Bee at Work

It is easy to loose sight of the smaller things in life. When walking, the larger things: the sky, the larger plants and animals, the ground in general, are perfectly obvious. Bright colored flowers stand out from the background. The smaller things tend to vanish into unawareness.

On my walk at Crescent Bend Nature Park on Friday, August 5, the bright pink flowers stood out from the surrounding ground cover both because of their brilliant color and because they were the only large cluster of flowers in the immediate area. The bees taking advantage of the clustered food source were much less obvious, but it didn't take long to realize the honey bees were hard at work gathering nectar as they also spread the flowers' pollen.

When bees are at work, they don't spend much time on any one flower. They flit about very quickly. This presents a photographic challenge in focusing when working in the macro-range with a telephoto lens. In this case, there were so many bees, the problem was solved by focusing on a single cluster of flowers then waiting for a bee to appear: