A bee in my flower!

You would have thought I'd found gold in this blossom the way I was beaming from ear to ear. Or you may have thought I was nuts when I did the I-just-got-THE-shot victory dance... Well, at least my neighbors probably did.

Feast or famine, isn't that the way it always goes? Yesterday, I struggled to come up with any blip at all and found myself disappointed at every step of the process. Today was quite the opposite. Up until mid afternoon, I thought I was set with a nice shot of a red-bellied woodpecker. Or maybe the chipmunk that let me get so close, I almost didn't need my long lens. Then, the sun came out and so did the insects! I've been waiting for this for ages! I was on my stomache to get this shot and on a step ladder to capture 50 images of a dragonfly. I chased a fly with a golden face (dubbed the Las Vegas Fly) and tracked down the mystery buzzzz of a horned in the tree above me. Such fun. :) It took a while to sort through the obscene amount of images I ended up with and I struggled with which one to choose. But, I kept going back to this Augochlora Sweet Bee, so she had to be it. (Oddly, I was able to ID her easily - even the sex..... That never happens.) She is a tiny bee, measuring a quarter of an inch in length. You'll need to go large to get a good look at her.

I thought about putting the runner(s)-up on Flickr, but I'm pretty sure I'll have another crack at most of those... So, I'll leave them for another blip day. :)