Huge bee

First task at the grove today was to take some photos of the creeping foxglove plant for Iain. What I had planned for the photo was certainly good enough for a blip and was my Plan A. Also, I had Damien the decoy in a new color, a reasonable imitation of the green dragonfly that I recently posted. I was hopeful that Damien might present me with a plan B blip to supersede Iain's flower.

I first setup the decoy and then started rooting out all my equipment out of the bag. Within seconds, a dragon came down and buzzed Damien. Unfortunately, only for a few seconds. A couple of minutes later, while I was shooting flower heads, a butterfly came to the decoy, the same type as before. Plan B was looking very promising, so I set up the tripod for decoy shots. Unbelievably, nothing else happened with the decoy for the rest of the shoot.

I will keep trying the decoy, but I am starting to think that my presence is intruding on the possibilities, after all, they saw the decoy as soon as I set it up, so they can certainly see me. I need to start thinking about a remote trigger, so that I can sit twenty feet away. The shutter release button is not threaded, so I will have to design and build something to press the button externally. I have a few ideas, but this is not going to happen in a hurry.

After shooting the bloom photos, I settled down behind the tripod, when this huge bee flew past. I estimated over an inch long and dangerous looking. Keen to blip the new visitor, I took the camera in hand and started to stalk the giant. It spent no more than a second at each bloom, so focusing was very difficult. I managed to collect about thirty shots and combined the best four into the blip.

The bee was way too large to enter the bloom of the foxglove, so it obviously has a long tongue. Unfortunately, this feature did not present on any of the photos. Once again all the plans went out of the window and I ended up with a blip that I was not expecting. I really wanted to show off Damien's new paint job, but that will now have to wait for another day.

Iain's bloom Asystasia gangetica, "Creeping Foxglove" can be seen here.

Update - Eastern Carpenter Bee - Xylocopa virginica

Dave