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some recent teddy bear bees
piggsy
Registered Users Posts: 88 Big grins
Although this has been pretty bad for bugs here lately (driest summer since 1919) I've been lucky to have a few native solitary bees set up and roost overnight in my yard over the last few weeks. All E-P5 / Tokina AT-X 90mm 2.5 + Raynox 150.
Very large teddy bear bee, by far the biggest bee Ive seen around here.
Shes right behind me, isnt she?
Lucky catch of co-habiting bees, this was quite a large blue banded bee but its still significantly smaller than the more bumblebee sized teddy bear. Unfortunately since the big bees are ridiculously likely to wake up, active and angry seeming even in sub-20 degree temperatures and under dim light you really have to motor through focus stacking - the legs and back end of the bee are constantly pulsing when they start to wake up. I initially thought the big hump on the teddy bear bee was a focus stacking error but they actually seriously do look like quasimodo from the side
Teddy bear male or different kind of bee? Not sure.
No difficulties spotting this guy, had to be about 2cm wide. What a fatty.
Other neat thing I found - because of recent land clearing in their shared habitat, a weed stalk where both orange tailed (M. rhodura) and nomia bees were huddling in one mass overnight -
Very large teddy bear bee, by far the biggest bee Ive seen around here.
Shes right behind me, isnt she?
Lucky catch of co-habiting bees, this was quite a large blue banded bee but its still significantly smaller than the more bumblebee sized teddy bear. Unfortunately since the big bees are ridiculously likely to wake up, active and angry seeming even in sub-20 degree temperatures and under dim light you really have to motor through focus stacking - the legs and back end of the bee are constantly pulsing when they start to wake up. I initially thought the big hump on the teddy bear bee was a focus stacking error but they actually seriously do look like quasimodo from the side
Teddy bear male or different kind of bee? Not sure.
No difficulties spotting this guy, had to be about 2cm wide. What a fatty.
Other neat thing I found - because of recent land clearing in their shared habitat, a weed stalk where both orange tailed (M. rhodura) and nomia bees were huddling in one mass overnight -
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Great images.
Haroldf
Brian v.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lordv/
http://www.lordv.smugmug.com/
Yup, they're by far the most photogenic and largest bees around here - stingless too I think, but I'm not keen to find out for sure. Other than the blue bandeds and some of the larger female cuckoo bees pretty much everything else around here native bee wise is getting into tiny "bring at least 2x on M43" territory photo wise.
Thanks! I was surprised how sloppy PS let me get with a couple of those stacks of both of them side on - managed to convince it to bridge some of them by inserting photos that weren't much in focus anywhere but tipped it over the "40% overlap" threshold to allow alignment, then just didn't select them as layers to stack