Sunday 9 September 2018

We Awoke To Find That We Had A Guest,

well an outside guest,


 who was on the balcony,

 one of the 15,000 or so species of jeweled beetles, (Buprestidae), they are tough little blighters, jewel beetles are extremely good flyers and can fly up to 50 km in a single day, 

  and you definitely do not want to be bitten by a larval jewel beetle, in some the hardness in the cutting edge of the mandibles is in excess of the mineralized carapace of stone crabs and compares favourably with some stainless steels! these insects can range from 3 to 10 cm in size, the iridescence common to these beetles is not due to pigments in the skeleton, but instead due to a microscopic texture in their cuticle that selectively reflects specific frequencies of light, as an aside there are over 300 species of jewel beetles in Thailand, 

 in the evening we were outside for our meal, for tonight some chili con carne,

followed by Swensens chocolate ice cream, delicious! we listened to music until the midnight hour then we were off to bed.


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