Get out there and celebrate bees! I’d like to. I tried. But right now we’re drowning in near constant rain and drizzle and cool temperatures, so all our bees are hiding. We’ve planted lots of bee-friendly flowers in our yard, but they haven’t blossomed yet.

I guess I’ll have to settle for this poor photo I took last year.

My excuse is that I’m usually looking for spiders, and it’s pure chance that I might click the shutter when a bee wanders by. Still, I appreciate them, especially since they can be a good source of spider food.

Oh no. They’re not as interesting as spiders.

I’m not very good at it, either…but man, I tell you, shooting these great big bird beasts is a heck of a lot easier than taking macro shots of teeny-tiny fidgety invertebrates.

Maybe I need to tell Mary to take more photos of birds.

My wife’s flower patch:

My wife has been keeping an eye on a chrysalis on the neighbor’s garage, and this morning it looked like this:

Empty! Where did the former resident go? It was stretching and warming itself up on a twig down below.

We have to celebrate every single monarch that emerges, because they’ve become too uncommon nowadays.

You know, I was stung by a yellowjacket the other day, when all I’d done was try to visit their nest and say hello. It still hurts a little bit, ow ow ow, have pity on me, etc.

Today my wife tells me she put out a water dish for them, in case they were thirsty.

Whose side is she on, anyway?

My front yard is a bit of a scary place — it’s been taken over by cranky stinging insects. Here’s a wasp that has a nest in my front door.

Scarier still, though, is this small cavern that has been excavated in my lawn, and is full of buzzing frantically busy creatures that I could not photograph well, because they were moving so fast to complain about my existence. It might be a swarm of Karens.

I’ve mentioned that I have an endoscopic camera. Anyone want to double-dog-dare me to probe deeply into that mysterious tunnel full of alien life-forms? I’ll do it. I’m not a-skeered.