Happy New Year to you all! My 2012 ended happily, as recounted below, and with a yummy barbeque and a sunny day. I hope you all had a great day and that next year is wonderful for you all 😀
Anyway, how did my year end happily? It was all thanks to a bee. Everyone knows they have bees in their garden and probably don’t really pay much attention to what they are.
Honey bee.
Here in Australia they are mainly the introduced European Honey bees, but we have quite a variety of native bees as well, the majority of which are solitary bees.
One of these solitary bees is my very favourite garden critter, the beautiful Blue Banded bee.
This bee uses buzz pollination to get to the pollen. This buzz pollination means that the bee doesn’t crawl around in the flowers, it uses its very loud buzzing to vibrate the pollen out of the flower. Good for the flowers, bad for me trying to take a photo!
The Blue Banded bees that love our lavender hedge never stop moving for a second and seem to select their target flowers at random. Grrrrr…. I have been trying to take a photo of one of them for a VERY long time and I despaired of ever getting one. Until yesterday!
I was giving my front step plants a good water in the morning before the sun got too hot and heard a loud buzzing in my ear. I almost went to swat the blow fly it sounded like before I realized it was my favourite bee, yippee! I dropped my watering can and rushed inside for my camera. I may or may not have trampled children and the dog in my hurry, the witnesses are not reliable.
I zoomed back outside and searched for the bee. Gone. Damn. I waited patiently for a few moments, after all, I couldn’t go back in until everyone had picked themselves up and dusted themselves off, could I?
Luckily the bee reappeared and I desperately followed it trying to get it within frame and somewhat focused at the same time. I took a few photos and almost gave up before it flew to a flower stem right behind me and hovered for just long enough for me to get a vague picture. Good enough!
Here it is, after much effort, a semi-focused picture of my favourite critter. The green-eyed, golden furred, Blue Banded bee.
Blue Banded bee. Woo Hoo!
