magnolia grandiflora - past its prime. In the course of looking up the beetles that are crawling all over the flower I learned that they are longhorn beetles. The largest is a banded longhorn beetle, the smaller ones are margined leatherwing beetles. But even more interesting is the fact that (according to Wikipedia) magnolia is an ancient species and it is theorized that the flowers evolved - before bees existed - to be pollinated by beetles. Which explains why there's always so much beetle activity in the flowers!

There's a lot of tiny going on.