Stuart Rae

Bees on blossom

The garden has been full of honey bees over the past few weeks. First they had the apricot blossom, then the plums, now they are collecting nectar from the apple trees. They really are busy little things and trying to grab some photographs of them is challenging, the fly so quickly. Here are a two shots taken with ISO settings of 4000, and exposure time of 1/4000 of a second. And they still are not frozen in action, well their bodies are but not their wings.

So I tried some slow-motion filming of them. This was more tricky as the camera could not focus closely enough to give larger images and tracking the bees before pressing record was difficult through a viewfinder. Here are the results of my better efforts. Fun trying.

The action shown in each of these clips was over in a few seconds.

And one last final clip