Large Black and White hover fly

When Jan and the children went to church this morning I took a trip over to Box Wood on the northern side of Stevenage. I’d seen lots of pictures of butterflies which had been taken there so I hoped to be able to get several different species and come back with quite a few decent pictures.

When I found somewhere to park and got into the woods, I found that the area I’d got to was not ‘butterfly country’ at all, and there wasn’t time to explore too much, so after taking a few dismal shots of fallen tree trunks and fungi I headed back to the car. However, when I got back to the car I discovered a much more interesting little patch of thistle and blackberry bushes which were swarming with bees and hover flies. I took these pictures there with my Tamron 70-300 mm macro zoom. There are mostly hand held because there was enough light to have at least 1/400th sec and the aperture wide open to get as much ‘bokeh’ as possible.

I thought that these insects were all bees but on closer inspection of my Collins Gem Insects book it turns out there are all hover flies ! I thought there was only one hover fly species – you learn something new etc.