Catching up - Thai Bugs

I'd like to think that the slowdown in posts here is just a reflection of how busy I am doing things. And this week has been busy. There was the meeting of the NGO's in Chiang Mai on Wednesday and Thursday (I only went Wednesday), an all day meeting with farmers to talk about the Bangkok Demonstrations Friday in Lamphun, and today (Saturday) Swe picked us up at 7:30am to take us to his village about 2 hours out of Chiang Mai, just below Doi Inthanon, Thailand's highest mountain.

There are lots of pictures and some video, just no time to go through it all and post. And then there was the rain, the first rain since we got here in early January. But I'm going to start with a post on bugs. A few I have stored up and not yet posted and some beautiful ones we saw today. I'm also going to give a nod to malaeng.com. Maleang means insect in Thai. It's a website with all sorts of information on Thai bugs in both Thai and English.


Wednesday night, coming home after dinner, we saw this great swarm of flying things around most of the lights. We'd seen this thing last year at the Sunday night market once too.

Mr. Deraek, Thursday night after work, was sitting with a baggie of red ant eggs. He said that the black ant larvae are the ones that swarm the lights. Oh yeah, the eggs were for Tok, who supposedly loves them. You have to wash off the mature ants and the larvae first. Then you cook them.



And here's from our trip today with Swe.

A small honey comb.

This was one of those cases where my Canon drives me crazy. I just could not get this damsel fly into perfect focus. It certainly posed ok, but it was always a little blurry. I finally took a short video and maybe I'll just have to post that.

And the butterflies wouldn't hold still at all so I gave up and used the video.



I also have some audio of cicadas which are probably hitting the 60 or 70 decibel level at times. I haven't gotten it post ready yet, but those were quieter cicadas in the background of the butterfly video.