Hoverflies on the Move

Four different Hoverfly species were very active in the garden today, along with a new mining bee Andrena nigroaenea (the Buffish Mining Bee), Hairy, Dock and a Rhopalid Bugs, and a rather tatty Peacock butterfly.

New Shieldbug Species in Garden

It has been confirmed that what I thought was a Green Shieldbug coming out of its brown winter state, is the Gorse Shieldbug, Piezodorus lituratus. A couple of Box Bugs were active, along with lots of Bee Flies and a Carder bee, photographed with its proboscis deep in an Alkanet flower - the latter is an excellent insect plant, flowering early and attracting lots of bee species.

 

Garden Insects etc

Pleased to see a  Scarlet Tiger caterpillar in the garden today feeding on the comfrey - there were certainly a lot of adults on the wing in the garden last year. Otherwise my first Bee Flies and several species of 'bees', one or two identifiable including Nomada parasitic species.

Partial Eclipse

There was quite a lot of high cloud around for today's partial eclipse but this added to the atmosphere in many ways. It did make consistent exposure quite a challenge. Not a perfect sequence of stages as sometimes the cloud was too dense but enjoyed the challenge. I used a 10-stop ND filter 1/8000th at F22.

Work in Progress!!

We still have large numbers of Greenfinches and Goldfinches together with paired Blue and Great Tits visiting our garden feeders so I thought I would have a go at capturing them in flight. Not enough depth of field and/or shutterspeed and definitely need to get a better background!

More Garden Arrivals

The midday sunshine brought out a few more flies, bees etc in the garden.

Spiders and Bugs

The invertebrates are gradually appearing in the garden with the Spring sunshine. I was surprised by the presence of a False Widow Spider - on the NBN Atlas it is not recorded in our area though there are scattered records around Cambridge area. Lots of Nursery Web spiders and small green bugs. Not sure what is going on in the last image - an adult Dicyphus epilobii appears to be grooming/attacking a nymphal stage bug (?same species). I will post on a bug site and see what ideas come up

Cucumber Spider

This little spider was hiding in one of the seed heads that I cut down in the garden and made a perfect model to try out the 90mm Macro lens. Image 2 is a photostacked image, others are single shots. The only other 'model' I found was a Blowfly and demonstrates the incredible sharpness of the lens.