My garden is starting to look a little ragged.  Some of my knock-out roses were hit by aphids this year, the birds, squirrels and chipmunks have made a complete mess with their seed droppings and my little bicycle planter is bare.  Despite it all, however, the butterflies still find my garden pretty enough to feed on.

We seem to have had quite a few more of them this year and I couldn’t help myself the other night when I saw several of them hovering over one of my butterfly plants.  At one point there were 4 or 5, but by the time I made it out with my cameras (plural because they were just too beautiful not to go back for the macro lens), there were only these three (3) beauties hovering around.

For as still as I tried to be, it was pretty difficult trying to capture them together.   I finally settled on following this little guy around.

I never realized how long their “stingers” were for drinking the nectar out of the flowers.  If you look closely in the photo below you can follow his arched stinger to the flower bud.

“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

-Nathaniel Hawthorne