hahahaha i’m cracking up. wonderland is also known as eastern virginia. it is a picture of my hand in a mirror... it was the only way i could get a picture of one i didn’t squish right away. they haven’t been found near plants. the antennae has given me issues with identifying it. but the small white/yellowish horizontal stripe on its abdomen seems to be a good place to start. i’ve been looking at pictures! the only other thing that i could consider relevant is that it’s been rainy here for the last two weeks so not sure if he and his friends are looking for a dry spot

Very tiny, pin head size or smaller. There will be clouds of them over my lawn in the hottest time of the day. When you walk towards them them they will move away. Not gnat or fly like, they don't go for the ears, eyes or nose. I was maybe 5 feet away from the bugs in the pic. The picture has a less dense sample of the "clouds" that are usually there.

I'll try that (it's been raining all day here so I'll wait until it dries out a bit, hopefully tomorrow) ... there's lots of funky looking stuff under that fabric liner and I would love NOT to have to move the whole trug to another location (it's close to a garage with wood clapboard now). There are also several creamy white clusters like these, which may be completely unrelated to the wood slat damage; they look like eggs to me and may be perfectly harmless -- even beneficial??

It is a leaf gall. Galls are atypical growths that form on plant leaves (usually) or other tissues in response to an insect irritation or infrequently, due to a bacterial or viral cause. They almost always tend to be aesthetic in their impact rather than actually posing any harm to the tree or shrub. There are zillions of different galls and many tree and shrub species can be affected.