My Turn for Bees and Butterflies

I have seen lots of butterfly pictures taken recently - and the weather has certainly brought them out. This year I planted some verbena and scabious in the garden, the butterflies and bees love them and often chase each other off a particularly tasty bloom - the bees always win.
Imagine me sitting on the grass in the warm sunshine toting my Sigma 400mm macro lens. I bought this last year for the princely sum of £250.00. It is a fairly hefty lens at 1.4kg, but has true internal focussing so that the barrel does not rotate when you focus. It also has a focus limiter switch on it to try to stop it hunting too much. Used at f8 or f11 it is pretty sharp. I think it must have been discontinued around 2006 and it has no vibration reduction. However for the money it is superb as I could never afford the Nikon equivalent.

Here are the photographs - there are mainly cabbage whites, a gatekeeper, a peacock butterfly and a silver Y moth. A few bees are sprinkled in for good measure. The cabbage whites often had bits of wing missing - maybe they have had close encounters with birds.

Green veined white


Green veined white

Small white


Gatekeeper

Green veined white

Gatekeeper










Silver Y moth







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