In Before the Lock

I gave blood on Monday.  We entered the nondenominational church's gym through a single door met by a woman who squirted hand sanitizer onto our palms and ordered us to rub it in.  Then she took our temperature.  If we were normal we were allowed in.


Checking in was the same as usual.  A volunteer scanned my donor card then told me to sit and wait.



The chairs in the waiting area where positioned approximately five feet from each other.  I've been giving at this location for years because everybody is so nice.  On this day nobody talked to each other.



When it was my turn to be checked out by a nurse things got even less friendly.  She stuck my right middle finger to check my iron level.  I scored an eleven.  She said that was too low.  I remarked that I'd had a physical about three weeks ago.  Surely, they would have noticed if my iron was low.

Nurse Terse said, you must be 12.5 to give blood.  (One time a nurse told me my iron reading was low due to my cold hands!)  Nurse Terse asked if I wanted to try the other hand.  I'd already put 45 minutes into this venture so I said yes.  My left middle finger scored a 14.5.  I asked how can there be such a huge difference between them?  Nurse Terse said, that's just the way it goes.



Now I was back in the waiting area.  My fellow waiters stared into space or into their phones.  Things were slower today though the woman at the door said many blood donors had cancelled.



At the blood drawing station they sanitized the entire cot after each donor then waited till it dried.

The phlebotomist was nice.  She even smiled at me a couple times.



Now it was time to sit for a minimum of ten minutes to "recover" from giving blood.  Though I've never felt the need, I cooperate and spend that time drinking juice and enjoying the hospitality.  At this location they usually have a table set up with sandwiches and crudites and homemade brownies.  You help yourself family style.  This day of course was different.  Individual tables with a single chair were set up about five feet apart.  Someone wearing gloves served your snack.



The lady who usually offers shoulder rubs was there but didn't touch anybody.

It felt like Us vs Them.  But who is who?

My Shoes are Still Wet

The inside of my shoes were wet so I put them on the back porch to dry.

This critter was in the way.  The light was good so I got the camera.

Annoyed by the impromptu photo shoot, he moved on.  I put my shoe on the post to dry.

I got the camera out again.

Who's messing with who here?

Lilacs and Whatnot

The fragrance of Lilacs is unmistakable.

Their beauty is undeniable.

Clover has no official opinion on either.

Being a Sighthound however, she finds butterflies of interest.

Garden Dreams

At this time of year I begin to get just a little antsy.  Thoughts of growing things start, well, growing.  It's too early to do anything about it.  That won't stop us from looking back, though.

These are the last of the tomatoes from last year's harvest.  It was November, frost was becoming a regular occurrence.  Thus, I picked all the fruit off the plants.  Most of them ripened on a plate inside the house. 

The Praying Mantis remained outside.

Bugged II

After picking some tomatoes, the gardener headed toward the house.

Suddenly, out of nowhere.  A hit to the wrist!  A hit to the ankle!

Lily, a witness at the scene said, "it was bizarre.  Totally unprovoked.  A coordinated attack.  Dastardly.  The gardener didn't have a chance. "

"Later",  Lily continued, "I heard the gardener cursing.  It seems that calamine lotion has limited effectiveness on the swelling and itching, especially when spilled on the bathroom rug."

This local resident remarked that some bugs go a little crazy this time of year.

Bugged 1

Lots of grasshoppers at large lately, here at the homestead.  Also, surely not coincidentally, there has been lots of heavy webbage.

 Grasshoppers travelling willy-nilly often end up entangled.  Pictures of such occurrences are just too graphic to show.

Suffice it to say, spiders catch their prey and process them, as spiders do.

Good thing there are lots of grasshoppers because the resident ducks enjoy them too.

Other bugs have also been active lately, some of them of the stinging variety.  More on that after the swelling goes down.

