Female black crab spider

Coriarachne brunneipes.

These shots need to be clicked on!

If anyone is interested: I placed a bowl upside down on a lazy susan,  added a little water, and a chunk of wood. This kept her contained, and I spun it around and shot photos as she moved around trying to find a way off.

Moths pollinating and of course another honey bee or two.

Click on the photo & look closely & you'll see she has less than half her wings left. I don't see how this old girl can still fly. This was probably her last flight. They literally fly their little wings off.

Lots of pollen. She's a beauty!

I'm waiting on an ID for these moths. They really liked the Aster flowers.

Update!   The Alfalfa Looper (Autographa californica) is a moth of the Noctuidae family. 

And that is what it is!

A lucky shot! In flight!

Shining geranium

Shining geranium (Geranium lucidum), an invasive species. A fully open flower, and I think too much movement caused degradation in the field-stack of 4 shots hand-held, slightly cropped to remove artifacts on the edge of the frame.

ISO-280, 1/250 at f/16, 1:1

Click for detail

Flowers maybe 3/8" across when open

Bumble bee close up.

Just to see if I could do it, I stuck a microscope objective on the end of my 105mm macro lens. I used a $10.00 reducing adapter I got off eBay.

Working distance between the bee & the lens was less than 1cm.

Go ahead, click on it. You know you want to.

Another cat photo

Portrait of a caterpillar.
Ranchman's Tiger Moth
Platyprepia virginalis

Much better when viewed large!

click on me.

Crab spiders

Tiny 5mm crab spiders up close & personal on a pear blossom.

Best viewed enlarged, with a click!

Cleaning her paws. Mmmmmm pear pollen!

Macros and Turkey Tails

Turkey Tail or Trametes versicolor, a polypore fungus and one which I currently have a personal interest in, is in the news. 

This is a macro of a very young mushroom. Actually there are two. Both look similar on the top, but very different underneath. The turkey tail is the left in the first photo and on the right in the second. The other polypore has false gills or folds.
Please click on & enlarge

Turkey tail pores. Looks like a coral reef.

Enlarged, it's quite hairy.

Because of the shallow depth of field at this magnification, twelve frames were shot at different focus points and then stacked, or merged together so that the entire subject is in focus.

This is photo #1 with only the foreground in focus

And the last photo with the farthest portion in focus. I'll spare you the ten in between.

The difference is easier to see when you enlarge them.

The Bees

The bees got some flying in after it warmed up to 51* today. The pears are all blooming, apples are starting as are the cherries. They seem to prefer the pear blossoms.

They look better enlarged, so click on one.

Getting some plum sap or just taking a break.

Andreninae (Mining Bees)

Wax moth larva

Crawling around on some of their cocoons , I let it out before it wanted to leave it's home. It wasn't happy. I deep sixed it afterwards.
From a box of frames I forgot to store properly. Most of them are salvageable. I'll put them in the freezer for a couple of days to be sure the eggs and any larvae I missed are killed.

A tiny hairy beetle

Trichodesma cristata – Anobiid beetle

 Adult: 5-6mm.

Order Coleoptera/ Family Anobiidae – Death-watch beetles

Should I be worried?

Click to enlarge & appreciate it's hairiness.

"The larvae of Trichodesma spp. feed in dry dead wood and have also been found to invade houses and other structures, in some cases, causing considerable damage to timbers.  Many of the Anobiid species of North America are what is termed glabrous, (having little or no body hair) but this remarkable little species is very hairy, or a pubescent beetle as you can see. Intermixed with the light hairs are patches or tufts of stiffer black hairs making the genus, Trichodesma, easily recognized. Death-watch beetles get their name from the fact that they, like so many other borers, make a ticking noise in infested wood. The early Europeans gave them this name because when the sound was heard in the quiet of hospitals or the bedsides of the dying" ...

Arctiinae (erebid moths)

Dr. Paul Hammond, identified the orange and black  caterpillar as Ranchman’s Tiger Moth and the other one as a Garden Tiger Moth.

Eggs are laid starting in July. Large bluish-white clutches of eggs are laid on the lower surfaces of leaves. The caterpillars hatch in August. They spend the winter on the ground in protected places and pupate from June to July of the following year. The moths hatch from July to August.

The caterpillar of the garden tiger moth feeds on various kinds of non-woody plants, as well as bushes and trees. It is especially fond of raspberry,blackberry, viburnum, honeysuckle, erica, and broom.

At last! Something that eats Blackberry and Scotch broom! Of course at least these two also dine on Lupines. 

Photos by my wife.

From Wikipedia:

"Local folklore of the American Northeast and the American South hold that "woolly bears" (or "wooly worms" in the South) have the ability to predict the weather, similar to that of the groundhog. The forthcoming severity of a winter may be indicated by the amount of black on the Isabella tiger moth's caterpillar—the most familiar woolly bear in North America. More brown than black is said to mean a mild winter, but more black than brown is supposed to mean a harsh winter.^[13] However, the relative width of the black band varies among instars, not according to weather."

This is obvious, as we are currently having a record mild winter and these are more black than brown.

Dung fly

Surprisingly colorful little fly. He (or she) is partaking of the maple sap on the tree where the honey bees were also drinking.

Click to enlarge as usual

A desk spider

I was reading the manuals and trying to re-learn macro, something I used to fool around with in college in the 60's at USF, and this little guy crawled by on the desk. He (she) is only a couple of millimeters long. That's about a 1/16 of an inch. I let it crawl up on a microfiber lens cleaning cloth to take the pictures. Kind of cool. Nobody has been able to ID it yet. These are cropped quite a bit from 1:1 full frame.
Update: The general consensus so far is:
Arthropods (Arthropoda) » Chelicerates (Chelicerata) » Arachnids (Arachnida) » Spiders (Araneae) » True Spiders (Araneomorphae) » Entelegynes  »Sheetweb and Dwarf Spiders (Linyphiidae) » Dwarf Spiders (Erigoninae)

Click to enlarge for best view, as usual.

I am really looking forward to spring, when the bees are hitting the flowers. Until then, I'll take what I can get.