I forgot to add that a great online resource for Great Britain and Ireland bees is Steven Falk's flickr pages, the nomada one is here link
I have his book (which also covers Ireland) and is a great resource for people interested in bees. However I still struggle with ID's....

A beautiful couple of images of spring insects. The 2nd looks like a Nomada Bee, these are out now as they are mainly cleptoparasites of the Andrena bees. Not sure of the exact one as I find them hard to ID and there are quite a few of them that look similar to me.

I thought it might be fun to see what flies over our humble abodes.
Recent sightings over mine
Jackdaw


Red Kite


Starling


Grey Heron

A sandisk 64GB extreme pro read/write 95/90. Wanted to see if it would improve the buffer usage on the KP. Upped the number of frames to 20 in 10 seconds from 17 on my previous fastest write cards and reduced the clear time to about 15secs from 17secs. Plus the frame rate is pretty constant when the buffer is full unlike the others which caused a bit of variability.

Great to see. We counted about 27 in our little pond a couple of weeks ago, it was difficult to count as they kept moving. Our's have been singing for a few weeks and are very approachable, yours?

A beautiful set, here and on flickr. The light makes such a difference.

They've just done a warranty repair on my DA*300 F4. Work seems good, resulting in a lens that performs better than new. They look thorough. Only drawback was it took a couple of months, but they were waiting for parts, it was over Christmas and they were probably picking up issues from the previous co. It's good to not have to send the kit to France or Germany, which is what Pentax support said I should do, however SRS knew better!

From experience I don't agree with this. My non WR DA 18-55 pentax was ok, had to stop down but not bad. However my Canon 18-55 IS kit lens was better. Here's a quote from photozone.de 'The resolution capabilities of the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS is amazing even based on the EOS 50D. The lens resolution may no longer reach the limits of the sensor resolution (as it did on the EOS 350D) but the quality level remains very high throughout the zoom range.' See link for the full review. Our Panasonic kit lens was pretty good as well.
I upgraded my Pentax to the WR version, that wasn't as good as my DA version. I got rid of it and kept the DA. I've still got the Canon as well.
It may be that other companies kit lenses were poor a long time ago, but things have changed.

An excellent watch, thoroughly enjoyed his style. I'd have missed it if you hadn't posted this. Thanks.

I've got both the DA*300 F4 and the Pentax FA*300 F4.5. The FA* is just as good in sharpness and is faster to focus on a modern Pentax body. It is also smaller and lighter than the DA*. There is also the F*300 F4.5 which was the predecessor of the FA*, but had a tripod mount.
The DA* has the advantage of being weather sealed and has closer focus, full time manual focus override and obviously silent AF, but it's drawback is that my SDM stopped working while on holiday and in constant use. I managed to get it working again by constantly turning the focus ring for a few minutes and eventually it came back to life, phew But if it hadn't it would have been a paper weight because not even the manual focus was working.
My DA* is now with Pentax and I'm awaiting feedback from them. Dependent on their response I will decide on what to do with it next.
The DA* has in my opinion better rendering of the out of focus highlights which can be harsher on the FA*.
I've tried my DA* on my Pentax Z1 and the screwdrive was a lot quieter than my FA* and didn't seem to hit the stops so hard...
I use the DA* more than my FA* (obviously not at the moment) because it's newer(!) and I like the close focus for my insect shots and because I feel self conscious in shared bird hides etc when the screwdrive of my FA* misses and decides to nosily hunt. This was okay in the past because lots of people had noisy lenses but these days everybody seems to have silent wildlife lenses.
I also had the Sigma 100-300 F4 only in Canon mount, so it was silent and fast focus. It was a lovely lens that unfortunately had focus shift on stopping down and was not just heavier than my FA* but seemed cumbersome to use because it felt front heavy. I use heavier lenses these days on my canon, Tamron 150-600, but it just feels better balanced. I guess I also had the nagging in my head that said this is heavy for a 300 F4 when you've got the FA* at considerably less weight and size.... So it went, but I did miss that one at times, but replaced it with the Canon 200 F2.8 and 1.4x converter, so much lighter and just as good image quality.
Personally if you want a screw drive Pentax 300 prime, I'd happily recommend the FA* or F* 300 F4.5.