Honey Bee Central
Individuals from three visits over the past month or so, where the creek crosses the track in Venman. They come in waves from the hive, fill up at the waters edge and home again.
Hunkered down on the side of the track, off the landing zone and out of the flight path, watching for any nearby bee at the right angle and situation for a shot or two.
Careful not to kneel or lean on one, don’t want to kill or get stung, dipping the lens tip to the water at times for a bees eye view. Hat on in case of accidents from behind, listening for the tell-tale buzz from what can’t be seen.
Air traffic observation. A flurry of landings, a scattering of take offs, coming and going in apparent confusion with rare collision until, all of a sudden, nothing. Quiet space.
A gap in the busy work of the bee, it seems, and the mind at work with them dies, no more to take my attention.
Time to look to the sense, in between.
Mind the gap …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Flower Power 2
Adds colour and contrast to the green or darkness, sometimes a scent, and feels silky smooth – mostly. And beauty, can’t forget the most important part, a little shimmering inside. This one is wonderfully yellow and it has stopping power, to stop an insect, or me, in its tracks.
Flowers feed the small creatures with pollen and nectar and are the precursor to what feeds you and me, fruits, seeds and things. Wonderful little things, flowers. And bugs.
In fact everything rests on the flowers and the bugs that tend them.
And they rest on the one primordial intelligence behind.
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The same intelligence that pervades and upholds all things.
Known and not, that we call God.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Wild Things
Gecko. Lives around the house and eats everything in sight or flight around the light at night. It rhymes.
Huntsman. Found under the peeling bark of a tree in the nearby forest/NR. Known as the giant crab spider, young and fast.
Wasp. (can’t remember name now) Was depositing eggs? in rotten old branch in same NR when the ant came to investigate.
Lynx Spider. Waiting on some wild growing Jasmine, such a sweet smell. You have to be careful smelling the flowers.
Honey Bee. Last of the day and I saw this one moving on the ground. It was weak, trying to scramble up on a leaf with its wings outstretched. Death wasn’t far off.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Gecko. Lives around the house and eats everything in sight or flight around the light at night. It rhymes.
Huntsman. Found under the peeling bark of a tree in the nearby forest/NR. Known as the giant crab spider, young and fast.
Wasp. (can’t remember name now) Was depositing eggs? in rotten old branch in same NR when the ant came to investigate.
Lynx Spider. Waiting on some wild growing Jasmine, such a sweet smell. You have to be careful smelling the flowers.
Honey Bee. Last of the day and I saw this one moving on the ground. It was weak, trying to scramble up on a leaf with its wings outstretched. Death wasn’t far off.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Going to Market
The honey bee is dying here, apparently paralysed from the waist back, perhaps bitten by a spider. Or it is experiencing one of the many maladies visited upon it in the effort to profit from it. It could only move its forearms to scramble around in the leaf litter, not its wings or other legs.
I put it on a nearby surface and covered it with a large leaf. Who knows, it might have recovered.
Who knows without looking?
Flies are still the dominant creatures on my landscape though the weather is beginning to warm up. With the warm comes the biting midges and mozzies but I know how to deal with them now. The other larger creatures won’t be far behind though I expect a little more ebb and flowing of the cold yet.
I went for a walk recently at the nearby NR and met a gardener and he told me where there is a black bee hive, the ones I have a few pix of on the yellow flowers. I have yet to check it out but I’ll get to it soon enough. They are native bees and they don’t have a sting, or much of one.
There is something very pleasing about the black bee. Perhaps it’s that they aren’t domesticated, uncorrupted by man and his exploitive ways, unlike the honey bee.
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The gardener’s wife asked me to do a photography workshop after seeing some of my prints but I declined saying that’s not what I am, others know far more about photography than I do. So she asked me to give a presentation on how and why I got into photography using my pix as illustration and I agreed, as soon as I am set up on another front.
That is selling my images at the local markets, the other front. I am having to learn all about cutting mat and foam board and getting it right, not as easy as it first seems. But all in its time, that’s how it is.
All of it. In it’s time.
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Now the birds are dancing and singing in the trees in the morning. The magpie warbling resounds beautifully, magically in me, reminds me spring is almost here.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Nature's Place 
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