I saw a mating pair of Queen Butterflies in my yard, and spent the next hour running in circles chasing them with my camera.

They spent most of that time flying away from me. The top orange dot in this picture is a Gulf Fritillary Butterfly that was nectaring on the Spanish Needles Flowers. The darker spot near the bottom is the pair of Queens flying across the lawn.

I wonder what the neighbors thought if they saw me chase the Queens. I was running with my camera in one hand, and a chair to stand on in the other because the Queens kept landing too high up in the trees and shrubbery for me to get a good photo.

The pictures I did get are a bit fuzzy because I took them standing on the chair on tippy-toes with my arms high out as far as I could reach to get the camera as close to the butterflies as I could. Unfortunately, whenever I got close, they moved, flew away, or the wind moved their perch. They did choose a very windy day to mate.

Hopefully one day I'll catch them at it again. I do have better photos of pairs of Orange-Barred Sulphur, Zebra Heliconian, and Gulf Fritillary Butterfly pairs.

Update - I finally got close enough to another pair of mating Queen Butterflies to get nice pictures:)

Here's a tough one... do I delete those fuzzy photos now that I've gotten better ones? My first thought is, of course I do! My second is that I waited ages for the search engines to index my pictures, and I don't want to lose what index entries I have so heck no, I don't. Opinions welcome.