We had an hour or so of bright sunlight in the early afternoon of September 29, so I found a patch of Large Leaved Asters and looked for pollinators.  I was not disappointed as I pressed the shutter 60 times over a 7 minute period, all while sitting in the car.  It is fun to find the several insects on most of these photographs.   During this coming winter I’ll try to ID these pollinators as I am getting increasingly interested in their importance to our natural world.

Here are 20 photos (the other 40 are repetitious) showing different kinds and species of pollinators:

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It was quite a  magical time, seeing all of these beasties filling up on nectar at these last of the Asters.  Can anyone recommend a good field guide to hoverflies, bees and wasps?  Many thanks.

Photo data:

All of the above have intact exifs and are downloadable at less than half a MB each*.  Leica 100-400 mm lens mounted on a Panasonic Lumix GH4 at max focal length (800 Full Frame equivalent) giving a working distance of about 1.3 m, all shot from the front seat of my car.

Most are at f/11 (f/22 FF equivalent), ISO 800, giving a shutter interval in the 1/1000 sec to 1/4000 sec range.  Electronic shutter (which is why some of the wings in flight are strange.)

*Here is #18 again, this time uploaded at 1.6MB with no limit on its edge dimensions.  Click on it to see the difference in detail between this image and the ones above with a smaller file size.

Lots to see out there.  The camera is a good tool to enlarge one’s vision.