And the creepy continues...

I know you've all been waiting patiently for more images and stories of decapitation. Cozy Toes is, after all, the smart internet surfer's main source for such educational treasures. Your wait is over! Here in Cozy Toes Land, Friday night involved a trip to the inspection 'scope with many months' worth of (mostly) dead insect samples.  A last second inspiration was to take a sprig of my rosemary plant which has some evidence of aphids.  I put that in the container with the insect bits.  Without further ado, here for your viewing pleasure, the magnified treasures. Click on the image if you'd like to see the larger version. Go on, do it. Go big or go home, right? 

Just slightly down and right of center you can see a pale yellow blip of a creature.
I'm pretty sure that's an aphid that crawled off of the rosemary plant. When I looked
through the scope at this (dead) Crane Fly sample, I yelped and jumped back from the desk.
I did not expect to see something crawling around, alive. 

I wish the camera could fully capture how stunning this Cuckoo Wasp looks in magnified glory. 

This is the actual size of the cuckoo wasp. I've been saving this
in a Gladware plastic leftover container since the end of the summer.

This is the husk of some kind of beetle - similar in size to a ladybug. I probably found it on a
window sill while inspecting my rock or feather collections.  So I added it
to the Gladware Plastic Sample Repository for future study.
In this photo, the beetle husk is resting on it's back, allowing us to see the iridescent hind wings
 folded up under the hard outer elytra. 

A small colony of aphids on that piece of rosemary I brought. Dang it!
They are sucking the life blood out of my beautiful rosemary plant!
Actually, several weeks ago I sprayed Rosemary with Neem Oil and the infestation
is relatively under control. I sprayed her again last night and I'll check in another 10 days
to see if I need to do another treatment. She should make it.


Here you can watch one of the aphids plodding along after I disrupted it with some tweezers. Thrilling, groundbreaking, cinematography. I've never tried to capture video with my silly little camera through one eyepiece of a binocular 'scope. Not as easy as you might think.