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Photo#51130
Scale insect based community - Hamamelistes spinosus

Scale insect based community - Hamamelistes spinosus
Fairfield, Wayne County, Illinois, USA
May 4, 2006
These scale insects have infested my River Birch. In the morning ants and beetles congregate below the infested leaves to eat the frass? that has fallen during the night.

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Scale insect based community - Hamamelistes spinosus Scale insect based community - Hamamelistes spinosus Scale insect based community - Hamamelistes spinosus Taking flight - Hamamelistes spinosus Scale insect based community - Hamamelistes spinosus

Moved
Moved from unidentified woolly aphids. The "corrugations" shown in your second image are a characteristic sign of spiny witch hazel gall aphids, in their alternate life as fluffy things on the undersides of birch leaves.

Moved
Moved from Woolly Aphids.

Honeydew
Sap-sucking insects often deal with sap pressure by releasing some of the liquid (otherwise they might burst!). Mostly it hasn't been processed by their digestive systems, so it still has a lot of sugars and other nutrients in it.

Honeydew has been suggested as a possible non-supernatural explanation for the manna mentioned in the scriptures (I don't buy it). It's true that dried honeydew is still gathered from tamarisk groves in the Middle East- but not enough to live off of for long.

I've actually bought candy in an Iranian market here in the Los Angeles area (some years back) that had this tamarisk manna as an ingredient.

 
Cool
Reminds me of the FarSide cartoon of the mosquito that hit an artery. :)