Sweet Attraction …
It’s been cold and wet lately but still some creatures about and looking for nourishment. So I put out some cooked fruit to see what may come. There have been a lot of fruit flies, a few weevils and two beetles I usually find in flowers munching on the pollen.
First the big one came and had a look around, and took off very soon after. She, I think she ‘just because’, didn’t stay long enough to eat the first time but came back the next day, after it would have fermented some more.
I set her to the fruit you see, away from the madding crowd of flies and ants, and she tucked in and didn’t raise her head until this smaller version showed up. They shared the food until the little one took off, didn’t take long at all, and the older one didn’t move for a couple days.
I thought she might have died so I poked her with a piece of straw and she moved, so I left her be. It occurred to me she might be drunk and unable to rise but I wasn’t about to interrupt her experience.
Then, when I was sure she must be comatose from alcohol poisoning she got up and flew away. I trust she did since I didn’t actually see her but you never know what happens in the unknown, obviously.
But in this story they lived happily ever after, this time …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Little Things …
This little thing …
In time, becomes this little thing …
That eventually meets another little thing to do a little thing so more little things can in turn do their thing …
Life on earth depends on the little things.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Born Of The Green
The green, earth as it may be remembered, mother to every creature born, without exception. So why do we think we are the exception, that we can ruin the nature for a profit?
We separate ourselves from nature and call it progress. But what is it progress from or to? From the simplicity of being content in nature, to a future imaginary world that only makes the present unreachable.
I’ve lived long enough to have involved myself in the delicious addiction to minding, as thinking and emotion sustaining a ‘way of life’, to have come to know it as nothing more than the pain of separation from the simplicity of being content now.
And now there is only one concern, one purpose, to live long enough to love enough to not have to do it again – live this life of progression from one self generated delusion to the next, one insane mental construct that only serves to divide, until it serves, as it does. To know love enough.
Look around, the world is going to hell, the world is hell and madmen are in charge. Seeing it is hell reveals the beginning of heaven, separating from the madness, and it is not up or over ‘there’.
Enough experience will do that, especially if you live long enough to get old and ill while retaining a sense of equilibrium throughout, regardless …
There’s got to be less, or other, than this …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Whittling Down The Form …
Winter has advanced across our sub tropical night with the dark clear sky and the native bees are feeling its cold grip. There weren’t that many to start with but now down to two, and they don’t give up, though there is no choice in the matter, in the season – as health fails.
As soon as the sun is high enough off they are into the garden to find sustenance, and maybe a mate – there seems to be a couple females foraging through the day – to complete their instinctive little lives.
It is always a pleasure to see them patrolling the flowers, always careful of potential predators, where I discourage the spider’s webs and the neighbour’s grandchildren from retiring them early.
The least I can do for our garden’s indispensable residents.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look *
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Pretty Boy
He is a charmer, colourful fellow, proud headdress, garden ranger, deadly hunter.
When nature is left to itself everything finds a place. The plants feed the caterpillars, they feed all sorts – including spiders, they feed the lizards and they feed the birds.
Everything produces something for the tiny stuff to start it all over again, a perpetual motion machine requiring all the parts to be functioning, as intended.
There is no panic in the garden. They all go about their business without fear of future, or losing what’s known. And the end comes, naturally, inevitably.
Living, eating, sleeping, working, playing, mating and dying is what it’s about. When that can be done without a mental emotional problem it’s a pleasure …
… that passes understanding.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Be – Jewelled
Where the native bees have been more or less wiped out by local councils ‘native regeneration’ efforts a few plants have been flowering and attracting other native creatures.
They are shy bugs, don’t like being overshadowed by the flash diffuser, but still some are just too occupied to notice or care – with a few lucky shots taken of them on the run.
Wonderful colours, clearly no less precious to the earth that makes them than the earth’s rare stones and metals are to humans.
Every thing is precious in its place, seen for what it in fact is and not necessarily for what it may be to the sleepless calculator.
Takes a certain separation from mind to see the colour, the form, and not the stuff mind would attach to it.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Bait ‘n Capture
It’s one way I sometimes effect a photo capture of an otherwise elusive creature. A tiny drop of honey placed in a flower and wait for something to take the bait. Once it is feeding it is usually oblivious to other benign circumstances in its orbit.
There is clearly no expectation of danger apparent in its demeanour, unlike some bees that act so cagey when approaching a flower – there perhaps being a knowledge of waiting spiders in its instinct.
You will never see an instinctive creature walk knowingly into a trap, willing to die by its own actions, except maybe a mother or other guardian – though I doubt there is foresight of consequences.
To live and die without psychological fear is no small thing.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Daylight Robbery
The bee hotels I have under the veranda, where they are protected from the heat of the sun and the torrential summer rain, are often under attack by other creatures looking for advantage.
Here is one parasitic wasp laying into the nest of a Orange Tail Resin Bee, you can just see the ovipositor behind the middle legs in two pictures. Through it she deposits an egg which feeds on the bee larva and probably the store left for its initial growth.
It’s the way of nature that one thing depends on another for its sustenance. When one piece of the picture is missing there is a deficiency but things invariably balance out in the big picture – just as well for us most destructive humans.
And then there was light … as one more wasp is created, by design.
A wonderfully mysterious nature.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Wild Being
Bee on my stick …
Click on pix to see bigger version in new tab.
Climbing to the sun …
Have only seen those ‘cutters’ behind the mandibles on a Carpenter Bee
I hadn’t been to Venman for a while and didn’t take my camera on the walk, thinking to just enjoy the cooler wet woods without consideration for a picture, of anything – it had been raining much and I had no mind for hunting.
Along the way the path was flooded and I noticed a commotion on the water’s surface and could see plainly a large insect was in trouble, on its back, wide wings keeping it from sinking, so I offered my stick and it gripped it without hesitation.
It wasn’t the first time I had done such a thing and knew it was only a matter of time before she was recovered and away on the wing, it being a bee’s nature to busy itself. It climbed a few inches and stopped, resting, recovering from its watery struggle.
Walking on I gave it time to wake up and it didn’t move again so I kept it in my shadow, protected from the wind, as I slowly made my way back to the van, where the camera was, and set her up on a dry surface in the sun and took a few shots.
She soon got moving again and after a while tried to fly away but without success, launching into the air but unable to sustain flight for more than a couple feet. I picked her up again and she made use of different surfaces, bark, stone and tree.
I didn’t see at the time but in the pix it is apparent she was damaged on the upper right eye and head, it was a windy day, which would account for her crashing to the water.
Falling back to earth a few times I kept her from the ants and eventually set her climbing a tall tree into the sunshine, was where I left her.
Eventually we’ve got to leave the wild to be …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Nature's Place 
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