Saturday, May 30, 2015

4-eyes made my day


 As often happens with my little local field trips, I look for one thing and find another.  I was looking for Leopard Lilies, but in my usual spots, they hadn't bloomed yet.  Then I noticed the Showy Milkweeds had almost bloomed.  So close, in fact, that I drove the Oakland Camp Road, Chandler Road, and Highway 70 around Quincy, checking all my Milkweed spots, and finally found some blooming, and as a bonus, the Red Milkweed Beetles, Tetraopes basalis, had arrived for the season.  Photographs of them crawling around on Milkweed and on each other coming soon.  Tetraopes means four eyes, and the basalis part indicates these eyes (actually two) are at the bases of the antennae.  Each eye is more or less split by the antenna so it looks like two.

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