Every Time The Sun Rises, Domo-Kun Eats Another Bee.

The ladies who really wanted that ginormous brown sunscreen just outside the back door have sat in it a total of...an hour? The Puppy gets more use out of it, laying under the table in the dim brown-tinted sunlight.

To the right, you may be rather displeased to see what I believe is an extraterrestrial harvesting scout. I've seen a few of these over the years, once when I was twelve and much more likely to react by recklessly hurtling through the air to get away from The Thing On My Leg.


The weird-ass bugs that live in our neighborhood love it, though. Sure. They flock to it and can't get out, so we come out to a huge brown screened room full of flying insects. And ants. Sometimes the ants fly, too, but I haven't got the ability to take a really good photo of a flying ant. Bad enough the yellowjacket in the second photo went on to sting my Puppy in the foot. I think. They all look alike. They're also all dying by the sunscreen-load every day. I've had seven yellowjackets go to the great lawn and leaf bag morgue this month.


I can't be afraid of these things anymore when they're so fragile that the appearance of a great brown nylon thing kills them. Maybe it gets too hot, maybe they just can't find their way out and commit bee seppuku, I don't know, but my inner rabid environmentalist worries about the future of bees when my backyard has brought more death to them in one week than overturned trucks and cell phone towers.

All these bees and flying maniacs are upside down in the pictures not because they're dead, but because they're hanging from the ceiling of Domo-Kun.


The cats love the way Japanese beetles (or jitterbugs, or "those noisy bastards that end up in the water bowl") collect inside the sunscreen. The final picture shows the record number (so far) of three armor-shelled, blindly bouncing beetles. I took that picture surrounded by Japanese beetles. Twenty years ago, I would scream and run indoors and stay there for three days if I heard one of them bouncing off the siding. Now, I rescued one that got tangled up in the tied-back panel of screening.

Of course the panels of screening are tied back. If we didn't tie them back the cats and dog couldn't get in and out. Or the birds. Birds have flown in. Luckily, they fly back out again and don't cook themselves on the sun-heated pipes.

I sat inside the sunscreen one day...it was hot.

Every Time The Sun Rises, Domo-Kun Eats Another Bee.