macro photography – Page 5 – Brennah's Backyard

Sights from the Bee Hives

I recently got a couple new colonies of honey bees. These were nucleus colonies, which are just tiny honey bee colonies in small (and more portable) boxes. They rapidly outgrow such small boxes, so moving them into new boxes (and looking them over and taking photos while I was at it) was my first task. Here’s a bit of what I encountered.

honey bee eggs and just hatched larvae — Honey bee eggs (mostly on the left) and just hatched larvae. The liquid around the larvae is their food; probably royal jelly. (All larvae are fed royal jelly until they are three days old, after three days, only queens are fed royal jelly.)

The black background to these photos is foundation, a template that the bees construct their comb on inside the hive. Foundation is a sheet of wax, or plastic (or wax coated plastic) printed with a hexagon pattern that the bees draw out into comb. In this case it is black plastic, which is often helpful for beginners to be able to see the bee eggs and young larvae, which is useful in assessing the health of the colony. (You actually literally have to train your eyes to see them; I had good eyesight and knew what I was looking for when I started, but I simply wasn’t able to see them through my veil so I would take it off temporarily. Now I can see them just fine through my veil.)

honey bee eggs and young larvae, with two eggs in one cell — Honey bee eggs and just hatched larvae. One cell contains two eggs. Very young queens sometimes do this when they are still learning how to lay eggs properly.

honey bees on comb — Close up of a few bees on the comb. The light in this picture highlights their fur (they even have fur on their eyes). Young bees are especially fuzzy.

honey bees with eggs and just hatched larvae — Honey bees with eggs (mostly on the left again) and just hatched larvae.

worker honey bees with queen — Worker honey bees surrounding their queen. This queen is marked with a white dot on her back (this is also something that can be helpful for beginners to be able to spot the queen among the thousands of worker bees, but it can also be helpful for people who have a lot of hives, or are breeding queens and need to keep track of them more carefully).

Back Door Bees

Leafcutter bee (megachile sp) and bumble bee (bombus sp) with pollen on thistle

There are at least three different species of wild bees that nest within a few feet of my back door. Most people never notice that they’re there. Most wild bees are solitary, meaning that they don’t live in colonies. Instead, the female bees build nests and provision them with nectar and pollen and lay an egg or eggs in them. Two of the three outside my back door are solitary, but one is social, meaning that they do live in a colony and even they are very discreet.

Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata)

The first bees I noticed nesting outside the back door were two-spotted bees, or melissodes bimaculata, as I usually think of them. (I didn’t learn the common name when I first identified them, and I assumed they probably didn’t have one since most common names for bees don’t refer to a single species; they refer to a group of related species. A year or two later, I came across the common name.) These bees have been nesting in the vicinity of the back door since we moved here, which means they’ve probably been there longer than that. Two-spotted bees are solitary bees that nest in the ground and emerge late in the year (I have not even seen any of them yet this year). They usually start to appear at about the time our lemon balm starts to flower, and I frequently see them foraging on it. They are named for the two rectangular spots on the back of the abdomen of the females (bimaculata also means two spotted).

Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) with pollen on lemon balm flower

Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) on lemon balm — Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) resting on lemon balm flower. You can see one of her two spots in this picture.

Leafcutter bee (megachile sp)

The next bees I noticed were the leafcutter bees. They are not nearly as consistent about nesting in the same spot every year, but there was at least one nest three years ago, and several nests this year that I’ve observed. They’ve certainly been around other years, but I wasn’t able to spot exactly where they were nesting. Leafcutter bees are also solitary, and they build their nests out of pieces of leaves that they collect. They roll the leaves up into a tube, and divide the tube into sections that each will contain one egg and its food provisions. I enjoy watching them forage since they and the other bees in their family are the only bees to store the pollen they’ve collected on the underside of their abdomen, often causing them to hold it up high so that the pollen they’ve collected doesn’t get brushed off.

Leafcutter bee (megachile species) on oregano — Female leafcutter bees have large jaws for clipping leaves, which they use to build their nests

Bumble bee (bombus sp)

The third bees to make their nest right outside my door are the bumble bees. These are social bees, and there is one colony living at the edge of the lemon balm patch. They live underground and there is no obvious hole leading to their nest, so they are basically invisible… much like the other bees in this list. I think I was expecting them to be slightly more noticeable since they are social, and honey bees and yellow jackets (a social, sometimes ground nesting wasp) are both fairly noticeable. Both have a steady stream of traffic at their entrance and the yellow jackets do have a noticeable hole when they nest in the ground. But the bumble bees have one or two bees coming and going every few minutes and nothing to see to indicate they’re there otherwise.

Bumble bee (bombus sp) on blue vervain — Bumble bee peeking out from behind blue vervain

Bumble bees spend the warm months of the year living as a colony, and in the fall they raise a new batch of queens which hibernate over winter and start new colonies in the spring. The old queen and colonies don’t overwinter. Because of this, the colonies are in different locations each year.

Bumble bee (bombus sp) on tomato flower — Tomatoes are tricky plants to pollinate, but bumble bees have mastered the technique by vibrating their wings at the exact frequency to cause the flower to release its pollen. You can often hear them doing it if you watch them forage.

