Great pics, and I love to watch the little critters that visit the gardens! I spend hours contorting myself into strange positions to get pictures of the pollinators and other visitors. At first, the bees or butterflies seem skittish when I first appear, but after a few minutes, they seem to get used to this big human creature with a camera. They let me get very close sometimes. Here are a couple of the assorted bees that come to pollinate - Yesterday was very exciting, a female Monarch was alternating between nectaring and laying eggs on the Asclepias tuberosa and incarnata. Here she is nectaring - And here she is laying an egg - Can you spot the butterfly in this picture? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oh, here she is!

mrclint: Nice tree. Glad to see others singing the praises of Page mandarin hybrid. Most people don't know it is closer to a grapefruit than an orange (in its genes). Page responds very well to fruit thinning as Patty mentioned for those suffering with small Page fruit. When I moved from Houston, in 04, Page was the first tree I planted. The tree was on citrange rootstock. That Christmas eve night it started snowing about 9 PM and continued until about 4am. My Page and about 60 other potted citrus were covered with two layers of heavy duty frost blanket so I did not care. Next morning there were 8 inches of wet snow on the ground. I could not see where the frost blanket was! It looked like a big igloo out there. I now have two more Page trees on standard trifoliate. One was supposed to be a Lee. The original Page was damaged in a bad freeze in the winter of 09/10. The bark split all the way past the graft line. But it is holding up better than I thought possible. My frost blanket ripped that night.

We have lots of new toads or frogs, I'll have to look up the images to see, and some baby ones as well. Our two dachshunds were each watching a toad (my guess) . The younger one was using a front foot to keep it from moving away while she observed it. I'm hoping if they get too close and try to do bodily harm to the toad, that it squirts them with some bitter stuff. Might make them foam at the mouth, but it is all for a good cause. They need to learn to leave them alone. I now believe the hissing pot from last year held a toad which got stuck with my plant name tag. I had another pot hiss at me this spring. And, in a newly planted hosta, next day there was a hole between two eyes, just right size for a toad to slip down to the bottom. I left it alone, but put new mix in the hole. I tell myself it is a hissing toad anyway. I'm thinking too that wild birds eat slugs. Yuck.

So it is a girl!!!!! I wouldn't have guessed yellowthroat but now I see the females lack the mask. Yellowthroats seem especially vulnerable to window crashes.