The Honeymakers: Clickety-Clicks of (not so) Busy Buzzing Bees

Both the front and back gardens where I live are left relatively wild. Primroses grow here and those guys are fussy! There are always plenty of bees buzzing around, and they love the bush by the gate in the front garden. This bush produces clusters of little white flowers with shades of delicate violet.

Shanti gets interested too, of course! She snaps away at the bees half-heartedly and ignores our warnings about being stung on the nose. She points out matter-of-factly that I had been snapping away at the bees too - hmm what can I say to such witty canine use of human lingo punnery?

Yes, she's a clever girl and has picked up that flying things are difficult to chase – no stings yet!

Bees soak up energy from the sun, it activates and fuels them as they buzz about their bizz-ness. However, it is not always sunny in Scotland, and this can be a problem. When it rains, the bees can get wet, become inactive and unable to fly. Wet or not, if their energy is depleted, they need to find somewhere to sit and wait until conditions change and they can recharge again.

We had a lot of rain yesterday and this morning I noticed that there were a few sodden bees sitting on the bush. I thought they were dead and gently proded a large one with a twig – it wagged a limb at me in warning and I backed off, apologising. Not sure if they had been sheltering inside the bush all night, but it seems possible.

Later on, as the sun popped in and out of the clouds, the bees started to stir and buzz around collecting nectar.

The bees were very gracious in letting me photograph them with a macro lens, checking me out on occasion, or just ignoring me and getting on with it before buzzing off to the next locus of attention.

Thanks bees, you are my 700th post on Steemit :D.

Photos taken with a Nikon D200 + Nikon AF-S 40mm f2.8 MG lens.

All images are sized to a width of 1680 pixels, so if you'd like to zoom in, you can use the right-click (CTR-click) options to 'view image' for more detail.
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