Snapshot of an Alder

Alders are a water loving, nitrogen fixing tree or shrub (depending on the exact species and growing conditions). We planted ours in 2015, and we already knew that the water loving part was important. Now, after the floods they’ve been through, the alders are looking beautiful.

Alder branches with leaves, cones and catkins — Alder leaves, cones and catkins

Alder leaves, cones and catkins covered in ice from freezing rain

Alder branches with leaves — Alder branches

Spring Flooding (part 2)

As I was wading around our land taking pictures of the flooding, I started to notice a lot of little creatures taking refuge from all the water…

Ants, a jumping spider and a snail — Some ants, a jumping spider, and a snail on a blade of grass

Garter snake up on our wood pile, out of the water

In this clump of grass sticking out of the water, there were hundreds of pillbugs and sowbugs clustered there to escape the flood. Pillbugs and sowbugs are crustaceans (like crayfish and lobsters). They are the only crustacean families that have adapted to live on land… making it a bit ironic to see them all fleeing the flood.

Pillbugs — A couple of pillbugs on a blade of grass

Rove beetle and another insect — A rove beetle and another insect (I’m not sure what at this angle)

Rove beetles, other beetles — A variety of small creatures on a dried stalk of grass

Pillbugs, sowbugs and a millipede — This is another case of my noticing something after the fact… I did not see the millipede when I was taking this photo!

Spider standing on water — Spiders are the show offs, as they can run around on the surface of the water. They look like they are running on a super slippery surface, and they probably prefer having something solid to stand on.

Ants and beetle — Three ants and a beetle

Cluster of ants — A clump of ants clinging to a twig

Willow Catkins

People seem to notice the willow catkins when they are small and fuzzy, but this stage is essentially just a bud of a flower that has not yet opened. They are not quite what one thinks of when thinking of flowers; they don’t have petals, and they don’t look like they are trying to attract insects. But they are the part of the plant that produces its pollen and its seeds. Unlike many flowers, though, the pollen is produced on separate catkins on separate plants from the seed producing catkins.

The small fuzzy buds are generally more appreciated for their appearance, and they are pretty, but I actually find their later stages to be even more fun to photograph. There is a surprising amount of variety in the opened willow catkins (even of the same species of willow), and I took more than fifty photos of the opened catkins this spring; most of them seem distinctly different from each other. The catkins are very attractive to pollinators since there’s not a lot flowering yet, and the insects give even more variety to the pictures of the opened catkins.

It occurred to me, while taking pictures of insects on the seed producing (female) catkins, that if willows were wind pollinated, as most plants with catkins are, then the pollinators should have no interest in the female catkins. Since many pollinators eat pollen, as well as nectar, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see them on the male catkins only, but they were just as excited about the female catkins. It seemed that willows must actually be insect pollinated, and a little bit of research confirmed my guess.

The fuzzy unopened stage of the willow catkins

Pussy willow catkins just starting to open

Another type of willow just starting to flower

Honey bee collecting pollen from willow catkins

Willow catkin mostly open (close up of pollen)

Pussy willow catkin just starting to open

Miniature Wildflowers

When we first moved here, there were two tiny flowers that would bloom when the weather was beginning to warm, but before it really looked like spring. They were draba verna, and bittercress. It occurs to me now, that one of these is a common name, and the other is a scientific name, which strikes me as slightly inconsistent. It is how I usually refer to the plants, though. The common name of draba verna (whitlow grass) seems harder to remember and certainly seems less descriptive of a tiny, early flowering member of the mustard family. Bittercress is also a member of the mustard family, and seems very much like a miniature version of a garden cress that I grew in the hoophouse the winter before last. Both were extremely cold hardy, both tasted about the same to me, and they looked very similar except for size; the garden cress was much larger. The flowers look a little different too. The garden cress also doesn’t shoot its seeds at you if you brush up against a ripe seedpod. Before I identified the bittercress, I called it the ‘seedshooting mustard’.

Draba verna flowers are only slightly larger than a poppy seed

Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) flowers — Bittercress flowers

Draba verna plant — Draba plant – this one is actually fairly large; sometimes the cluster of leaves at the base isn’t much larger than the clump of flowers

Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) plant — Bittercress plant

Speedwell flower; another extremely small wildflower that usually flowers a bit later than the bittercress and draba plants. This plant, though, is flowering a bit early.

Miscellaneous Macro Photos

I recently figured out how to use the ‘manual focus’ mode on my camera, which has been handy for making good use of my macro lens. Here are some of the little things I found to photograph.

Sedum – this variety was planted last fall and has emerged much quicker than the variety we had before. We got this one from a plant swap so I don’t know what it is exactly.

Bittercress is one of the first flowering plants in the spring, though it usually is unnoticed due to its minuscule size.

Dead aster flowers – even though they are from last fall and have lost their petals, they still look like flowers. The part that looks like petals is the remains of the bud.

Mushrooms growing out of a dead giant ragweed stalk

Morning Frost

One morning recently we had a pretty frost over everything. I took the opportunity to get out my macro lens. The dead stalks of last fall’s white asters turned out to give me the best pictures. All the pictures I selected for this post are of the frost on the asters.

Close up of a detail in one of my pictures

Ice Storms

We had a couple of freezing rain storms over the past week, which provided me with a rich source of photography opportunities. Here are a few of my favorites.