The Company Of Bees
Between the recent heat of the day and the rain and wind at night there are few opportunities for shooting Blue Banded Bees. It’s only when they are either feeding or sleeping that they are at all approachable.
During the day they rarely stop for more than a second or two at a flower and I don’t have the equipment for that. So I walk the garden at dusk listening for the tell-tale sound as they approach and select a place to sleep for the coming night.
Sometime during the night I will set up a shot or two and the primary concern is to not disturb them. If they wake they will fly into the dark and may be lost to the night hunters, of which there are many.
It’s why the bees sleep where they do, gripping a stem off the ground and at the end of a branch where there is no through traffic or passers by, to increase their chances of waking in the morning – they are not stupid.
And if a predator does happen upon one during the night it will automatically splay its legs in all directions to make itself bigger and would be a bit thorny to eat, with its hooked feet the first contact.
Once the morning comes they are up and about before any other bee I know, hardy little creatures, bullets of blue and red and black darting about, with purpose.
Even when it’s raining heavily they are up and about, a pleasure to watch, the way they control their flight in tight spots in their search for food – known to favour blue flowers.
Bees being bees … not to be confused with butterflies …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Dear Bee …
All of a sudden it went from hot to cold and you were caught out in the rain, needing heat to fly, weighed down by water. Lucky there was a flower to land on and wait out the weather.
When I saw you the rain had been falling for a day and you looked on the verge of drowning but I’m sure your kind are no strangers to such events, or the hunger that drives.
Regardless, I arranged some background to shoot against and after a while the flower you gripped so tight fell from the stem to the earth, naturally worn out, dead.
So I picked you up, still gripping the dead flower, and brought you to where we could both relax and recover. It was easier for me to shoot from a stool and you dried out, good all round.
After a while you started to move and flex your wings, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before you were away on the breeze, rain permitting, in search of your fulfilment, as a bee.
And as I watched that’s exactly what you did, took to the air, and I saw you fade to the distance, a small dark dot becoming nothing quickly – disappeared from sense, no more in mind.
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I went for a walk in the garden, camera in hand, and there you were again, or a brother or sister, feeding on the same kind of flower, still a little tired from the weather event.
Climbing, not flying, from flower to flower, so unlike a bee, I waited until you were occupied, focussed, and moved in for a shot, or two, and I was lucky.
We were lucky, I got some pix, you got to live a little more, eat, then fly away, doing bee things.
Not a bad day’s work at all, for a monkey and a bee.
On the earth that makes and breaks us …
… what we are and what we are not.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
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Bee On My Finger
When I get up, usually sometime in the morning, I have in mind to take a look around the garden. Not only because gardens require some tending, more that the sense of nature is soothing to the psyche and when put first, the sense, it has the effect of diminishing the mentality, the thinking and emotionality engendered by modern living.
It’s a good way to start the day. It helps resolve any lingering dream. And when I have been quiet enough for long enough I can come to things, inside, that nag at me to do something about it – whatever it is. It is tempting to gloss over what hasn’t been resolved, comfortable even, but that is not the way to peace of mind. It’s got to be about peace of mind first …
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On the way around I check the water buckets, where I let it sit to evaporate off the chlorine. I check for trapped or drowning creatures that don’t need to be so, and amongst the others there was a honey bee on its last legs. I lifted it out by putting my finger under it and raising it out of the water, as I do with them all, and I could see by some small movement it was still alive.
It had been raining for days, and cold, so I left it on my finger to warm up and dry out. It didn’t seem to be in any hurry so I got the camera and performed a few contortions to get a few shots. Eventually it woke enough and I put it down in a sheltered spot to gather its strength, fed it a little sugar water and next morning it was gone – back home or back to the hive, who knows. But not yet time to die.
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Did it succumb overnight to a creeping cold malaise or return to its vital instinctive self, given enough life left in it to do so. You just never know, and that state of not knowing is one of the beauties of truth. Because truth, or love – that beautiful state of bee-ing, is beyond the knowing mind.
Nature can be reflective … of the low and the high.
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
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In Limbo …
… the bugs, that is. The sun is shining, the climate is mild and getting warmer, the garden is in flower and still all I find is spiders. Nothing wrong with spiders, but they are not bees.
So I dug one up, out of the bowels of the computer. One I haven’t posted before, from a time I had a good session of shooting – because I was present to do so and nature presented, the two are not exclusive.
