Cuckoo bee

Back to the grove again today and as you see above, quite successful. Actually not my target, the green bee which I spoke of two days ago, but still a very impressive insect and probably my best capture to date.

The metallic blue bee moves around in a similar fashion to the regular bees that you find around the flower beds. It moves from bloom to bloom spending about 8 seconds at each plant. It hovers slightly before entering the flower head, but its hovering skills are not that adept, which meant that the hover shot was a tad blurry and not upto blip standards. However, even with the two second lag between shots, I was still able to collect two more frames before my blue friend departed.

The sky was heavily overcast, which meant that I was very limited for exposure settings. I did not want to go below F5.6, so as to collect a reasonable depth of field. But for a moving insect in flight, 1/100th sec is just not fast enough. Now that I have my static shot of the blue bee, I can concentrate on capturing the hover shot, perhaps on a bright day with the ISO pushed up a couple of stops, I could achieve 1/500th or even 1/1000th sec. The green bee is going to be my best chance of a good hover shot, as its hovering skills are excellent, but it is so fast, I will have to be on the ball.

I have collected a follower, a young man in his 30's. A pleasant chap, speaks a little bit of English. He owns a big house next to the grove entrance, so is quite wealthy on the scale of things. Looks like a business man, well dressed and sharp. He is totally engrossed and fascinated by my antics and has crouched down beside me for the last two days. I will have to do a blip of the Indonesian crouch position, they can sit like that for hours. I can last about twenty seconds before my legs start to cramp up.

I did have to slow the guy down a bit, as every time a butterfly or a bee caught his eye, he would be getting all excited and pointing it out to me, while I am trying to remain as still and quiet as possible. But he is getting the hang of it now and shared my enthusiasm after the capture of the blue bee. No, we didn't link arms and do a dance.

Shortly after the blue bee, a few spots of rain started to fall, so this time I packed up straight away and covered the camera with a plastic bag, learned from yesterdays experiences. I was going to finish anyway, as I did not want to risk another good blip shot coming along and giving me a headache in the lab.

A good blip day and looking forward to tomorrow.

Update - Neon Cuckoo Bee - Thyreus nitidulus. Family ANTHOPHORIDAE

Here is a link to a composite including the hover shot.

Dave