Category Archives: Insects

Bees on palm flowers

Bees on palm flowers in Hawaii

I was watering my coffee plants, early one morning, when I heard a loud buzzing noise. I looked up and saw bees all over the flowers of a palm tree on the edge of the yard. To be honest, I hadn’t noticed the tree had flowers as they’re rather dwarfed by the profusion of fronds. But there are a lot of these small yellow flowers and the bees obviously approve.

Bees on palm flowers in Hawaii

You gotta laugh

Breakfast strikes back
A green anole tries to eat a Chinese Rose Beetle, and loses. Original post here.

This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Comics or Funny Pages (aka silly or funny photos).’ See more responses here.

These are photos that I’ve run before, but quite a while ago. They still make me smile and I hope they do the same for you.

Geckos are endlessly entertaining.

But they’re not the only ones.

A gray chub in the waters off the Big Island
Want to come along? We’re going fishing! Original post here.

Cattleya Labiata orchid

A Cattleya labiata orchid at Hawaii Tropical Bioreserve and Garden
A Cattleya labiata orchid at Hawaii Tropical Bioreserve and Garden

There are many things to like about this orchid. It’s a beautiful flower. It’s an epiphyte, growing on the trunk of a tree. It hosts a small hover fly, which I didn’t notice at the time. And it has a handy tag attached, identifying what it is, which I also didn’t see until later.

There’s an interesting story about the discovery of this flower here.

What’s going on here?

A wasp preening in Hawaii.
A wasp and a crab spider in Hawaii.

The house where I live is ready for Halloween thanks to the generous numbers of spiders living around it. By the front steps, there’s a small Hawaiian Garden Spider and several crab spiders.

One day, I came home and saw a wasp flying close to the various webs. I thought it was dicing with danger, but soon saw that wasn’t the case. Instead, it would approach a web and bob its head toward the spider. It didn’t seem to be a terribly threatening act, though perhaps it was from the spiders perspective. The wasp didn’t push home an attack, but would instead fly away, settle for a bit, and preen itself.

The garden spider didn’t seemed to be bothered by the attention, but the crab spiders would drop suddenly on a strand of silk, before returning to their web as soon as the wasp moved on. I watched these maneuvers for five or ten minutes before heading inside. No webs were damaged, no spiders hurt, and I still don’t know what was really going on!