Photographing Bees in Flight

There's something so satisfying about photographing bees in flight, standing so close to them and yet not being stung. Looking at them toil, pick up honey and then flying away in a specific direction only to return after some time. There are the smaller bees and the larger more brightly coloured bees. However, one does spend a lot of time photographing bees, since they never seem to hover for any particular time at one place. This is a collection of photographs that I took of flying bees over a period of a few days. I did use the inbuilt flash to somehow bring out a crispness to the snaps.

I've tried very hard to get a few of their photographs to face on, but then, it was so difficult to guess when they'd emerge out the flowers and when they did, they just flew away without giving me a chance to press the button.

The best I could were the shots from the side and others from the top. Somehow, the best shots were when the bees were hovering before the flowers.

But then there were others too that came out somehow OK! I guess it was because of the fact that the rays of the sun fell in a particular direction. One of the most important factors determining good photographs that have an acceptable amount of detail is the direction of the light! Of course, there were bees chasing each other, taking turns somehow to get into the flowers and carry off the nectar.

However, the others went sola and grabbed the stuff, not waiting for the others. These were the 'Solitary Reapers'!

And while the bees worked hard to gather the nectar, I stood watching them toil, all with a purpose so great that one would wonder that if bees worked so hard, then how do we compare to them!

And while the bees kept gathering their food, I kept a watch over them. Time well spent, I guess, during times of lockdown. 

Now you must be wondering about the settings, well I used a fill-in flash,  an ISO setting of 800, an aperture setting of 8 (f-8) and a shutter speed of 1/200. 

Sometimes however you might bend the rules and play with light to create backlighted or highlighted photographs such as the two of the photographs posted above. The idea was to create a surreal image of the bees.

The best of the bee photographs came with a higher f-stop setting of 9. This narrower aperture provided for a sharper image of an otherwise fast-moving bee. Hope the viewer likes these snaps.