Little critters

I must apologise for being so slack about writing in my blog. Just when I think I have my life organised so that it is all mine, I volunteer to help people "do things" and so find I have no time at all! Today I have a little time just for me so here I am again!!!
While chasing around in the garden with the camera in search of "small" things for the photographic topic for Visions I came across all sorts of little bugs and spiders. Some lived to see another day but some have hopped off to another planet.

My first photo is not of a Calendular - a rather large showy flower that is usually a brilliant orange colour, no, this is a much small flower that comes up every year in my garden - I bought the first punnet of seedlings about ten years ago and since then I have split them and moved them around the garden and they flower prolifically for about three weeks. Each flower is about the size of a ten cent piece. No way can I remember the name of it though. Sorry about that!
Now I come to the bugs. There were lots of tiny spiders - I was using a macro lens so those tiny spiders now look quite impressive and a bit scary.

Now this one looks quite fearsome! But when you remember the size of a begonia (tree begonia) flower you then may realise that it is very small indeed.
This is the web of another of my garden inhabitants.

I am not sure if Mrs Spider is inside the funnel or if she expects her prey to get trapped in it. The web covered quite a large area between leaves and must have been newly made because there was nothing trapped and it was undamaged in any way.

The last little monster was really small - the web was stretched between three leaves and the spider was weighting down the middle of it. I thought the spider was transparent until I focused the macro lens on it and saw that rather than transparent it was a subtle green colour. The fancy markings on the spider's body surprised me. With the naked eye I couldn't see it. (Mind you I do need glasses if I have to read anything!!!)
 There are plenty more bugs and critters crawling and hopping around in my garden. There are even some miniature grasshoppers that make lots of little round holes in the Chrysanthemum leaves and the ones I found I photographed and sprayed. I obviously did not manage to find all of them because I have found more "aerated" leaves since.
A little reminder before I close. Click on the photos if you would like to see them larger. Click on the "back" arrow (top left) to return to the blog.
AJ