They're Back and So is My Cussing Habit

For the past several years, I have made a sincere effort to reduce my swearing.  It has gone fairly well- most of the time.  Then there are times when the effects of outside forces negatively effect my peace of mind.  After that, an explosion of bad words flow like a waterfall down a sheer cliff.

 

The latest cussed avalanche began when after a short time strolling around the grounds, Lois sported over a dozen hanger-ons.  My initial response was to yell, "I will kill you!"  Then collecting the tools to do the job, I continued, "I will **** kill you!"

Henry too, was tick ridden.  Tweezers poised, I exclaimed, "you ***** tick bastards!  You will die a **** horrible death!"

 

 

 

 

After removal from their unwilling hosts, the ticks were dropped into a deadly alcohol bath.  "Die!  Die!  Die!  You evil ****  ****!"

 

 

Later, as the Tick Killer was showering, the swearing increased considerably.   "How dare you!  You ****!" 

Two ticks were upon my body.  Gripping them between my thumb and finger, I stepped out of the shower, dripping all over the floor.  Seizing a pair of cuticle scissors, I cut each tick in half and then in half again.

"Take that, you **** parasitical ****!"

The bathroom nightmare wasn't over, though.  Soon, a horrible discovery.  There was a tick nestled between my toes.   "Ahhrrgggh!  ****!  You are not welcome here, ***** !"  

This tick too, was cut in half and in half again.  "I will kill you all!  You, and all your **** brethren!  **** ***** *****!!"

Lois, the voice of reason, suggests that the ducks be called upon to dispatch the ticks at ground level.

If needed, wild reinforcements are also at the ready.

OK, birds.  Get out there and kill, kill, **** kill.

Walking Sticks

There are different kinds of walking sticks.  For example.





 Fancy Cane

 

Shillelagh

 

This guy

 

 

Ticked

Ah, spring.  The grass is greening up, trees are budding.  Hungry ticks lie in wait.

Ticks have four life cycles: egg, larval, nymph and adult.  They eat nothing but blood throughout their lives.  There are two general types of ticks: hard and soft.   Adult hard ticks look roughly like a sunflower seed.  They have a hard shell behind their mouth parts (mouth parts -as in- what looks like it's head.  As though ticks aren't creepy enough, they sort of don't have a head.)  Soft ticks resemble a raisin.  Hard ticks tend to feed on dogs and cats and people while soft ticks prefer birds and bats.

The usual scenario finds a tick waiting in the grass or on a shrub.  When a warm blooded animal passes close by, the tick climbs aboard.  Then the stowaway tick makes its way to a spot on that animal to settle in, bite into the skin, then hang there and eat.  It takes several days for a tick to eat it's fill.

Ticks are Arachnids.  Other members of the Arachid family are spiders, mites and scorpions.  These creatures, when full grown, have fours pair of legs and no antennae.  (Insects have three pair of legs and one pair of antennae.)

 

 

When you find a newly arrived tick on you or your dog you can remove it with the sticky side of a piece of tape. However, if the tick has been on the body for a while, it'll have dug it's fangs in, so you'll need to pull it off, ideally with tweezers, aiming close to the skin so as to get all of the tick off.

Now.  Kill it.

Less than one finger of alcohol does the job.  Teetotalers find soapy water works too.



Not only do ticks leave their unwilling host feeling an awful bodily violation, there's also a grim chance the tick will leave a disease behind.  Then there's the unpleasant paranoia that comes after one finds a tick on the body of oneself or a loved one.  Every smallish object from a pebble to a piece of lint becomes the specter of doom and defilement.

Then there's the formication.  You know, that ghastly tactile hallucination whereby one feels there is something crawling on the skin.


To paraphrase Waylon Jennings.  Are you ready for the country, are you ready for ticks?

Clean Bees

Some insects live in the ground.  Sometimes they make their home in your home turf.  Some such winged bugs have located their hive in an area of lawn between our kitchen window and the driveway.

