To bee or not to bee--a photographer.

Capturing images of honey bees is a delightful leisure activity.

You don't have to sign up for a safari on another continent, or invest in thousands of dollars worth of camera gear.

You can do it all in your backyard (especially if you provide bee friendly plants). Or, you can head for a bee garden or park.

Lately, my objects of interest are the honey bees foraging on our tower of jewels (Echium wildpretii). Earlier this spring, five towers of jewels graced our backyard. Now we're down to one; the others are spent. (They're biennuals and have completed their life cycle.) The sole Echium apparently doesn't know it's time to quit; it has been blooming off and on since April.

Which is wonderful for the bees, beekeepers and photographers!

To get photos of honey bees, I don't poke 'em, prod 'em or pin 'em. I don't spray 'em, glue 'em or freeze 'em. The bees do what they do naturally; I am a visitor in their habitat. I quietly pull up a chair--keeping low to the ground and as obscure as possible--and watch them. No, they won't sting you when they're foraging. They are more likely to show defensive behavior when you're too close to their hive entrance (such as blocking their flight path); when you haven't smoked the hive properly; or when you swat at them.

Lighting is everything. Photography, in Greek, means "writing with light" and that's what you do.  Write with light. A little backlighting and a honey bee absolutely glows.  Adjust your camera settings and you can stop a bee in flight or capture the redness of its tongue (proboscis).

Early in the morning is the best time to photograph bees. Their flight muscles haven't quite warmed up yet; they move at a slower pace; and they linger longer on the blossoms. One of the bees below clung to the same Echium blossom for two hours before it buzzed off.

These photos were all taken around 7 a.m. the same day on the same plant. The tools:  a Nikon D800 camera and a 200 mm macro lens.

Cameras are just that--a tool. They don't make the image; the photographer does. Folks who say "You must have a nice camera" don't understand the creative process or the making of an image. They would never tell a gourmet cook "You must have a nice set of pots and pans" or an artist "you must have some nice brushes" or an athlete "You must have a nice pair of shoes."

That being said, bee photography is something each of us can do, each in our own way.

Read your camera manual. Know the settings. Know what your camera can and cannot do. Learn from other photographers. Look at photos in art galleries, in publications, or on the web. Then head out for a bee safari.

On an African safari, you may not find "big game." But on an insect safari, you will always find "little game."

Always.

Valley carpenter bees are passionate about passionflower vines (Passiflora).

You see these black bees foraging on the blossoms. Tiny grains of golden pollen, looking like gold dust, dot the thorax.

Their loud buzz frightens many a person, but wait, they're pollinators.

Valley carpenter bees (Xylocopa varipuncta) are found in the Central Valley and southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and southward through Mexico, according to native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis.

These carpenter bees are large (about the size of a queen bumble bee). The females are solid black, while the males are golden/buff-colored with green eyes.  

We receive scores of calls about "golden bumble bees." They're the male Valley carpenter bees, sometimes nicknamed "Teddy bears." 

The females are the only ones we've seen in the passionflower vines, though.

The males? They must be cruising somewhere else, patrolling for females.

Most of the time we see female Gulf Fritillary butterflies (Agraulis vanillae) laying their eggs on the leaves, and male Gulf Frits searching for females.

if it's a streak of gray, you don't wash it away.

You welcome it. 

The gray hairstreak butterfly (Strymon melinus) is common on our sedum, a good fall plant for pollinators, including butterflies, honey bees, sweat bees and syrphid flies, aka hover flies or flower flies.

Butterfly expert Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, says on his website that the gray hairstreak visits "an immense variety of flowers, both wild and cultivated.  They are particularly addicted to Heliotrope and white-flowered Apiaceae."

Apiaceae? That's the carrot family, which includes not only carrots but parsley, celery, Queen Ann'es lace, parsnip, cilantro, hemlock, fennel and anise. Heliotropes, which commonly yield pink-purple flowers, are good for graystreaks, but not good for horses. It's toxic and can induce liver failure, according to the ASPCA's Animal Poison Control Center.

You can't be too careful out there.

Call it serendipity.

Call it a prize from the sky.

Frankly, it's not every day that a newly emerged Gulf Fritillary butterfly, Agraulis vanillae,  lands at your feet. It crawled from its chrysalis, hinged to a eight-foot high tree limb near our passionflower vines (Passiflora), and fell, quite unceremoniously,  on a bed of wood chips.

Right where I was standing.

At first I thought a scrub jay or an European paper wasp (which keep an attentive eye on the Gulf Frit population in our yard) had nailed it.

No. This was newly emerged. It looked like a plop of red, orange and silver paint, its body limp, its antennae crumbled, its wings still damp.

I lifted it gingerly and placed it on a Passiflora to dry off. Did it fly off in five minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour? No, it stayed for two hours. When scores of male adult butterflies ventured down to check its gender and then left, I figured it to be the same gender.

A boy butterfly.

If it were female, a male would have mated with her in minutes as one did several weeks ago when a female emerged from a chrysalis. (That, however, is not the only way you can tell gender! There are abdominal differences and males are more brightly colored, a deeper reddish-orange, than the females.)

Boy Butterfly leaned his head back, opened and stretched his wings, and finally, he took off, touching me on the shoulder as he floated by.

Butterfly expert Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis  who monitors the butterfly population in the Central Valley, is glad to see the Gulf Frits making a comeback in this area. He writes on his website:

"this dazzling bit of the New World Tropics was introduced into southern California in the 19th Century--we don't know how--and was first recorded in the Bay Area before 1908, though it seems to have become established there only in the 1950s. It can be quite common in the East and South Bay--particularly in Berkeley--and has been found breeding spontaneously as far inland as Fairfield where, however, it is not established. There are scattered records in the Central Valley and even up to Folsom, perhaps resulting from people breeding the species for amusement or to release at social occasions. According to Hal Michael, who grew up in South Sacramento, this species bred there in abundance on garden Passiflora in the early 1960s. It seems to have died out by the early 1970s, however. Intolerant of hard freezes, it still managed to survive the record cold snap of 1990 that largely exterminated the Buckeye regionally!"

As for Boy Butterfly, a loudly buzzing female Valley carpenter bee attempting to forage on a flower near his head, prompted his rather abrupt departure.