Pollen everywhere!

A couple of weeks ago I got a new camera - a Canon EOS Rebel XS. The previous digital camera we were using is a Canon Powershot A540 (we like the Canon brand) - it's a nice camera, but Tracy complained a lot because it took a while to turn on and autofocus; by the time it was ready, you missed your interesting shot. We have an older film camera Canon EOS Rebel-G, which she likes, so I knew the new digital version would be good.

One of the features of the camera is a continuous shot mode. It can shoot 3 frames per second for as long as you have space on your memory card. So if you are looking to capture a good shot, you can take a bunch of successive pictures and pick the best ones. I think that's what the pros do.

I decided to take some pictures of the bees. I've seen such a variety of pollen being collected, I wanted to capture that to show you. We had a lot of rain on Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday the bees were out in force! I was amazed at how much pollen some of those bees were carrying - some of them looked to be carrying about as much as a pea-sized bundle! And the colors!! After taking about 300 pictures (most of them continuous shots), I used a graphics program to put together some good pollen shots (click on the picture to enlarge):


I've been seeing a lot of the dark red / rust pollen coming into the hive, and wasn't sure where it was coming from. Well I was standing out front of the house where Tracy had planted a "broomstick bush" and saw that it had about a dozen of my girls working it, and their legs were full of the rust pollen. Mystery solved! They really like the bush, so I took a lot of pictures. During that time, I think I've taken my all-time favorite picture of the bees so far; it's the one at the top of this post (and I think I'm going to put it as the main picture of this blog, since that picture there now is from someone else). The bees love that bush. It was neat to be able to say, "yep, them's my bees!"

Here are some bees coming in for a landing laden with pollen: