Bee spotting

Fab. pics Fran ! Lovely blog.

thanks, TT. Glad that there are still bees about, an so many different families!

Its amazing how many varieties of bees there are - there are five pages of illustrations in the Collins guide - about 70 altogether! There is one page that's just bumble bees, (the fat furry ones) some of them so similar its hard to see the difference.
These are all wild bees except possibly bee42 which might be a hive bee but I'm only guessing.

Lovely photographs Fran, I don't know how you manage to do it.

Thanks, TT: I'll have to do a search for "bee varieties" and see if I can match any up, even if only approximately.

They visit all the flowers [obviously, or those flowers would be wasting energy in advertising with no customers!] but they love the geraniums; I was out with the camera trying to track bees - easy while they're in flight, i can see movement and hear the buzz, not so easy when they land and I've no visual or audible clues! I took oh, hundreds of photos on the off-chance that when I uploaded them and could zoom in, I might find a bee there somewhere.

Now I've got a tripod, I think I'll just set it up on one plant and wait for visitors.

Natural History Museum - find British Bees by Colour Pattern - http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/research/projects/bombus/key_british_colour.html
[a lot easier than some other sites criteria!]

But I can still only tentatively name Bee #1, rest don't seem to match in any more than very basic ways.

ps: used their "contact us" to ask, and gave the link for this blog. No idea if that's allowed, but would be a tad diffcult to describe them in words!

Super pics Fran I think we have more varieties of bees in the UK than we realise.

The Nat Hist site gave lots of nation-wide ones and even more local ones - and included rare and extinct types - few of those but plenty of others

What great pictures! And very interesting. I hate wasps but love bees! Bees seem so gentle to me and I'm not scared at all when I see them. Wasps on the other hand scare me lots and I run off screaming from them ( looking like a crazy lady) ! Lol. I particularly like your photos of bee 1 and 4!
Where would we be without them all though ah!!!??????

Thanbs, Maggie. I'm not fond of wasps either, but i tolerate them as much as I can - they're a necessary part of the natural food chain, and a lot of them do prey on garden pests - but when I found a small nest in my shed, I had to take action. I did a blog on that.

Bees are more useful to humans, though! And nature in general - pollination duties without which a lot of flora wouldn't survive, and so nor would a lot of fauna.

This summer, bees permitting, I'll try for some more photos; now I've got a new camera and a tripod to put it on, I should be able to get some less blurred images. And this time I'll look out for the different varieties

I think you have done brilliantly to get those photos, they are really very good. And your very knowledgeable on them too!

Lovely photos Fran. It's lovely to see the bees. I have discovered this week that we have mining bees in the lawns and am really delighted. I live just south of Lincoln. Wish I could get a few photos of them.

Given that I'm visually impaired, bees aren't all that easy to photograph: while they're moving I can see them a bit, and I can her the buzz.. Once they settle, I lose both clues.

lol I didn't want to get close enough where I might see them, in case I infringed on their personal space! I ended up just generally taking photos of the geraniums and other flowers where I'd seen a bee and hten uploading them to the pc, and then having to scan the photo on high zoom, inch by inch, in case there was a bee in it.- then crop the photos around the bees - sometimes cutting 90% to get the bee up-front.

And, of course, a lot of photos didn't seem to have bees in them at all, or had one just taking off out of the frame. Oh, the stripey blurs I've got!

@ Numbersfarm - not heard of mining bees I'll have to look them up. From what you say, they burrow into the ground?

I've made a couple of bee hotels out of bamboo pieces, no idea if they're occupied, I don't want to disturb anything that's moved in. Could you make some sort of similar thing for your bees? a small built-up area for them to burrow into?

Oh my goodness fran, you really have done exceptionally well then!!! All that trouble you have gone to...... sounds a great deal to me!! More than well done to you!! ???

All i can say is, thank goodness for digital cameras! In the "good old days" I'd have to send off a roll off film, pay for it all to be developed and printed, and get one useable photo - if i was lucky!

I agree...... what a palarva ah!
Good job everything is so much more easier now! ?

lol, well, "easier" - the manuals were a lot simpler back then - "turn on,point, click button". These days the manual weighs more than the camera (and, given my vision, so easy to read!)

But still prefer these days to those :-)

I'm really bad on manuals, I usually look at the pictures and just go for it..... not always the best way to do it though! Lol ?

lol standard procedure: look at the manual only as a last resort!

Lol ???

You did really well, Fran, to get those photos of the bees in spite of your poor eyesight!

I'm a little surprised that you haven't been able to match up your bees so as to ID them yet! At least 3 seem quite common, the buff tailed one & the one with orange stripes I've seen quite often - though that doesn't mean I can ID them! The wide one could be a honey bee from a local hive.

I must agree with you on the issue of digital photos compared to the old rolls we had to have developed - I ruined no end of photos which today could have been deleted almost at once & taken again!

The site I went to, and gave the link for above, has the drawings of bees, with coloured patches, and a lot more segments to the body than I thought they actually had - but that's for the stripe pattern.

I found it a bit difficult to relate a mostly outline drawing to a real bee; I couldn't quite work out which one of two or three very similar [to me] colour schemes was the one in my photos.

They give so many variants of each type. I reckoned I could ignore the male bees, since it's the workders [females] that do the collecting, but even so ... trying to tell the difference between white and light cream, or yellow-orange, red-orange and orange-gold ...

I'd probably be able to ID bees easier from photos.

The following page seems as good a place as any to try & ID bees:

http://www.buzzaboutbees.net/bee-identification.html

I spent a while looking at bees on there. :-))

Thanks, Balcony, I'll check it out