Rants from the Hollow

I found the above scene yesterday on the underside of a leaf on a lima bean vine.  It just doesn’t look good to me.  Maybe these are some kind of beneficial bug-eating bug, but I’m guessing no.

It isn’t even clear to me what is happening.  The white things are pretty obviously eggs. They are actually kinda cool looking, with little super hero masks carefully painted on each one (click on the picture for an enlargement).

The red things are too big to have recently originated from inside one of those eggs. I think these are the nymph form of some bigger insect, but I don’t know what.

Are they eating the eggs, protecting the eggs, or just hanging out with them?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.