Since I am in the habit of walking willy-nilly about the yard, I've experienced irritable insects flying up my shirt.  (Hot under the collar does not begin to describe my feelings about this.) 


Some call these creatures ground bees.  Some call them sweat bees.  I call them uppity squatters.

The last straw was trespass on the dogs' water bowl.

Unfortunately, these gals did not stop by and eat the bees.  Thus, some other method of debeement was called for.

 



Throw a Tarp on the Problem 

This method is supposed to kill the bees softly.  You sneak out after dark when all the bees have retired to their slumber room deep in the hole.  You place the tarp over the hole, lay some heavy object(s) on top of the tarp.  Flee the scene.

The theory is, come morning when the bees awaken and attempt to leave the nest, they will be unable to get out and smother under the tarp.  Doesn't really sound like it'll work, does it?

It didn't work.  The industrious bees dug through the grass under the tarp till they reached the edge of the tarp.  Off they flew.  They couldn't get back under the tarp to go back into their hole, however. 

Soon, a mob of agitated bees amassed.  They flew round and round above the tarp.  More and more bees joined the air queue, creating a state a major unrest.

The tarp method only made things worse.



Clean Them to Death

This method is supposed to poison the bees without using scary dangerous poison.  Basically, you pour some soap down their hole.  It so happens, since our new house has no dishwasher, there was a nearly full box of dishwasher soap on hand, yearning to be used.  I dumped a whole bunch of the dishwasher soap down the hole.  A great deal of soap powder remained near the opening of the hole.  The bees continued to come and go -into the hole and out of the hole. 

The next day some powder could still be seen around the entrance of the hole.  The bees continued to come and go. 

The day after that, the powder was gone.  The bees continued to come and go -into the hole and out of the hole.


Several days passed.  The bees continue to come and go.  Yesterday I mopped the floors in the house.  Afterwards, I dumped the bucketful of dirty Spic n Span water into the hole.

Today, the bees continue to come and go -into the hole and out of the hole.

They are still uppity squatters.  All that has changed is they are clean uppity squatters.


To be continued, surely.

Cicadas

Many people have heard but never seen a Cicada.  That whirring buzzing clicking sound you hear in the summer air is a male Cicada.  Vibrating membranes on the insect's abdomen create this sound.  You might call it a love song.

After the loving, the female cuts a slit in a young twig and deposits eggs.  Now the parent Cicadas have fulfilled their life's purpose and die.

When the eggs hatch the nymphs (wingless segmented creatures resembling a grub with sturdy legs and big eyes) fall to the ground and burrow into the dirt.  They remain underground sucking on root juices and growing for years, the number of years depends on the species and things like latitude and weather and other mysterious forces that effect bugs.

When the nymph reaches adulthood he emerges from the ground and climbs a tree.  The skin on his back splits open, peels back and out comes the adult Cicada. 

Some Cicada Facts

-  approximately 3,000 species

-  adult life span:  1 week

-  nymph life span:  1 to 20 years

-  adults have 4 wings

-  range:  throughout the US and southern Canada

-  adult size:  1 - 2.5 inches long 

To listen to the love songs visit :   http://insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/fauna/Michigan_Cicadas/Michigan/Index.html

picture shared by:

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/bugs/cicada/





Walt vs Cicada

Yesterday I witnessed a fight to the death.  Happily, one of the combatants was already on the verge of death when the battle began. 

Wait.  Happily?  It was probably not all that happy for the Cicada.



The fight began as Walt and I were walking down the sidewalk, as we are on most weekdays around noon.  Walter and I have a working relationship.  I come over to Walter's house while his daddy is at work and we take a walk.

Mid and late summer here in southern Michigan is often hot.  It seems like the sidewalks glow with a  hostile power this time of year.  Mid and late summer is also a time when one notices Cicadas dropping well, like flies.  Lots of times these death throeing insects do it right there on the sidewalk.  Once the Cicada hits the sidewalk he is pretty much out of energy.  His life force nearly spent, he gasps desperately to retain the remnants of his vigor as the concrete steams beneath him. When threatened, he cannot fly away.  However, he can manage a strange buzzing sound that vibrates his body, causing it to zip around.  

