You may notice that the title of the post is followed by the Roman numeral III. That means that it is part of a series 🙂

You can check out the earlier posts by clicking on: Flora and Fauna and Flora and Fauna II

Tonight I will share a few more pictures that combine flora and fauna.

Here we have a rose bud from my St. Patrick rose bush. The bud does have a few small insects on it as well as a few little grubs.

These rose buds are from my yellow floribunda rose bush. You can see that the primary bud here is covered with aphids and other insects. This was before I put my special little helpers to work.

Here we have a little Coccinella septempunctata (seven-spotted ladybug or C-7) crawling on one of my rose bushes early in the year. You can see the first growth of the year emerging from the stalk. Ladybugs are very effective for aphid control. Several times I have bought them at the hardware store when I have had a lot of aphids. Now I have enough of them around that I haven’t had to buy them for quite some time.

Aphids also make me think of ants. Here we see some large golden ants on a leaf in Bangalore, India. The picture was previously used in post I wrote last year called Golden Palms. There are several other flora and fauna pictures in the Golden Palms post.

Ants and aphids have a symbiotic relationship. If you have aphids, you will usually find ants as well. The ants farm the aphids for honeydew and protect them from threats such as ladybugs.

I can see one of these big golden ants taking on a ladybug, but not the little black ones that I have in my rose garden.

Steven