Bees, Butterflies and Bee flies in the Garden

The white comfrey in the garden always attracts lots of bees - here a female Hairy-footed Flower Bee and an Early Bumblebee worker. Great to find an Osmia cornis mating pair. Holly blues and Orange Tip butterflies are everywhere in the garden at the moment as are Bee-flies, feeding on the hedge garlic. The latter images are taken at 1/4000th second with electronic shutter and the wing has recorded in more than one position. A small Zebra jumping spider completes the line up.

Easter Sunday Sunrise

I went on an early walk from home to photograph the full moon setting but it was too misty to see it so I  concentrated on the sunrise, which proved to be a very colourful one!!  The dew on the wheat and flowers added another subject for the walk though meant I arrived back with very wet feet and trousers..

Toft Insects Including First Damselfly of 2022

First Large Red Damselfly today (compares well with 2020 - April 13th but much earlier then 2017 - April 28th and 2021 April 24th ). Other insects -two hoverfly species, a Red Velvet Mite, 3 species of Hemiptera and a House fly and Midge.species.  

Garden Project 10

It is now 2 years since I started my wildlife garden and the various areas: front meadow with cowslips, pond with marigolds, woodland with Yellow Archangel and Fritillarias and the back wildflower beds with Red Campion, Hedge Garlic etc all  appear to be fairly stable. The bee hotel is very active with dozens of Osmia bicornis.

Hardwick Wood and Caldecote Church

 Our Cambridge Camera Club (and RPS Nature Group) outing was to have been to Waresley Wood but this was closed until the day so we relocated to Hardwick Wood, which in many ways is a better venue. It is certainly at its best and has the finest displays of  spring flowers for several years with all the species out together. Paul and I visited Caldecote Church meadow at the end for the Fritillarias and also a couple of bees. I was using mixture of focus stacking with the X100v and single shots with the 80mm macro. The bees are with the X100V (23mm). The third shot is with a legacy Olympus lens - I love the softness of this but found it too difficult to manually focus in the bright and contrasty light.  Last shot shows some of the group in situ!!