Bee Identification

Bev has been busy trying to take photographs of the bees in our garden, with mixed success.  However, she recently got a nice closeup of an insect, and when she asked on Flickr what it was, she was told it was a honey bee!  Yes, a HONEY bee!  Yum Yum!

Honey Bee on yellow flowers outside our kitchen window

We think he is rather cute, though he does need to cut his toe nails - look how long they are in this photograph!

Now we can identify a honey bee, we are going to follow them back to their hive and steal some of their honey!

Bev has a bee in her bonnet!

Bev definitely has a bee in her bonnet about photographing bees!  Ever since she got her new 17mm-70mm lens, she has been desperate to get a half-decent photograph of a bee and has been taking hundreds of shots in the hope that at least one comes out ok.

Therefore, when Paul was asked to look after a neighbour's garden while they jetted off on holiday, and that garden contained the largest lavender bush we have ever seen, the conditions for photographing said bees were perfect!  Consequently, on a bright and sunny Sunday, the whole family decamped to the neighbour's garden - Kitty, Paul, all us bears and Bev with her camera!  And while Bev photographed the bees and a ladybird, we bears searched for honey, Kitty marked the garden as his territory and Paul checked if anything needed to be watered.

So, did Bev get any decent shots?  Well, actually there were two visits, the first one producing hundreds of very fuzzy shots, and a second visit using a much faster shutter speed which produced the following photographs:

This cute little ladybird / ladybug appeared on the lavender bush, so Bev got a couple of shots of it before it got bored and wandered off.  Mind you, it doesn't look quite so cute through the lens of the camera - those razor-sharp pincers at the front look rather lethal (gulp)!

This furry bee was busy at work collecting nectar from the flowers, but when it whizzed off to the hive to produce honey, it was too fast for us rather tubby little bears - we just couldn't run fast enough :-(

And this is one of those little blighters taking off with a full load of nectar! 

So, lots of well-watered plants, an expanded territory for Kitty and some half-decent photographs of bees and a ladybird - what more could we ask for?  Well, some yummy honey would definitely have been the icing on the cake!

Our Grand Tour of Scotland: 2010 - Part 5: Bees and Honey!

Ok, Bees are a bear's favourite insect because they produce HONEY!  Yummy, scrummy honey!  Well, Bev's dad pointed out that the lavendar bush outside their house was full of bees, and he was right - we bears spent ages watching them, licking our lips and following them to find the honey.

Bev wasn't interested in the honey but she was interested in photographing the bees, and she did remarkably well:

This is a cute and furry little bee on the lavendar.  She also caught these cuties flying around the lavendar:

And here is her quintessential Scottish photograph of a bee - on a thistle:

So, while we think Bev's photographs of the bees are great, we prefer the sticky, sweet honey that these little guys produce - if we had thumbs, we'd put them up to the bees, our favourite insects!