The colours are accurate - the butterfly was only a couple of hours old and yet to fly. Here's one of its siblings... slightly more purple in the blue scaling, but that might have been the angle to the light.Felix wrote:Dave,
That Peacock is exceptional..! Has the blue colour reproduced accurately? and the extent of the blue scaling is very impressive.
Also: did you happen to save any of the tachinids by any chance..?
Felix.
Here are a couple of pictures of the parasites. The larva and some pupae, and a fly. The larvae descended on little ropes of silk from the Peacock chrysalids. I collected the resultant pupae, and then, I'm ashamed to say, I put them in a container (not airtight) but forgot about them. A week or two later, I remembered and discovered I had a box full of dead flies. This is one of them.
I submitted a report via the Herts & Middlesex BC branch to a chap named Colin Plant, who was proposing to publish an article about second brood Peacocks. His opinion was that though they were tachinids, the parasites were not Sturmia bella, though the descriptions I have seen seemed to match.
Dave