This is just what happened on that fateful Thursday, otherwise known as yesterday.  Walt felt compelled to pursue the zipping bug.  He got his lips on it but recoiled at the weird vibration.  That didn't stop him, he went back for another go,  gingerly pushing his nose on the now motionless Cicada.  Another bzzz another zip.  The bug was moving slowly, but managed to slip himself into the cover of some ornamental grass.  Now Walt could not reach the Cicada.  He glanced up at me. The bug was valiantly struggling to dig himself in between two shoots of grass.  I am loathe to admit this, but I bent down and parted the grass, giving Walt another shot at his ever weakening opponent.

Walt thrust his face in the grass, grasped the Cicada in his mouth and bit down.  He backed away from the clump of grass and dropped his vanquished foe onto the sidewalk. 

The Cicada moved no more.  I waited, certain that Walter would eat the Cicada.  Surely, a macho guy like Walt has some sort of warrior code that requires him to consume the flesh of his enemy to possess the enemy's strength -or something.  Failing romantic heroic reasons,  I thought at the very least Walt would eat the bug because he could. 

He didn't.   Walt and I continued with our walk.  The defeated Cicada lay on the hot sidewalk.

 

**Walter is a pseudonym.  This pugnacious terrier has been fooling folks for years with a soft and fuzzy persona.  I will keep his secret.

***we at Pets and Other Critters lack the technological ability to alter photographs to hide ones identity....remarkably an "artist" happened by and agreed to render a drawing to help bring the action to life.  Cool, huh?  It's almost like those court scene drawings you see on the news!

!!!!! Coming Soon! Fun Facts about Cicadas!!!!!!

Shining Light on the Firefly

Fireflies are bugs with a glowing, or luminescent, quality.  This light is generated from an organ in the insect's abdomen surrounded by nerves, fatty material and air tubes.  Oxygen combines with a substance called lucifern to produce light without heat.  How the bugs turn the light on and off is not known.  All in all, the Firefly has a cool light meant for the heat of love.  (Best explained in that delightful old song, Glow Worm).

Fireflies are beetles.  The adult Firefly has wings covered by a wing cover.  In many species only the male has wings.  The female sometimes looks much like a larva, which is to say, she resembles a heavily segmented worm. 

The average Lightening Bug tastes bad.  The glowing may serve to warn predators to avoid eating them.  In some species, not only are adult Fireflies luminescent, the eggs and larvae shine too.

Romance is believed to be the main reason for the Firefly's luminescence. Different species have different patterns to their light flashes.  After all that enlightenment, the male and female find each other.  They mate (sometimes the female eats the male in the afterglow).  Within two days, the female lays eggs in the ground.  In a month or so, the eggs hatch into larvae.  The larvae live in the dirt eating slugs, snails and worms.  Over the winter, the larvae hibernate.  In spring, they emerge in a pupa stage.  By summer, they are adults ready to mate. 

Illuminating Firefly Facts

- approximatley 200 species
- they appear on every continent except Antarctica
- average life span larva: 1 year
- average life span adult:  2 months
- size:   1/4-1 inch long




picture shared by http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/bugs/firefly/

Lady Bugs

The insects that most of us call Lady Bugs are Lady Beetles or Ladybird Beetles.  The Lady Bug is found all over the world.  There are some 450 different species of Lady Beetle in North America.

Ladybird Beetles eat aphids, mites, scales, and other pest style bugs.  A pest bug is one that eats plants, particularly plants that humans grow for food or show.  This is why Lady Bugs are considered "good bugs".  A few thousand Ladybird Beetles can control the aphid population on an acre of land.

