That's my girl!

Finally, an image of my female blue banded bee! I chased her (in a calm non-threatening sort of way...) twice around the garden before I caught her momentarily still.

Though she wasn't at all still, just not flying. She was holding onto the leaf with her powerful jaws and gyrating her body in a wild sort of frenzy! No idea what that was all about, but she did it several times! In most of the other shots I got, her body is out of focus because she was 'shaking her booty'! I did take some other angles, but this way you can compare the male and female better.

Compare this shot to the male blue banded bee of a few days ago and you can see that she has four stripes on her abdomen and is a lot shinier and less hairy. I don't know if this is a local variation (they were taken about 13 kms apart) or a male/female thing. Photographically, I think the previous shot is better, but in my defence, she was moving a lot more than him!

I did have a really nice little skipper butterfly all lined up and ready to blip, but I do love my BB bees, so they get precedence. Still waiting to get a decent flying shot though.

Better bigger