Butterflies, bees, and brethren (and bugs)

You're thinking "ah, an excuse for macro pictures of interesting and lovely insects on the farm". Not so fast.

Far more than anonymous pests or lovely colored flutter bys, insects are by far the largest class of animals on Earth, with roughly a million named species and likely four times that many awaiting identification. They support most terrestrial food chains, serve as the planet’s chief pollinators, and act as critical recyclers, decomposing and returning other life forms to the Earth to be reused.

We do have some lovely ones here in Maryland's Piedmont and our goal is not to catalog them all here.

If all us humans vanished, the Earth would quickly establish a richer ecosystem without us.

If all the insects vanished, the ecosystem we inherited and currently abuse would collapse into chaos.

The bugs

Other helpers