Hey friends! How are ya? 

This week is insect week – which is run by the Royal entomology society to try and get us to engage with the importance of insects/pollinators.

Something I love about photographing bugs or animals is that you have until they lose interest or fly away to try and capture an amazing image so this week I thought I’d share seven of the best (in my opinion) bug photos I’ve taken over the last month or two. 

This year I accidentally bought a dyer’s camomile instead of the regular type you make tea with and the flowers are massive, this iridescent green swollen-thighed beetle (Oedemera nobilis) rested on it for a few minutes and then flew away.

Isn’t it a magnificent colour?

So the main focus is a ladybird beetle larvae, this one is a seven spot ladybird. It’s nice that there’s a lot of them about this year. The larvae themselves look like aliens and compared to the ‘finished’ ladybirds they are huge. I particularly love how you can see all the little hairs and details on this bug.

Did you know that daisies grow on trees?! 

I didn’t, but I fell in love with a daisy tree at my local nursery and had to buy it – the bugs adore it. I saw this little Marmalade Hoverfly feeding on the nectar of one of the flowers a few days ago and I am so pleased with this shot!

It’s wings look like they’re made of glass and I love how in focus it and the flower are. This image was taken close to sunset and the natural light was so nice!

I’ve planted foxgloves in my Wildspace (because I love them…as do the bees) and was pleasantly surprised to see this little Comma butterfly on them a couple of days ago – its actually the first one of these butterflies I’ve ever seen!

They’re such a bright orange and clash wonderfully with the pink flower.

This one was taken about a week ago – I’ve planted cabbages in my Wildspace for the aptly named Cabbage butterflies and was so pleased when I spotted a Large white laying her eggs on one of them (I even managed to get it on film!) hopefully I’ll be able to get photographs of their whole life cycle!! 

A while back I rescued and released four Orange tip butterflies, something rather lovely was that the garden naturally has a lot of Lady’s smock growing in it – which is one of the Orange tip food plants, so the ones I released never really left and at one point I found thirty of their eggs in the garden, so I was super excited to find a few of the almost fully grown caterpillars!

It was really cute to catch a bee having a nap in a foxglove flower, out of the afternoon sun.

For what its worth I never really have a plan when taking bug photographs, and am genuinely happy if I can get everything in focus and looking half decent before my subject matter wanders (or flies) away. All of these were taken with my Nikon in macro mode, except for #5 which was taken in sport mode (that zooms further) so that I didn’t have to get too close as I didn’t want to disturb her.

So there we have it, seven photographs one for everyday of insect week. I really hope you enjoyed these pics because they filled me a great amount of positivity and happiness. Do you have a favourite picture? Hopefully you’ll be back to read more of my nature filled posts in the future, thank you so much for checking out my blog and have a great weekend!