This green iridescent sweat bee is loaded with pollen grains after only a few minutes on the flowers! Check out those eyes. This bee is probably :Agapostemon virescens . The black and white banded abdomen is partially obscured by all the pollen. There is a nice concise description of these bees at < http://www.everythingabout.net/articles/biology/animals/arthropods/insects/bees/sweat_bee/ >

These are photos taken with a stereomicroscope or a macro lens and digital camera

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tonygt19 > Money, Mayhem and Murder! Nothing good can come from a meeting between a California bark beetle (Ips paraconfusus) and a Pennsylvania ground beetle (Scarites sp.) with all that silver lying around. This has all the ingredients of a great mystery Novel but I really wouldn't know where to start.

tonygt19 > This dragonfly photo was a result of one of the set ups in the auto-montage how to gallery. Montage Explorer is a program which will automatically create a selected number of automontage images in a horizontal and vertical (to the plane of the image) panorama, then stitch them together. It absolutely could not handle this object. It was necessary to make many separate automontage images manually and then stitch them together manually, a tedious and painstaking job since exposures, color casts, and perspective all vary from photo to photo. Nevertheless on close inspection, retouching artifacts abound. To be fair we are really pushing this system yet the people at Synoptics (US) and Syncroscopy (UK) have been working heroically with us (many hours overtime) to make it all work.

tonygt19 > This green iridescent sweat bee is loaded with pollen grains after only a few minutes on the flowers! Check out those eyes. This bee is probably :Agapostemon virescens . The black and white banded abdomen is partially obscured by all the pollen. There is a nice concise description of these bees at
< http://www.everythingabout.net/articles/biology/animals/arthropods/insects/bees/sweat_bee/ >

tonygt19 > This is a different species of green metallic bee from the previous photo. Still looking for a name. This is an enormous photo in original size ~50MB in TIFF and ~8MB in JPEG as displayed here. Not worth attempting to view the "original" unless you have a very fast internet connection (250KBS+). Instead use the smugloupe in the "Critique" style viewing to view details.

tonygt19 > Bees aren't the only iridescent insects in the flower patch. This green fly was caught in the same patch as the bee at the corner of the cornfield that comes up to our backyard. While the bee above is a four winged hymenopteran, this fly is a two winged dipteran. The second pair of wings have become somewhat vestigal showing up as "halteres" the small round white things near the base of the true wings. The greek root word "ptera" refers to "wing".
"Hymeno-pteran" means "membrane-winged" while "di-pteran" means "two-winged" as you might imagine.

tonygt19 > Just for the fun of it! Here's a crosseyed stereo-pair of Scolytus schevyrewi, the banded elm bark beetle. It reminds us some of Billy Idol, don't know why. The way you visualize the 3D effect is to relax your eyes and stare through the screen into the distance. Let the images drift together until they overlap and Voila! a 3 dimensional image appears! It is easiest to do this with the "large" size. Enjoy! Info on this invasive species can be found at < http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/CoopExt/LARIMER/plantinsectid/>

tonygt19 > An improved shot of red darter? dragon fly munching on the jaw plate of another dragon fly it had killed.

This green iridescent sweat bee is loaded with pollen grains after only a few minutes on the flowers! Check out those eyes. This bee is probably :Agapostemon virescens . The black and white banded abdomen is partially obscured by all the pollen. There is a nice concise description of these bees at
<http://www.everythingabout.net/articles/biology/animals/arthropods/insects/bees/sweat_bee/ >