Busy Bees

Yesterday afternoon, while I was watering the garden, the usual assortment of bees were busily buzzing around in the lavender. One in particular caught my eye — she was carrying a bright orange accumulation on her back legs.

Getting a photo was tricky. The bees don't stay in one place for more than a few seconds. and their route from flower to flower seems pretty random. Additionally, with the camera set on Macro and zoomed in, the area framed in the picture window was fairly small and locating the bee I wanted to capture was somewhat hit-and-miss.

Nevertheless, I snapped several pictures and got some acceptable images.

In fact, there were not one, but two bees with visible loads of pollen. This photo was completely serendipitous.

This morning, I was again watering the garden. Among other things, we have a couple of pumpkins over by the fence, near where some California poppies have volunteered to plant themselves. And what I observed there told me where the orange pollen came from.

There were two bees being extremely industrious among the poppies. Not only did they spend about twice as much time at each flower compared to the lavender (which made it easier to photograph them), sort of walking around inside the bloom to collect as much pollen as possible, but they also would visit the same flower more than once.