I also love birding, especially owls and other nocturnal avians. Gardening is my second love and I maintain a beautiful greenery with lots of inflorescence around my home. Obviously I was focusing more on backyard / garden photography for around eight years of shooting. After photographing more than 100 species of various insects from my garden alone, I call it a small piece of earth by itself.
The challenging section in macro action photography was always bees. Bees, the prime agents of pollination were always my favorite subject. I wasn’t introduced to flash and diffuser set ups till 2020. Till then I used natural lights to freeze the moments of these tiny beauties.
When my journey with bees started, I was not quite aware about the various species of bees around in my garden. The only two species I ever knew was big honey bee and a small sting-less bee. As days went by, my run started more exciting as I could see a lot of buzzing beauties with unique characters and features here. Among all the bees, my favorite one is neon cuckoo bee. I have spotted more than ten types of bees from my garden alone. Further my concentration was on taking few action moments of them along with the other winged beauties.
Leaf cutter bee is another beautiful bee, comes in two patterns here, which I was font of clicking.eight years back. I have spotted one of them and and followed their interesting act of nest making. Being a solitary bee, Leaf cutter bee makes a nest alone and lays eggs and seals it for the eggs to hatch. They make nests with leaf cuttings, leaves are cut in a perfect shape with their scissor like mandibles to make cones out of it. The cones are arranged one over the other to make the nest. The air tight holes where they arrange these leaves are further sealed after laying eggs. This is done by a single bee.
This bee fascinated me many times. I could see my rose plants with broken leave . not only roses, the leaves of any plant that would not dry faster, a bit thick This bee fascinated me many times. I could see my rose plants with broken leave . not only roses, the leaves of any plant that would not dry faster, a bit thick yet soft . The ability of the bee to find the perfect leaves is really cool. When I started the search for finding its nest, I understood that it is made inside a hole, sometimes inside a PVC pipe, a small hole in the fencing joints, in the curled-up curtains, some dried wood in the garden etc.
Photographing leaf cutter bees was a big challenge- so fast, restless and energetic packet they are. The speed they maintain from cutting the leaves to entering the hole is very high. They make sure the leaves are brought fresh inside the hole. So I decided to be more patient and follow one bee who started cutting leaves from a plant in my garden. Another challenging factor was the time they start working. After spending early mornings and late evenings, when the lights were perfect, on nectaring, this bee starts working towards noon time. The light was too harsh all the time and I had to work with that light. seven days and almost 2,000 clicks!!! My favorite click came on the sixth day. When this bee cut the leaf and took a reverse gear and paused for few seconds and accelerated to fly forward to take the leaf to the nest site. I was watching the entire show through my eye piece. Hand held, and with natural lights available (light almost falling from straight above), I took this picture and that became a special one.
Not all action shots are lucky. Few are born with much planning, observation and patience. This leaf cutter bee image carrying the leaf is one such picture, which won some recognition for me as well.