It’s the same bee as this one – https://beingmark.com/2013/06/15/bee-odyssey/ – that had moved about in the heat of the sun and stranded where it landed if the sun went in or shadow overtook it. That’s what happens when cold, they stop.
Much like us if we were subject to the same relative conditions, except the bees never complain or blame, never feel hopeless nor despair. It’s their nature, instinctively bearing all that comes their way, not a thought for why but just to get on with what they do.
It’s their intelligence, their being a bee, in its perfect place …
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
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To Dream a Bee
Sorry, no bees today.
Yesterday while walking about the garden I saw this huge black and yellow bee, black bottom and furry yellow jacket, busy feeding at the still flowering Chia with its little blue flowers. The bee was the size of half my thumb, about 3.5cm long, and I later found out it is a Great Carpenter Bee.
It was the biggest bee I have seen and I didn’t have my camera with me, but she was moving too fast anyway. So I just watched as she flew from flower to flower and then away. It’s not yet spring here so this could be a good sign for the forms of life to come.
The weather is wonderful, bright, sunny and cool and plants are finding their place in the garden, before the spring starts up, to be ready for the hotter summer. I don’t decide where a plant goes, it tells me in no words at all.
It’s a form of communication you just have to be open to, after you’ve given up thinking reason is most important – it’s not, but has its place too.
So what I do is unpredictable, because life is unpredictable. Some would call me slow, I don’t mind, but I say ‘what’s the hurry’.
This afternoon I had to lie down for a while, to recuperate from recent exertions, and I had a dream. I saw a black bee swimming in the water – not an unusual sight throughout the year in the garden – and it was happy, a smiling bee.
Someone put a finger in to tickle it and it climbed out onto the hand and flew away. A wonderful little dream, to be a bee.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab – best in FireFox
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Daisy – Oh Dai-i-aisy!
I never before realised how abundantly the common, and not so common, daisy caters to the need for pollen and nectar of the many small flying creatures in the garden. Not until I got a few and took the time to see.
Now I have four different kinds in the garden, one really finding its feet after transplanting a little while ago spreads and hangs over the sides of the pot, another pops up around the garden at will – its,The Will, and two more recent residents – one just doesn’t stop flowering in a ball of colour and nourishment, the other just starting out has two budding threads reaching for the light, one just opened today.
It’s nearly time to find a spot in the ground for the ball of flowers; it needs a secure home that isn’t dependent on my daily attention. And the one reaching will need moving to a bigger pot, for now.
I do enjoy these simple pleasures.
The Bees and Flies, and other visitors, are never far from the flowers and with the sun shining more now I expect more visitors in the relative heat of the day. As long as it isn’t too cold at night.
The garden ebbs and flows, ripples and eddies as much as the tides, but you need to be in daily attendance to notice.
It is music to the senses. Take the time to listen, even play along. Move that one to the sun, a little water there, repot, replant, nourish and tend them as if they were children – as they are …
It’s a different kind of prayer.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab
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This Little Girl …
… I found in the bucket of water I leave at the end of the garden to make it easier for watering a few starters – plants – there, the yellow bucket of the recent post of the same name.
She was exhausted from the effort to get out of the water and her temperature would have been below what is required for optimal operation of the system, but that’s a part of the effort she makes to survive, it also keeps her ‘warm’ in the cold water – while she dies from exhaustion.
I scooped her up, a finger beneath her and gently rose with her well balanced on it so as to put no strain on her meagre reserves, in trust she will recover with a little help. Insects die all the time from falling into water; it’s not unusual – a daily hazard where there is water and wind and predators – to evade, accidents happen too.
I brought her to a yellow Straw Flower in the sunshine where I could attend to her and feed her a little honey while she would clean, energise and dry out. Instead what happened was the honey blended or melted into the water drenching her little body and got in everywhere and made her sticky and unable to fly – I would suppose, putting myself in the bee’s shoes. Do bees have shoes? :)
She was disturbed, but not aggressively so. It was just that she now had more work to do because of my intrusion with the honey, however well intentioned. She may have taken a little of it but my placement of it was not regulated enough so there was just too much for best result, least effort to recovery.
So she went to work cleaning herself, and it seemed she would never succeed to get rid of the sticky water. So I interfered again, this time to spray her with more water from a bottle, to dilute the honey and make it easier for her to get rid of it. I did this three times and in the end, about an hour later, of me standing in the heat of the sunshine with her cupped in my hand for best solar heating as she gently gripped my skin in her jaws to enable the vigorous flapping of her wings and shaking of her bum to throw off any liquid, she seemed close to clean.
