Yesterday I went for a walk near the campsite. The campsite where we have a mobile home is at the edge of a forest. Next to the forest is a large corn field.
In between the two is a strip of a few meters wide where a lot of wild flowers grow.
These flowers attract a lot of insects like butterflies, bees, dragonflies and many more species.
I like nature and macro photography, so I grabbed my macro gear and went for a nice walk through the wild flowers to shoot some insects. And here is the result...

Farmers are asked to keep a strip of land around their fields where the wild flowers can grow to help the insects which are having quite a hard time nowadays.
Pollution, the use of peticides and unnecessary mowing has resulted in a decreasing population of a lot of species of insects.
That is why things like these strips with wild flowers helps.

There were quite a lot of butterflies flying around. I haven't seen a lot of butterflies this year. But here there were plenty, but not a lot of different species. I just spotted two different ones. The most that I have seen were these common brimstone butterflies.

The butterflies were enjoying the beautiful purple coloured flowers of the thistle. When you look at them closely you can see how their hooked black tongue is collecting the nectar from the flowers.

The other species of butterfly I spotted was this one with a name that is as beautiful as the butterly itself; The Queen of Spain fritillary.
I couldn't get a better closeup of these butterflies because they were a bit more active and flew away when I came closer with my camera.

Another cool insect is this bright red Ruddy darter dragonfly. There were quite a few of them and they are easy to spot in the mostly green environment. And another advantage of dragonflies is that when they fly away they often circle around and land on the exact same spot.
It's just a matter of sitting still and waiting for them to return when you scare them away. This way I could capture some nice close ups.

Their wings are so thin, just like paper...

The following insects are quite common ones in our country. I see them in our neighborhood as well. In English they are called (Italian) striped bugs, but I like the Dutch name better; pyjama shield bug.

It was a funny sight how these two bugs were trying to pass eachother on this small stem. They eventually managed to do this.

When I was heading back to the campsite I notices something on some dead wood. There are a lot of crickets as well, but these were a lot lighter.
When I came a bit closer I saw it was quite a big flying insect.
It was a species I had never seen before, so I looked it up with my Obsidentify app.
The app gave me a 100% match; it is a Hornet robberfly.

The Hornet robberfly is one of the largest flies with a size of 2,5 centimeter. I took the time to get in a bit closer and was able to take a nice macro shot of him

Quite a scary insect when you see it in a close up like this.
On its head you can see a short snout which they use to sting their and imsert poison in their prey.

I hope you liked my macro photo series!

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FriendlyMoose

Creating blogs about photography, cycling, gardening, craft beer and more...

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Every week I create a post with an overview of all the photography contests on Hive. You can find the weekly overview post by checking the #photocontests tag.
I also organise a weekly photography contest myself; the POB Photocontest. This weekly contests has a new subject every week and you can win POB tokens and Ecency points.
Check out the posts with the #pobphotocontest tag.

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