It turned off chilly this morning, too cold for this bee to be active. It doesn’t look all that comfy. There are other sorts of insects out this morning. My eye was drawn to this wheel bug on my sweet basil:
It was moving, albeit very slowly. I think that may be due to it’s natural hunting technique. It places one leg at a time, stalking through the foliage. Note the “fang” folded under it’s head. It uses that to stab unwary prey and suck their innards out
He’s showing some wear and tear.
This is the largest one I’ve seen this year. It’s four inches from head to folded wing tip. It has a good reach with those long arms.
He was harder to spot than this photo makes it seem, the brown blended in well.
Cicadas! One of a myriad that appeared overnight. They are kind of pretty, fresh out of their old skins. This one is perched upon a coralbell Mrs J planted last fall after nurturing it all last summer in a container. Not really looking forward to their singing 24/7, talk about the sounds of summer…
Once we noticed and started looking we found the empties all over. These things emerge on a cycle, I’m not sure if these are the 13 year or the 17 year models.
Lots of praying mantises today. This one had a hold on a hummingbird before Mrs J, hearing a small commotion in the bush, reached in to rescue it. She said she thought it was hung in a spiderweb at first and only saw the mantis when the bird’s foot didn’t come clear.
This fellow is in the coleus but isn’t the same one from the other day. That one had green eyes. I’m not sure if mantises can change colors, a quick search found answers all over the map. Some said yes, some no, and a few were firmly in the sometimes camp.
I’m pretty sure this one is the same one from before. He is in a green coleus right next to the vari-colored one, both of them in pots Mrs J has set in the shade of a small crabapple tree.
My habaneros are loving this August heat. I picked this bush once already and there are as many ripe now as before. These are more than I will use. Need any?
We’re loving the big slicer tomatoes the garden is producing. They are perfect for BLTs, or BELTs, as is the case here.
Toby is still not sure I won’t do something to him he won’t like. Ginger plays with him quite a bit and Toby doesn’t seem to mind, but let Homer come by and there will be trouble. Toby has taken a serious dislike to that boy and we’ve had to separate them lest fur fly and the dogs become fearful for their own safety.
I’ll close with a few more sammiches. I fired up the panini press for this reuben and all the cheese ran out. The pickle is a bread and butter spear. Tasty!
Last is a mushroom Swiss burger. I sauteed some brown buttons in butter and olive oil, added beef stock with cornstarch for a thickener, and ladled them all over the cheese covered patty. It’s a classic burger recipe, and for good reason.
Don’t try to do this at home! We browsed around at the local Amish run store the other day and finally picked up a squeeze tube of pie filling after seeing them there every time we went. They have several different flavors, we took home the cherry:
There are little chips of fruit in there but nothing the size of a whole or even half cherry. There are 2 lbs. of it in the tube, not sure what the volume is but I think it’s plenty for at least one 9″ pie. We didn’t buy it for that, though, because the squeezable nature of it is perfect for fried pies. Alas, we discovered that those prepared crusts from the store are just not very good for that. They tasted good but they were so fragile they were impossible to hold without coming apart. Looks like it’ll be back to Mrs J’s Famous Fried Pies crust recipe to use up the remainder.
Yay me! Alas, the thrill of turning over another million views is tempered somewhat by a new method for counting that Flickr.com is using. I’m not sure what the new scheme is but it has drawn much comment from the user community.
Hard to beat a nice ribeye. Grilled sweet corn is another one of those things that we’ve been doing that is relatively new for us. Mostly we just boiled it. I’ve always buttered and salted mine but I’ve been going with other seasonings lately. Old Bay is very good on it, tonight I used some of Olde Thomson’s tex-mex blend of seasonings.
Mrs J spotted this fellow on her Coleus, down in the shade of a crabapple tree. I scrambled down there with the camera and got a few decent pictures. Mantises are one of my favorite insects. They don’t show much fear of the camera but you can make them pay some attention:
My favorite moth is back today, browsing over the flowers in one of Mrs J’s containers. He’s especially fond of the little pink trumpet shaped blossoms, and needs every last bit of that proboscis to reach the sweet, sweet nectar. There are several varieties of hummingbird moths, this one is a Snowberry Clearwing.
I wish we knew what the name of that flower is. Mrs J thought maybe it is a Sweet William but I can’t quite find any online that match up well.
I stumbled across this photo while browsing the referrer logs on my Flickr stream. It’s from a Tumblr blog posting but I can’t find the original now so I can’t offer attribution. I love these insects. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen one with wings extended. Some kind of threat display?
What's 4 Dinner Solutions 