... talking about flies - I seem to have a thing about insects lately!

... because these are all photos that I have taken during the first 2 months of this year:

A weevil:





front view and ...


... from the top (yes - on my hand ;-)

This one is a praying mantis (a juvenile - it will probably moult a few more times before it is an adult)

A bug:

... another one of the sort of bug that laid these eggs I posted about a few weeks back -


http://aykayem.blogspot.com/2007/01/from-7-eggs-came.html
http://aykayem.blogspot.com/2007/01/another-dozen-eggs.html

A very strange looking little spider I found on the wall:





yes I know - a spider is NOT an insect ... but I like all sorts of "creepy crawlies"

... and there are even some weird creatuers that don't crawl or walk too


like this -

something in a rock pool at the beach:

and some more stuff in another rock pool nearby:

still more insects ...

A moth on the screen door:

another view showing the amazing colours:

DD (Dear Daughter) tried to catch it ... but it flew into the garden and someone else caught it instead!

it must have been rather tasty ...


... because there was not much of it left when I took this photo!

DD caught this one (yes she likes insects/etc too)




- that weird looking thing is what a cricket looks like before it grows up ... has weird claws on the front, so it can dig (which is what it was trying to do when I took this photo ... as DD found out when I took this photo - it kind of tickles when one of these tries to dig between your fingers ;-)

This one is on my arm - a ladybeetle:



I grew up calling these "Ladybirds" ... but they are definitely not birds. They are also called "ladybugs" by a lot of people - but they are not bugs (order hemiptera) either - they are beetles (order coleoptera) ... not that it really matters, so I will stop boring you with the technical stuff now.

Here is a rather nice coloured moth:

and an "inchworm" (which is a caterpillar, rather than a worm ;-) that I found on a geranium leaf that I picked, to be used by a science class, at the school I work at.

I am sure I have taken a photos of a few more "creepy crawlies" this month too, but if I have - they are not on the computer yet ... (or they are already in one or 2 of my other blog posts ;-)

btw ... if the formatting is a bit messy - blame the editor thingy I am typing this blog post in and/or the person who invented "div" tags in html (the editor thingy puts them in ... all over the place ... and they do strange things like make spaces between the lines show up or not show up ... and at this hour of night I can't be bothered editing the html and removing all the ones that don't need to be there ... but weird things kept happening so I just ended up doing what I did last time and removing them all! (which seems to work ok as long as I put some <p> and <br> tags in there, and get them in the right places)