Megachile aurifrons, in June?

Author Gary Taylor ◦

A bit of a surprise on this week’s bush-run. 🙂 We’d already had a pretty good day (new glasses, so I could actually see stuff… 😅), but it was getting into late arvo, we were on the home run, and I’d stopped to cut some firewood for the week when I spotted this girl… Megachile aurifrons, in June? She’s normally a summer bee, I’m not sure if she’s exceptionally early or exceptionally late… 😅 Perhaps just exceptionally adaptable, dunno, but it’s a first for me 🙂.

And you might be thinking “Crikey, that last pic is crap…” 😄 Yep, but that’s what makes it the best pic for the next part… 🙂

Ok, first up, for those worried about my comment “stopped to cut firewood” (as you should be, dead trees in the bush provide homes for countless creatures, and in most places these days it’s also illegal to remove it), this is not “bush wood”. It’s dead trees on a cattle station, knocked over in a cyclone years ago and bulldozed into piles to be burnt. Which is kinda why the last pic is crap… 😄 When I first saw her, I was standing on a log several feet off the ground and all I had was a chainsaw, so I clambered back down off the pile, got my camera from the car, clambered back up and snapped the first four pics… but then she left this hole and flew to another one, so I clambered back down and tried to follow her… apparently with my thumb on the setting dial inadvertently changing all the settings, again… 😂 But! In the crappy pic she was dragging another bee out of the hole, which means she’s not a one-off freak occurrence, there are others around too… 🙂

Which brings me to the last point. I often get asked about my camera, “you must have a nice one…”. Yes I do 🙂, several actually, my “nicest” one being a Canon 5D, 100mm macro lens and came with more fruit than a buffet at vegetarian wedding 😅 (double battery pack, extension flash with its own separate battery pack, bunch of flash additions/options and a heap of different diffusers…) Awesome, if you’re on flat ground, have a tripod, and don’t mind spending a couple of hours waiting for one or two good pics (even then, the focal point is so incredibly fine that the eyes might be in focus but the rest is just a blur…). And good luck hanging by one hand in a precarious and uncomfortable position halfway up a pile of dead tree branches and getting a pic with that… 😄 And it’s not only seriously heavy, it’s so big and bulky that the moment you raise it up to get a pic, the bees see the movement and take off… I rarely even bother taking it on our bush-runs anymore, statistically (as in how many decent pics I come home with), my little old Olympus TG 4 (1/3 of the price of the Canon lens alone) absolutely flogs it… 🙂