Bee Gallery

Honey Bees

One male drone and many female worker bees form in a swarm on a tree branch at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

Bee Good

One of my favorite experiences at Ridgefield this spring was discovering a bee swarm early one morning near the parking lot at the observation blind. I had walked right by it at first, more cognizant of the existing bee colony in a tree cavity to the right, but discovered it on the way back to the car. I'm allergic to bees and generally keep my distance but the cool temperatures kept them pretty quiet.

This is the first time I've ever seen a swarm, one of the nice things about wildlife photography is that it encourages me to learn more when I see something I don't understand. A quick visit to the Wikipedia page on bee swarms revealed that the colony was reproducing by sending off a large group of workers to start a new colony, waiting patiently en masse while their best scouts agree upon a new location.

I initially thought the one large bee in the picture might be the queen, but further reading revealed this to be a drone, the male honey bee, and the rest the female workers. I also learned that males don't sting so I guess I'm only allergic to lady bees.

A bee swarm hangs together despite the heavy rain

The Weight of Water

After first finding the bee swarm one cool spring morning, I was both pleased and concerned to find them still there the next day on a warmer but wetter morning. Despite looking like a solid mass, the swarm was anchored by the bees on top to some mossy branches while the bees below were just hanging on to each other. The mass of bees must have gotten much heavier in the rain, but these stout workers up top held their ground. They also took the brunt of the rain, the bee in the upper left is covered with a drop of rain as large as her head.

I hope they survived the wet weather and were able to find a new colony before they starved to death. I wasn't able to get back to the refuge until the next week and by then they would have long since either established a new colony or died off. I didn't see any little bee carcasses on the ground, I took that as a hopeful sign.

I also need a new raincoat, mine has been shedding its waterproof lining and doesn't keep me so dry anymore. The camera and lens have some weather-sealing but I also draped them in a heavy old bath towel and stooped below it to take a picture like an old-time photographer.

A bee swarm hangs together at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

Wrong Way Driver

I was taken with the dramatic black-and-yellow pattern of the bees hanging in formation, but even more so with the co-operation of the colony as bees constantly flew into and out of the living, wriggling mass. Even though they stepped all over one another, they all seemed to take it in stride and focused on their common goal. I like the wrong-way driver in the lower left corner who is upside down as she finds her way into the swarm.

Bumblebees

Circle Jerk

One of the joys I find in wildlife photography is that, because you spend so much time in the field watching an animal, you get to study its behaviors and learn firsthand the many ways they have adapted to their environment. This applies just as much to macro photography as it does to traditional wildlife photography.

After I had been shooting bees on our coneflowers for a while in the summer of 2006, I noticed that the large bumblebees would sometimes use a special technique to collect nectar. While they would often just amble here and there about the cone, sometimes they would anchor one of their long back legs to a spike in the center of the flower and then swing themselves around the edge of the cone in a circle, collecting nectar as they went.

In the words of a famous science officer: fascinating.

Rising Coneflower

I intentionally positioned my camera so that the bumblebee would appear in front of the purple coneflower behind it, it reminded me of a large monster climbing over the earth (the cone of the coneflower in front) before the rising sun (the out-of-focus coneflower bloom).

I’m easily amused, in case you hadn’t noticed.

We Meet Again, Mr. Bee

These fascinating little creatures are my mortal enemy. It’s nothing personal and not even their fault, I just happen to be allergic to their stings. Makes your heart beat a little faster when you’re photographing them a few inches away.

This particular bumblebee was covered head to stinger in pollen from the many coneflower blossoms it had already visited.

Other Bees

And Now For Something Completely Different

When I first saw this little bee nestled between some purple coneflower petals, I knew I had a chance to take something other than the typical bee-on-a-coneflower picture.

However, all but the bee’s tail was in shadow, which usually calls for fill-flash to even out the exposure. The on-board flash would leave a strong reflected pattern in the bee’s eye and my external flash was too tall to penetrate the petals. A ring-flash would have been useful had I owned on.

Rather than give up on the picture, I decided to combat the effect in software by using an extremely low contrast setting when I converted the RAW image. I positioned the lens so that there were only three areas of interest: the bee, the out-of-focus blue/green background, and the mostly out-of-focus pink petals of the coneflower arcing across the image.

Hold On! Don't Let Go!

A small bee struggles to avoid being pulled down to its death inside the carnivorous coneflower.

OK, so maybe coneflowers aren’t carnivorous. And maybe the bee isn’t struggling at all and it’s only the angle of the petals that suggests its about to fall into the fiery orange center. The petal above it helped hide the bee so that this was in fact a fairly secure place to hang out for a sleepy little bee.

Drift Net

A bee hangs lifelessly from a mint plant, two legs stuck to filaments from an abandoned spider’s web. A nearby bumblebee had met a similar fate, unable to escape from a single strand that was still stuck to the stem of the plant. At first I thought they might be alive, but it turned out that their bodies were just waving about in the gentle breeze. The scene reminded me of drift nets in the ocean indiscriminately killing the animals who get trapped in the nets and eventually die, their bodies slowly waving in the ocean currents.

	Rising Coneflower I intentionally positioned my camera so that the bumblebee would appear in front of the purple coneflower behind it, it reminded me of a large monster climbing over the earth (the cone of the coneflower in front) before the rising sun (the out-of-focus coneflower bloom). I’m easily amused, in case you hadn’t noticed.
	We Meet Again, Mr. Bee These fascinating little creatures are my mortal enemy. It’s nothing personal and not even their fault, I just happen to be allergic to their stings. Makes your heart beat a little faster when you’re photographing them a few inches away. This particular bumblebee was covered head to stinger in pollen from the many coneflower blossoms it had already visited.