Bug eggs

Somebody else's eggs -- but if you look closely you see they are being visited -- raided? -- by a small fly. I wonder if it is preparing some parasitic surprise for the little buglets that will hatch. The eggs were on a rhubarb leaf; the cluster was a quarter-inch high. And I cheated and used flash -- it was getting dark.

The little winged thing is tiny -- bear in mind that the eggs themselves are about 1/16-inch tall,. I would guess it's a parasitic wasp, but it looks a lot more like a fly, particularly its antennae. And I can find nothing in the literature about little parasitic flies that go after insect eggs. So for now it is a mystery.

Now we have two of the flying insects -- it would make sense if they were wasps, but these look like flies, which is a puzzle -- and some of the eggs are changing color. What will happen next?

Nothing much new this morning. Flies (or whatever they are) still there. I don't have time (or patience) to watch these full-time, and time-lapse would be cool but would involve my leaving my camera out in the rain (and the leaf would move out of focus in the breeze anyway), but I hope to catch them when activity from within the eggs begin.

I'm not sure that this is the same as the flying things the last two days, but this flying thing, tiny and sadly not in focus, has the antennae of a wasp.

If you look closely next to the leftmost one and in the middle on the right, you'll see that some new little creatures have come to live on, or at least among, them.

Day five of the egg watch provides, finally, a picture that makes it clear that a tiny parasitic wasp is among the visitors.