Bug Blog
The Lavender Blossom Special
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...
Honey bee in flight, heading toward a lavender blossom. Note the varroa mite on her head.(Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Now That's a Pollinator!
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? Nathan...
Nectar-feeding bat with a record-long tongue sips sugar-water from a tube. (Photo by Murray Cooper; photo courtesy of Nathan Muchhala)
Nathan Muchhala is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
The Hostest with the Mostest
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...
Tara Thiemann is researching bloodfeeding patterns of Culex mosquitoes. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Tara Thiemann working in the lab. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
An Uncommon Bee
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.Native...
Female leafcutting bee, Megachile gemula, on rock purslane. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Female leafcutting bee, Megachile gemula, exiting rock purslane. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Katydid, Katy Didn't
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,"...
Katydid on salvia. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)