Making friends with our bees ...

[catbasket]

First post - Howdy folks! We decided a month or so back to go bee friendly in our garden and I've found some excellent tips here which we should be putting into practice from now on

More by luck than judgement we're off to a fairly good start as we already have a few flowering plants which the bees like. Next year will be better with more variety, plus we plan to have home-made bee nests up soon (too late for this year unfortunately). Butterfly boxes are also on my To Do list.

Here's a few pics of some of 'our' bees -



More in next post

[catbasket]

Hope you like our bees!

Now I'm off to find out some info about lupins. See you around

[Two_Sheds]

brilliant photos.
What camera/lens are you using?

[catbasket]

brilliant photos.

The joys of digital photography - take several billion pics and end up with one or two good ones!

What camera/lens are you using?

It's nothing special - Fujifilm FinePix A820 which cost £79 in January 2008. The earlier pics were shot on the 'auto' and 'macro' settings, the sunflower pics using an option I only found recently - 'SP' and 'Flower'.

Any quality in my pics is simply down to luck (and a massive SD card).

[Two_Sheds]

I've got a Samsung compact, but the macro lens doesn't get anywhere near as close-up as your pics.
I'm looking at getting a digital SLR for my birthday ...

[catbasket]

... but the macro lens doesn't get anywhere near as close-up as your pics.

Possibly my cropping the photo is partly responsible? The original pics are 8.3 megapixels, which gives quite a lot of scope for zooming in on one particular part of the image while still having a reasonable quality pic.

Using one of the earlier pics as an example, here is the original scene (shrunk to 20% size as it's too big for the forum) -


Zooming in on the bee at 100% the original size -

[Lovage]

Going back to the bees - does anyone else think the number of Bumble bees is increasing, or does it just seem like that with fewer honey bes about?

[vikkib]

Those are amazing photo's catbasket!

I've mainly noticed bumble bees in the garden this year but that's probably because we have some nesting in the garden. I didn't have a garden last year so haven't got anything to compare with really!

[catbasket]

I've seen loads more bumble bees this year, but that'll be due to us having more flowers - especially the sunflowers - the bees love 'em! I was quite surprised to see a bee happily buzzing around them earlier today ... well I guess they can't afford to take a day off due to rain ... and s/he's still working hard - just got a few more pics.

Using the amazing Bee Detector 2009 (one of our cats kept staring at an 'empty' part of the garden) I discovered we already have some bumble bees nesting in that corner

Last weekend we bought a small apple tree and a pear tree as we didn't have anything flowering before late April (one of our ornamental cherry trees). We're planning to get more early-flowering plants but haven't decided which ones yet.

Hopefully back in a bit with pics of today's wet-weather bee (if any are in focus).

[Alice]

Thanks for posting the bee pics Catbasket. They're great.
The more flowers you have the more bees you'll have.

We have plenty of bees here but they all seem to be bumble bees or the little furry brownish orange ones with roundish bodies - does anyone know what they are ?

In my last garden which was very mature we had all kinds of bees - red bottoms, orange bottoms, black bottoms, several kinds of bumble bees, black bees - all kinds of bees.
Once we even had a swarm of honey bees turn up. Had to get a bee keeper to come and take them away. That was interesting.

Hope you get on well with your bees.

[catbasket]

We have plenty of bees here but they all seem to be bumble bees or the little furry brownish orange ones with roundish bodies - does anyone know what they are ?

This page might help you id them.


And here's our wet-weather bee from a little earlier today -

[seasprout]

Thanks for posting the bee pics Catbasket. They're great.
The more flowers you have the more bees you'll have.

We have plenty of bees here but they all seem to be bumble bees or the little furry brownish orange ones with roundish bodies - does anyone know what they are ?
.

Sounds like Common Carder Bees. They like the clover in my lawn

[catbasket]

Here's a couple of pics from Monday. I like the first one as it's the best pic I've managed so far of a bee's head, and I love the shadow of the veins in the wing on the sunflower petal in the second.

[ginger ninger]

Please miss i have bee photos, can i join in please?????

[catbasket]

Welcome aboard! Great pics - is that sugar-water you put there or natural it's drinking? I hadn't thought of using sugar-water to attract bees for photo sessions ... until seeing your pics I plan to give that a try if it ever stops raining!