Typical insects, Lady Bugs have a head, thorax, abdomen and six legs.  The head is usually black, or black with white spots.  The Lady Bug has a pair of eyes and a pair of antennae.  The head is attached to the thorax which is attached to the dome shaped abdomen.  This dome consists of hard wings in red, orange or yellow with an assorted number of black dots.  Under this shell like dome are another set of wings that are used for flight.  The  Lady Beetle has short legs, much shorter than most other beetles.

Some Ladybird Beetle Facts

-  lifespan 2-3 years

-  able to retract their head into their thorax (visualize a turtle)

-  secrete a foul tasking fluid from their joints to discourage predators

-  adults range in size from 1/8th to 3/8th inches long

-  some species eat plants 

Most Lady Bugs lay their eggs in clusters near aphid populations.  The larvae emerge and eat the aphids.  In the typical larvae's 3- 6 weeks they eat up to 5,000 aphids.  The larvae are black and bristly in appearance and are usually found clinging to leaves with a belly full of aphids.  Ladybird Beetles lay several batches of eggs per year.

Why do you sometimes find Lady Bugs in your house?  These insects hibernate in groups, generally in places where aphids live.  Therefore, Lady Beetles hibernate in plant brush, under rocks and in buildings.  If they are in your house, this may mean you have aphids in your house.  Or you did, before the Lady Bugs came in and ate them.

Thank you http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/bugs/ladybug/?source=A-to-Z for sharing the lady bug picture.

Real Crickets Don't Wear White Gloves

An overwhelming number of Cricket species spend most of their time on or under ground.  It's dirty down there in the dirt.  Jiminy Cricket wouldn't stand a chance in the wild.

Nevermind cartoon characters right now.  The real live cricket is quite an interesting character. 

Crickets are insects, cousins to the grasshopper and cockroach.  Insects in general, have six legs, an exoskeleton, antennae, eyes, jaws, wings, a digestive system, a nervous system, respiration system, and their bodies are separated into three parts, head, thorax and abdomen.

The cricket on the left is a male.  The female is on the right.  Notice the middle appendage on the female's rump.  This is used to lay eggs.  She shoves her oviposter into the ground (or into plant tissue) to deposit her eggs.  The eggs are laid singly or in pods of 10-200.






Some Cricket Facts

- found everywhere except very cold places, such as Antartica

- life cycle: two or three generations a year in the South.  One generation a year in the North: eggs or nymphs, overwinter in the soil and adults appear in the spring or summer.

- most active at night

- roughly 20,000 species

- larve (nymphs) pretty much resemble adults (rather like puppies resemble the dogs they become)

- some crickets are solitary, some live in colonies, or swarms




The most commonly seen crickets are Field Crickets.  They are medium sized bugs, black or brown in color, with a stout body and small wings incapable of flight.  There are however, other cricket species that are camouflaged to look like leaves or bark, stones or sand.  Other crickets are near blind burrowers that  never surface.  Some crickets are brightly colored, signalling their distasteful or toxic nature to warn away would-be predators.

Cricket predators include:  spiders, other insects, lizards, frogs and birds.  The cricket's legs are designed for hopping to escape being eaten.  Many crickets avoid prey status by spending the bulk of their time hiding in or under plants, in sidewalk cracks, and under the dirt. 

At night they emerge to eat plant foliage, roots, dead plant and animal material, algae, mud and the microorganisms in mud.

Also at night the (usually male) cricket makes a sort of chirping sound using his stridulatory organs.  These musical notes are for courtship (some species dance too!) and for territorial annoucements.  The stridulation organs are located in vents on the bases of the fore-wings.  When rubbed together, sound is produced.

The call of the male Snowy Tree Cricket is slower when the air is cool and is said to be a measure of temperature.  Count the number of chirps in 15 seconds add 40, and you have the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.














images:  Bing, Audubon Pocket Guide:  Familiar Insects and Spiders
sources:  Enclycopedia of Insects  edited by  Christopher O'Toole,

Insects, A Golden Nature Guide