A pause before launching into an ancient, ruined world,
the tiniest dragon has you where it wants you,
ravished, a bit chilled,
before you fall back to earth,
charred, warped, and forgotten.
 

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Soldier Beetle | Cantharidae

I’m the Featured Artist on the Fotomoto.com site today, with one of my ant images.
 

Is there a way of knowing that ants actually experience emotion?
Read more here: Ants and Answers: A Conversation with E. O. Wilson.
 

Biologist and theorist E. O. Wilson has a story, Trailhead,
in the current issue of The New Yorker.
Here’s an excerpt and an image of two curious ants:
 

The Trailhead Queen was dead.
 

Ants live most of their lives in underground darkness, they cannot communicate through sight or sound. Pheromonal, they think only in taste and smell. The members of the Trailhead Colony transmitted their messages using about a dozen chemical signals, which they picked up by smelling one another constantly with sweeps of their antennae.
 

The Trailhead Colony, when all the learning and thought of its workers came together, was very smart, by insect standards — and, with the unifying power of its Queen lost and its population growth plummeting, it needed to call on that group intelligence to regain its balance.
 

A few warm-ups now, but nothing like the workouts
to come for one of the tiniest Olympians.
Count the number of ants on the road to to Vancouver.
 

Ants may not meditate, but this ant seems to have found the still point of the turning microwilderness, a momentary pause in its ceaseless activity.
 

The image is also the cover to my book of portraits from the microwilderness, Bug Dreams.

Twirl like fire, leap at the sun.
Let’s twist again like we did last summer.
This honey bee wants to rock with you.

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Honey bee | Apis mellifera

        My latest play, an unauthorized staging of Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”, the actors all untrained, unemployed ants:

       ”Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

I’m not sure what could be sexier than the mating flies in my last post, but over at the Myrmecos blog, they’ve been discussing “Why Ants are Cooler than Flies“.

Are they? The ant below makes its case for being cooler than you.

See the Still Point

Officials at Spain’s Prado museum announced that “Colossus” (below), one of Goya’s great last paintings, may not be a Goya, but by one of his assistants. Genuine or not, it’s still one of my favorites, and the rough painterly style works well.

“Seated Giant” is still considered authentic.

An ant finds a little pocket hideaway, between the petals of a dandelion.

I’m hoping we’ll have a nice day for my nature photography workshop tomorrow, but life underfoot goes on no matter the weather. Rain and clouds can produce some great light, and bring out creatures from their usual hideouts.

Ants are not as effective at pollination as bees, but they do play a role. June 22-28 is the 2nd Annual National Pollinator Week. More information at the Pollinator Partnership.

A short hop in a busy day, a bumblebee darts across my backyard dandelion highway. The dandelions were late this year, but are out in full force now, providing pollen for many ants and other insects.

In the larger Zoomified image in the link below, you can see some pollen particles scattered in the air by the explosive lift-off.

Here’s an experiment to see an enlarged image. Click here to Zoomify it.
I’m working on a way to enlarge it within this post, without the link.