OK here is a new picture - a hornet has caught a honey bee and is making quick work of devouring it! This was in Provence in the south of France. Notice how the hornet is hanging on to the flower with just one leg.

Now we all love honey bees - so bearing this picture in mind , why not vote in my poll below?

Visit My Photos - 6 Pics Insects

Scarce Swallowtail Butterfly

So far my blog posts have chronicled my pictures of insects pretty much in the chronological order they were taken, but I thought I'd post up this recent picture - a rare treat I saw while on holiday in the south of France this summer. Pictures like this really exemplify the advantages of digital photography. I noticed this beautiuful Scarce Swallowtail feeding on some plants by the beach, and it afforded some great opportunities to take lots of photographs. With traditional film I might have taken perhaps 3 pictures at most, because of the need to save pictures for other things on holiday, but with digital I could snap away and then select the best shots later. In fact I think I took about 20, but only three were really good enough. Partly this is because I was using a zoom lens on macro facility, hand held, so getting the focus sharp is extremely difficult. I've sharpened the pictures up slightly using Picasa.

The Scarce Swallowtail is not, I have read, actually as rare as the Swallowtail, which it resembles. I have a photograph of the latter, which I'll post up at a later date. While they are both very beautiful butterflies, I think the the Scarce Swallowtail has the edge in terms of attractiveness.

I don't know what the attractive plant is that the butterfly is on. Any ideas?

Graphosoma Italicum Shieldbug

I'm always coming across a new insect which gets into my list of favourites, and in 2008 this brilliantly coloured little shield bug, the graphosoma italicum did just that, for no other reason that its colouring is so fantastic! They are not very big, perhaps 1cm from head to tail, and are fairly common, but not in the UK by all accounts. The ones I have seen have all been in France. The redder of the specimens here is in Brittany, while the pair (presumably mating), which are noticeably more orange in colour, are right on the south coast. The are both on the same plant as far as I can tell, so I'm wondering why the variation in colour - perhaps some kind of sub-species variation?

Really big flies!

If you live in the North Pennines or Highland Scotland you might be familiar with this pretty monstrous fly! Then again, you may have mistaken it for a bumble bee, as its size, shape and colour all make it look as much like a bumble bee as a fly. As far as I am aware it doesn't have a common name, but my studies have revealed it to be the Tachina Grossa. I first saw specimens on top of Padon Hill in Northumberland in 1991, where they were cruising about rather loudly and menacingly - as far as I know they are totally harmless to humans, but that said I wouldn't fancy having one land on me! Then I saw some again in a little placed called Laide, in Wester Ross, Scotland, in 1996. I managed to take this picture, which isn't one of my best but I'm including it as it is an interesting specimen. Notice how its creamy yellow head is in striking contrast to the rest of its black hairy body.

This is one for me to try to get a better digital picture of. The picture here was taken on a Minolta Dynax 500i using Fujichrome 100 film.

Emperor moth

During the early 1980s it was not uncommon to find the large and brightly coloured caterpillar of the Emperor moth on moorland in South Yorkshire. It is a bright green with thin yellow or pink rings which have small tufts of dark hairs. I would find them during excursions to pick bilberries on the moors near Stocksbridge. (Such visits would always subsequently turn into caterpillar hunting outings!) After one particularly prolific visit I came home with about five really nice big caterpillars - not a very ecologically friendly thing to do but I was only about 14 at the time. I put them in a box with plenty of the plant on which we had found them - probably bilberries I think. It was probably only a couple of weeks before I noticed a couple of rather curious brown hairy cocoons - not a regular chrysalis at all. I think they all pupated successfully like this, but the next spring only one moth hatched out - however it was a beautiful specimen, as this picture shows. I had seen a picture of an Emperor Moth before, but the real thing is much more vivid. Look at the stripes on the body, and the red tips on the wings. I'm not sure whether this is a male or a female.

Once it hatched out we were keen for it to thrive (probably a somewhat forlorn hope in the centre of an industrial town) and set about trying to get it to feed, without success. Some time later we discovered in a book that the adult moth does not feed at all and doesn't even have a mouth! This was one of my first glimpses of the rather weird world of insects. Our conventional notion of an "adult" does not apply in the case of the Emperor Moth, or many other species in fact, where the vast majority of the insect's life is spent as a juvenile, eating. The adult is simply the form in which reproduction can take place.

Anyway, despite still visiting the same places over the years, I now no longer see the emperor moth caterpillars - does anyone else out there have recent sightings? I have never seen one of the moths since this one - and this one was in 1983! A question - what causes the different colouration of the rings on the caterpillars? Why do some have orangey yellow rings and others have pink? Is it age, sex or something else?

The photograph was taken with a Pentax MV camera, using Fujichrome 100 film.