Farewell to June; also, an ENORMOUS beetle is plotting our destruction

What a glorious send-off for June here in southern Vermont. A stunning, stunning day.
I did my Reiki shift at the hospital, and then met up with a friend and ran some errands with her. Giving her a ride home apparently entitled me to plunder and pillage in her strawberry patch, for gas money. Or at least I tried to plunder and pillage. She yelled at me and made me be more methodical in my strawberry picking, even going so far as to have me pick the gross, mildewed berries for her chickens. The nerve.

I didn’t have my camera with me at the time, so this is an after-the-fact snapshot of part of my haul. Tomorrow: I’m pretty sure strawberry rhubarb pie will happen, assuming I still have some chopped up rhubarb lurking somewhere in the freezer.
No flower pictures! Instead, scary beetle pictures!

I think this might be Prionus laticollis and…yes! according to the same guru who helped me out with my previous requests on bugguide.net, it is! What mad skills I have! I am able to look at one picture…and say that it looks similar to another picture!
OK, so Prionus laticollis is the broad-necked root borer. The larvae eat rotting wood.

I wonder if all that business in the beetle’s back end is egg-laying equipment. Meaning what, she thinks our front steps are rotting? Hey, wait just one minute there, little lady!
Her face looks like it’s covered in spider web.

It also looks like it’s been bashed in.
OK, so not only do we have a beetle that is attempting to destroy our front steps, we have a ginormous spider capable of beating the hell out of a two-inch long beetle.
I’m not sure I’m going to sleep tonight.

Dandelion saga, Part 4; plus bonus footage of other random goodness.

First up, dandelions:

• In Part 1, I took a look at dandelion flowers closing up.
• In Part 2, we had fun with dandelion flowers that had opened up into puffballs.
• In Part 3, we had a bit of a diversion looking at botched dandelion puffballs.

And now, with pride, I bring you, Part 4: the Elusive Missing Link. In the interest of full disclosure, I’d taken these pictures last week, BUT, I didn’t appreciate their Profound Significance until today.

The individual seed filaments have separated from one another, but their starburst parachutes have not yet opened up. Plus, remember the remnant phenomenon of the botched puffballs? That’s that cluster of drying-up yellow flower petals and green sepals, at lower right in the picture above. Well, this picture seems to show what it looks like when that bit is falling off the way it’s supposed to. BRILLIANT! just brilliant.

The one in the foreground: opened up. The one at the top right: partially opened.

VICTORY. I have now more-or-less documented the whole phenomenon of the dandelion going to seed.
I’m ready for my Pulitzer now.

In other news, I’ve been wondering if the False Solomon’s Seal flowers would ever get more…interesting. So far, they’ve just looked…unripe:

Not very brilliant, huh?

Well today, I found the one that’s the furthest along:

Now that’s more like it!

In the meantime… onto a very similar looking flower…the white baneberry I’m so in love with…See at the center of the circles of stigmas, there are oval-looking berries forming? Hallelujah!

Plus, the whole…apparatus…has gotten bigger, and you can really see the stubby little stems at the base of each flower are getting longer. All the better to make way for those newly-forming berries.

The Siberian Irises are just starting to show where their flowers will be. They were just shoots three and a half weeks ago:

Siberian Irises, May 2

And today. Deep purply goodness will soon be upon us.

The report from the fern naughty bits is that life is good. 

Just a couple of days ago, here – May 25.

A different kind, today. Getting scrunched up. Probably a different species, but still. I wonder why this is happening.

I think I know who’s involved with pollinating the red baneberry. [Editor's Note: this is probably actually wild sarsaparilla - Aralia nudicaulis)

This dude crash landed into me today. I managed to avoid shrieking and actually was reaching for the camera when he fell to the ground – I swear I didn’t touch him. He seemed stunned and let me zoom in on him. I’m going with “bug” as a general ID.