May 9th, 2007
love on a dandelion
I wasn’t going to post anything for a few days as we’ve been dealing with a stressful event here, but I couldn’t resist sharing a photo taken this morning. While hanging laundry out on the clothesline in the garden, I noticed at least a two or three Spotted Lady Beetles (Coleomegilla maculata) moving about over each of the many of the dandelion flowers in the garden. Some of them were mating. The Spotted Lady Beetle is native to Canada. It’s great to find so many of them active on the flowers. This species can be recognized by its elongated body — in contrast to the rounded body of many other lady beetles. The background colour is a sort of pinkish red, and the elytra (wing covers) have several black spots that are of similar shape on each side. The pronotum (front part of body ahead of the elytra) has two black spots. If you look carefully, you can see the head with buggy little eyes and the two antennae.
As you might have guessed, we don’t spray our lawns and we like dandelions. Without them, we wouldn’t see such wonderful sights as today’s Spotted Lady Beetles. I also noticed some species of solitary bees mating on the flowers this morning. That’s also a good thing to see considering that populations of other pollinators such as the Honey Bee are suffering at the moment.