Author Gary Taylor ◦
Finally! Perhaps… 😄
So, the bush excursions have been pretty much a waste of time lately… But on the bright side (or so I thought 😄), my Eucalyptus platypus burst into flower a couple of weeks back, it’s huge and loaded with buds… I should get heaps of pics (last year I photographed around 20 different species)… 😃
And it started ok with a few of the regulars turning up, 1st pic, always one of the first to arrive, Amegilla chlorocyanea… From the Latin chloro meaning green, cyaneus being “deep blue” (and I have actually seen one that colour, once 😆, it was the most amazingly beautiful deep, almost metallic, green-blue I’ve ever seen, that five years on I still check the spot I first saw it out in the bush, hoping to see another one… 😅, never have… 😄), in my experience the vast majority seem to have softer pastel colours… This one’s more of a “Morning Sky French Vanilla Banded Bee”… 😃
But then Megachile aurifrons turned up (from aurum-gold, frons-front, or “brow” when in reference to a face), and that’s when things started getting weird… Just after I took the 3rd pic, top right, my camera frose up completely. Wouldn’t focus, wouldn’t zoom, had to take the battery out to reset it… Next pic (4th pic middle right), Megachile erythropyga also arrives (erythro-red, pyga-rump, a reference to the deep red spot on her bum… and yes in this pic she does look a bit like M. aurifrons with “red-eye” taken out… 😄). But then, right in front of my eyes, she suddenly let go of the flower like she was dragged back by an evil spirit, and simply vanished into thin air… You can see it starting to happen in the 5th pic, photographic proof that she’s becoming invisible… and I dead set never saw her again…😆
Ok, so maybe the camera “frose” ‘cos it’d been in the hot sun all day, and maybe the red spot resin bee simply flew behind the flower off to somewhere else, and I didn’t see it… the “ghosting effect” simply a movement/camera-flash glitch… But it doesn’t explain why, despite seeing heaps of different bees, and being presented with so many awesome opportunities, photographically, I’ve had the worst luck I’ve ever had in my life… 😂 It’s like Murphy is giving the Grandkids a go, showing ’em all the tricks, laughing his head off, “Hey, he’s just spotted a stunning male Hylaeus violaceus fanning pheromones on a gum leaf and he thinks he’s going to sneak in slowly, softly and gently… See that little knob of Rosemary-bush root just slightly poking out of the ground? Get his left thong caught on that as he goes to step forward… that’ll be funny…😃” and instead of getting a nice pic, I face plant the poor little guy…. 😆 never saw that one again either… 😂
And that was just the beginning, it actually got worse… 😅 I shall elaborate in further posts, but suffice to say that sometimes you need to be logical about these things… check the facts, like planetary alignment, and I’m starting to wonder if that old saying “Never try to capture the soul of the red eyed bee on the 13th hour from midnight of a new moon…” really is just an old “wives tale”, ‘cos of the hundreds of pics I’ve taken since, there’s not one that’s actually in focus or not ghosted to some degree…😂 It’s The Curse I tells ya!.. 🤣
Images © Gary Taylor
Check out more blogs and contribution by Gary Taylor.