Then, when she was nearly ready to get back to her life as a free bee, free to do what she does, she climbed onto my finger, the highest part available to her – to launch from I suppose, since that’s what many creatures naturally do, but didn’t.
I was watching and waiting, I had observed and helped so far and was looking to see her take off but it wasn’t happening. She was just sitting on the top of my finger, only occasionally shifting herself this way or that, moving only slightly about. A few times it looked like she had just run out of energy, but I reckon the honey helped there at least.
I noticed a car coming into the driveway and looked up to see who it was, and it was just then she launched into the air and was gone.
Have to laugh! If it was personal I might have been disappointed she left unseen and without a wave. :)
But she left in her time and that’s always best, there’s no other way to go.
Nothing is done outside its time. It doesn’t matter what we may or may not want. Life is too big, and life is in charge.
A bow to thee, little bee.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab
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PS These pix were taken as my OB flash was dying on my #1 camera so exposure was hit and miss, these were the best of the lot.
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Sunrise on Dew Laden Nomad and Friends …
… in the Wildness.
Cold nights and humid air with warm sunshine in the morning means something to drink and life goes on, if you’re lucky and survive the day, if luck it be. All the creatures are making the most of the light and warmth at sunrise. I would too if I was sleeping on a leaf, though I think I might hang under it and brave the spiders rather then carry all that cold water on my back.
Well, I was this side of the camera so I don’t have those considerations today. ((:
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
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The Dreams of Bees
As the still bright sun goes down behind the clouds over the woods on a cold and windy day, a Blue Banded Bee gets ready for the long dark night through which he cannot fly away. For a while he comes and he goes but eventually to keep, he locks his jaws on the stem and that way goes to sleep.
And on the way he dreams of the things, of bees. While stretching his wings and kicking his legs he turns this way and that to indicate, he sees. The blue of a flower in bloom, a little nectar or pollen, a mate of his kind. Zooming in and out among the grasses and between the trees. God knows he will find.
Dreaming in imagery a thinker could never know, the things a bee is and does. Making his home near enough to his kind, making it on the go.
And all the while, he keeps his big eyes open for danger and, marvelously, knows no foe.
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She, in her clay nest looking over her brood, waiting to wake to the sun once more to do the dreams of bees, given the weather’s mood. To find a blue flower, some pollen and nectar, a mate perhaps, of her kind, a choiceless love that does not intrude.
She knows no time but what she does as the need presents in mind. Yes, bees have minds. Did you think you are the only ones, you and your kind?
And when they are done and dead, no one to mourn, the little ones fed, it happens o’er, never once knowing the ill of human dread.
Rise up little one, to the golden flight, though there be a little fright, Thou art a queen, of light.
Rise up, to know your right.
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Each bee new to the fact of being a bee, each flower a rare discovery, sipping the nectar of the earth can only be heavenly, to a new bee. And all the other things that happen anew in a bee’s busy day, you see.
Chased by a Dragon or Wasp or even a bird or three. Evading death a hundred ways, the wind no less a threat, when hungry, being as small a bee.
They have been cold and wet of late. Holding on for days and nights before they ate. To live and die as is their fate. And all to know a mate, a mate.
That’s their fate, and their faith, it’s never too late.
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And then I look up and what do I see, but the gods of the sub-continent aligned to a V. Sailing or running along on the wind, aflame, a-coloured, gloriously unhinged. What may be.
Was it me? With them or not, I can’t now see. A b… on the wing, I could equally be. ((:
What is this I have seen? The passage overhead, alongside, of fantastic creatures, warriors, a king and a queen. A wonderful procession of the characters of innocent mythical mind a keen.
Then to my rear I see the world, a-burning where there is no flame, consuming yellow arise from the earth, a perfect dissolution that knows no blame – it’s not you or me, no such fame.
This way or that, there was no escape, from these hard won laurels no man could possibly ape. T’was real enough, to me, all form agape.
The end I see, nothing to bemoan, but to set me free. The death of you and me, but no, not Thee.
Or was it just a dream after all, of bees, no more to be seen or fall? A dream, too few do recall.
No, t’was real enough to me, my friend. Know though, this is not the end.
For we meet in the wilderness, of mind, where thought would only offend.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
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Nature's Place 
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