I was out prowling my yard with my new camera looking for good pictures when I saw this White Peacock Butterfly apparently sipping nectar from a Climbing Aster Flower.. I froze and grabbed a picture from a distance because I didn't have a photo of anything nectaring on that kind of flower, and I didn't want to risk scaring the butterfly away before I got one. Then I moved in for a closer shot:

Do you see what's wrong yet? As I clicked a few shots, I noticed a few things:

- The butterfly isn't feeding - its proboscis is all curled up.

- There are too many legs, and some are clearly NOT butterfly legs!

- The butterfly should have flown away as I got in really close for the last pictures, but it didn't.

The last time I ran across a similar situation with a butterfly hanging from a flower but acting wrong, an ambush bug was eating it. These legs were absolutely not ambush bug legs! A closer look from the other side revealed a spider, but it was under the flower, so I plucked the branch, butterfly, spider, and all, and brought it to the porch for a little photo shoot.

The spider kept walking away with the butterfly (strong little sucker!), so I finally gave up and put it in a bug box to finish eating (the butterfly was beyond help.)

Now the spider has let go of the butterfly, but I haven't quite figured out how to take pictures of it without having it leave, or possibly bite me. I'll make page two on this spider when I figure that out.

According to Wikipedia, there are 41 species of Misumena spiders. I'm guessing this one could be a male Misumena vatia, but I'm not sure, because I couldn't find pictures of all the others to compare mine to. What do you think spider is, besides full of dissolved butterfly?