Friday? Halictidae! I’ve always wanted good photographs of sweat bees (Halictidae) and today delivered. As a technical aside: I always thought I did a good job with white balance, and then I tried taking photos of sweat bees, and my fond hopes of reproducing the right colors utterly vanished.
Off to Borderland State Park. For some reason, I’ve never looked for insects at Borderland, even though it’s only five minutes from my house. A rather strange gap, I’m not sure what I was thinking.
I get unreasonably excited by photos of insects flying, and am willing to share them, even if they’re actually pretty crappy:
At this point, I hit sweat bee paydirt. I’m just going to share all my best sweat bee photos from today in one place. These were identified for me as Augochlora pura.
There were many more, but I think that’s enough for now. See why I think sweat bees are so beautiful?
A couple of carpenter ants aka Componotus, I believe. Identifying ants better has been a goal for a long time, maybe it’s time to start working towards it.
I enjoyed this tapestry:
A closeup of a bee’s tongue:
A pretty cute leaf beetle, Chrysomelidae, I think:
Some random photos of the lake:
And an extremely reddish stream:
I find Opilionids (harvestmen) always very photogenic with their long limbs arching out of the focus zone:
Nobody likes flies, ever. But look at those colors:
And finally, a very charismatic, heavy-metal rock-and-roll assassin bug nymph:
a little wild 
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