Bees are super pollinators. We all know that. But sometimes the evidence is as plain as the nose on your face or, to be a little more literal, the pollen on their face.
Just a little on this busy honey bee, but what about the bumble bee in the next image?
Sometimes I wonder how they can even see where they are going.
I couldn’t resist using the title of the classic Cagney, Bogart, O’Brien movie for these images. Classic movie, classic critters.
I was pleased to find this shot from last year languishing on my hard drive. A hoverfly doing what hover flies do best.
A lot of weather comes to visit our little island. And we do tend to whinge about it from time to time. But when sun and rain coincide, diamonds are scattered over the garden. A good time to put a transparent bag over the camera and step outside.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) wrote: “Nature is an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere”. We encounter nature daily; we can hardly avoid it, even if it is only in the form of a humble fly who crawls through our open window or the scent of distant park flowers on the breeze.
Taking time to notice nature enriches my day beyond measure. The more I look, the more I see. Have you ever taken the time to watch a honey bee? I mean for several minutes or more. Watch how the light glistens in its wings as it hovers before its chosen blossom, forelegs outstretched for a gentle landing.
Notice how the evening light catches the soft hairs on its back, and its eager tongue, already prepared as if it cannot wait to savour the sweet nectar.
Or how about the bustling bumble bee? It announces its approach with an bombastic buzz before blundering onto its pollen-heavy landing pad.
It has become a cliche to speak of mindfulness, or living in the moment. I don’t know if our lives are busier now than they were a generation ago, or a century ago but, for me, a full life must still contain moments when all its demands are put to one side. Photography has opened my eyes to daily treasures. And the digital age has added the joy of sharing them.
Sometimes, however, it is also good to put the camera down and simply look, listen, smell, taste, touch. That’s all; I am going outside now.
“If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves.” Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849)
Well, I managed two whole days without posting anything buggy but I couldn’t resist sharing this shot with you today. Bumble bees love the Bishop of Llandaff dahlias in my garden. And I love photographing them.
I was pleased to bag a shot of a tiny Holly Blue butterfly in my garden this morning, having chased a Brimstone around without success. The butterflies and bees love verbena bonariensis – such a reliable self-seeder here and conveniently at head height for photographers with dodgy backs!
A non-buggy post tomorrow, I promise!
palomena prasina (spring adult)
This fine fellow is a common green shield bug. Shield bugs belong to the order hemiptera, whose members have a rostrum, or sucking beak, which they stick into plants. The common green is the most plentiful in my part of the world.
final instar, kindly demonstrating rostrum
There are five nymph stages. I think the little ones are really quite cute.
second instar – cute or what?
third instar
There are several other varieties of shield bug that frequent our neighbourhood. I think this next one may be a hawthorn shield bug (acanthosoma haemorrhoidale).
Hawthorn shield bug? Maybe
But as green shield bugs change colour in the autumn, when this was taken, this one may just be another palomena prasina, teasing me.
So that’s the natural history done, now on to the art, which is what interests me most. The following is another version of the second instar shot.
An instar’s world
I like this one better than the portrait crop I showed earlier. I like showing the instar as a small point within its (rather attractive in my opinion) grassy world. But a suggestion I often hear is that I crop closer with my bug shots. What do you think? All opinions very welcome.
These lovely flowers belong to the best thing in my garden, a thirty foot eucryphia tree. It is columnar, with a semi-weeping habit, and evergreen. So already it earns its place as a good garden tree. But, as if that weren’t enough, every July/August, it bursts forth in a froth of large white blooms, with pretty pink anthers, and a sweet scent.
And, best of all, the honey bees love it. In fact, the children call it ‘bee tower’. The garden thrums with the sound of happy bees.
Eucryphia pollen is very fine indeed, little more than dust. The bees look as if they have been sugar frosted as they go about their business.
At times, they are almost frenetic, as if frantic to collect and preserve this bounty while it lasts.
I can claim no gardening credit for this tree – it was here when we moved in ten years ago. I am told they are difficult to establish and fussy in their needs but this one seems to be happy with benign neglect. Long may it last.
Do you have a favourite insect-friendly garden plant/tree?
I was pleased the other day to capture this little hoverfly in mid hover with the light captured in its wings. However, the original shot wasn’t quite as nice.
The background is my patio. It is smooth and doesn’t distract the eye away from the subject but it is not very pretty. A lovely smooth green would have been ideal but the hoverfly ignored my polite request that it hover over the lawn. So I decided to improve the shot with a little photoshop magic.
I have a growing collection of what I call “garden bokeh” images. They are easy to make. Just find a pretty flower bed and some dappled light and, using manual focus, twiddle the focus ring until you get something you like. Then snap. (I like the soft circles that a wide aperture brings – the above is f3.2 – but if you want harder shapes, go for a narrower aperture.) After a bit of experimenting, I decided on this pink, white and green shot for my new background. Then it was an easy matter of copying and pasting the bokeh image onto my original. I usually experiment with various blend modes. Depending on the look you are after, you are likely to end up using soft light, overlay, hard light, multiply or screen. The last two have quite a defined impact: multiply will apply the shadows in the new layer whereas screen will apply the highlights. The other three overlay all tones but with varying intensity. In this case, hard light worked best. If the bokeh had been more contrasty, a softer overlay would probably have been better. Then a small amount of black brushing where the new layer was slightly obscuring the hoverfly and, hey presto!
It’s really no different from using a texture, except the over-layer doesn’t actually have any texture, just soft bubbles of colour.
Is it cheating? Not at all, in my opinion. Both images were taken by me and it is no different from double exposing film or choosing a complementary background in a studio. What do you think?
I hope you like this image I made this morning of a honey bee on fennel. I only have two fennel plants in my garden but they punch well above their weight when it comes to attracting insects.
Focused Moments 