Taken at Boone Hall Plantation in SC.
5000 species of dragonflies and damselflies
Life span is usually a month.
Speed 20-40mph, which is why you can’t catch one unless it is dead.
Dinner is mostly midges and mosquitoes. Yum.
Classification:
Enjoy the beauties! Taken in Charleston, SC at the Boone Hall Plantation.
Check out what I found. Florida Museum of Natural History – Florida Wildflowers and Butterflies
I don’t know what the above one is. Anyone know?
Gulf Fritillary – very common butterfly in Florida.
Julia – Female Found this one on the website I linked to above. You can tell it is a female by the brown stripe on the wings.
Monarchs
Zebra Longwing – Florida state butterfly.
My fellow friends (that live in my computer) and I have long forgotten the Nailed It/Failed It Pinterest Challange. Life happens. Today I decided to post this on my own.
Ants. We have them. We have lots of them. They get into our house when it rains. They get into our house when it doesn’t rain. They crawl up the outside of our house, down our sidewalk, and under our cars. It’s endless.
I found on Pinterest information on how to stop ants from at least entering the house. Use chalk. That’s right just plain ole chalkboard chalk. Just make a line with the chalk where you do not want the ants to cross and they will not cross the line. HA! Yeah, right.
Weeellllll, lookie here! I have a long line of ants crawling up the outside of our home.
I used green chalk so it is visible and look what happens! Boom! Instant road block. Immediately the ants start piling up at the line and will not cross it. What I found really amazing, but you can’t see it here, the ants above the road block turned around and came back to help the blocked ants. Unfortunately, they couldn’t cross the line either.
Just to make sure this was working, I placed another line. Now this confused the ants more. They could not go forward or backwards. I was surprised to see the ants could not figure out to go left or right to get out.
And because I am mean…..
This is so totally awesome and fun!
Still don’t believe me? Look at this “professional done” lol, video.
I don’t remember where I saw this or when I actually took the photo. I do remember thinking it was interesting, since it has a green abdomen.
A spider!
This male spider is called a tropical orb weaver. It comes in many shapes and sizes. 😀 Sometimes they have the green spot on the back and sometimes not. Same goes for the two little black dots you see at the rear.
They like open woodlands. During the day they like to hang around under leaves folded together with silk, like the one in this picture. Their bite is not harmful to humans.
Kingdom Animalia
Phylum Arthropoda
Subphylum Chelicerata
Class Arachnida
Order Araneae
Posted in God's Creatures
Tagged biology, God's Creatures, Homeschool, science, spiders
This little fellow as found on the back of Sir Husband’s truck. He was just hanging around and enjoying the limelight.
I have not seen one of these before.
He is grayish color with some green. He isn’t smooth like the Green Treefrog and his toe pads are much larger than the Green Treefrog. I think he is rather cute.
Pine Woods Tree Frog climb high in trees, preferring pine trees. Good thing they like to climb, because it could have ended up like this or this.
Size about 1.5 inches. Diet insects.
While out hunting for insects, I turn on the back porch light to attrack moths. Within a few minutes I heard this rustling.
Yay, says me, sounds like a huge moth! I take a look in the light area and notice it wasn’t a moth. It was a bat! A bat, people!
I have always wanted a bat house and now I have one on my own porch! It was not happy that the light was on, so I turned it off and promptly took pictures. Look at this cutie.
I do not know what kind it is. It’s small. After a while it left, but I am hoping it will return. I am not sure what to do if it does return. I don’t think it is wise for it to live in our lamp.
Anyone know what kind this is?
Wrens will build their nests anywhere. They’re not picky! I have found nests in a planter right next to our front door. I got to watch the babies leave the nest while the mama called to them. Last month William opened our propane compartment on Phil and out fell a wren’s nest. That was sad, because the eggs broke.
The nest you see below was built in William’s work bucket on the side porch. There are three or four babies in there.
This nest was just outside a window, so we were blessed to see the mom and dad feed the babies.
South Carolina State Bird
Diet: insects – yummy!
For more information on these birds and to hear their sound go to The Cornell Lab
Posted in Apologia Biology, God's Creatures, science
Tagged Apologia Biology, birds, God's Creatures, science
Sir Son announced there was a cricket on our garbage can and that I should get my camera. So I did. 🙂
There are 75 species in Florida and several do not have formal scientific names yet. The music crickets make is produced by rubbing one wing on top of the other wing. Many crickets are able to produce several different kinds of songs, mainly to attract the ladies. When you hear the music at night, just remember love is in the air.
Majority of the crickets do not fly. They use their large back legs for jumping to get around. Sometimes they can even make me jump when one comes out of no-where and lands on me.
This cricket is a female. You can tell by the ovipositor (long pointy thing at the back) for laying eggs. They lay between 175 to 200 eggs. The nymphs look much like the adults, without wings. This kind of cricket is on the larger size of the scale; about 1 inch. The smallest one is less than 1/4 of an inch. These are Ant-loving Crickets and clean up after ants in the ant hill. I have read that the Ant-loving Crickets make a tweeting sound in the ant hill, but who wants to put their ear down to an ant hill to find out?
The cricket has compound eyes. It can see many places at once. Major wow factor there. The antenna is used for feel. Every time I moved the camera to a different angle, this little lady would move her antenna. It was always on the camera. It was almost like she was “holding up a hand” and saying , “BACK OFF!”. Of course I didn’t listen.
Afterwards, Sir Son put the garbage cans back and the cricket went on her way.
Classification:
Posted in Apologia Biology, God's Creatures, Homeschool, science
Tagged Apologia Biology, classification, God's Creatures, Homeschool, insects, science
Typical Voice Click here scroll down to find the link. So cool. I clicked on it and my dogs started barking; then ran to the door to go outside.
Barred Owl
Adult:
16 – 25 inches
1 – 2 pounds
Habitat: Dense wooded areas
Food: Meadow voles, mice, and shrews.
I took this photo at Palatka Ravines on 2/26/2011. It was so close to us! 
I made this photo into journal pages. I was playing around with a photo editing thing and discovered I could remove the background with a click of a button. Then I placed the owl as a watercolor in Word. Now, for the life of me, cannot find where I was able to do that. 
If anyone knows what I did, please tell me. I’d like to make more journals like this. 
Owl Journal Page 5×8″ size
Hope you enjoy it.
Posted in Apologia Biology, God's Creatures, Homeschool, science
Tagged biology, God's Creatures, Homeschool, journal pages, science
It’s all about putting things in the proper order.
We are not talking about things in my house, because nothing in my house is in proper order. It’s hopeless…
What we are talking about today is Classification of animals. Insects to be exact. We all love those creepy crawlies! If you don’t, then you can’t be my friend.
In Apologia Biology, Experiment 12.2 is all about classifying. There are six insects to classify. That’s SIX out of 4,000,000 different kinds of insects. Isn’t that exciting!? Makes me want to jump for joy…NOT!
So, I came up with a better plan. I cancelled the experiment, the write-up, and did something else. I would say it was completely different, but it wasn’t.
I found at a local school supply store pictures of insects meant for a bulletin board. It had all kinds of pretty bugs! There was even a roach! As I was punching out the insects to be laminated, I said, “It would be really cool if there was a Palmetto Bug in here too.” The clerk said, “You know, I think you are the only person I have ever heard that say Palmetto Bugs were cool.”
Before class, I looked through the bugs and made labels using 3″ x 9″ flash cards. The labels listed all the orders needed for the insects, plus the Kingdom: Animalia; Phylum: Arthrodoa; and Class: Insecta.
The Order is what we are interested in. The students placed the Order flash cards on the window and then proceeded to classify the insects. I read from the textbook and reference books, the characteristic of each bug. Then the students had to decide where the insect was to be placed.
The finished project looks like this. The Kingdom, Phylum, and Class should be above the Orders.
This assignment was to help the students learn to classify insects and to prepare them for the upcoming insect collecting assignment. There are more insect orders that are not listed in the book, so I told the students to do some research to find what order their bug is in.
I don’t want them to only use Wikipedia. That is the lazy man’s way of doing things. I have used it many times myself, but we won’t talk about that.
I recommend my favorite all time insect book, Florida’s Fabulous Insects as a reference.
I also recommend: Bug Guide and Insecta. Just Google your state and insects. You’ll get lots of great links. Also, don’t forget your library!
You are probably thinking, “OK so, where do I fit in?” That’s no problem at all. Simply look at the above board, select your class, and Wah-lah you have it!
You are a beautiful butterfly or a true bug or anything you like. If you want to be a Blattaria, then so be it. I won’t judge.
FYI: Balttaria in Latin means “insect that shuns the light”.
More FYI: Orders: Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, coleoptera, Orthoptera and Diptera, (as listed in the Apologia book) have the same suffix ptera. Ptera means “winged” in Greek. Thanks to Melanie for all her Greek and Latin braininess.
Some helpful posts:
Posted in Apologia Biology, God's Creatures, Homeschool, science
Tagged Apologia Biology, Apologia Science, biology, God's Creatures, Homeschool, science
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