Emily Dickinson said to make a prairie, it takes one clover, one bee, and revery…and revery alone will do if bees are few. I’ve already opined regarding prairies, but let me add this: to make a blog-worthy closeup photo of a green bee pollinating a purple coneflower, it might take you more than 40 shots, most of which you’ll end up deleting.
It’s a kind of revery, I guess. It’s a sunny day, and you happen upon a garden patch of purple coneflowers–or purple cureflowers, as I prefer to call them. You see that they are swarming with bees. You have your purse-sized, everyday-use point-and-shoot digicam with you, as you always do, so you start shooting, using your zoom to take close-up shots from a distance. In the blink of an eye, you’ve shot more than 40 pictures–nearly two rolls of film, if this had been the old days–and maybe a few of them, if you’re lucky, will be worth sharing.
During today’s revery, I was approached by a friendly man who initially thought I was taking pictures of the coneflowers, not having noticed the various kinds of bees tenaciously working their orange disks. “Shouldn’t you take that from behind,” he asked, and I shrugged. When you’re in a revery and have pixels to burn, you shoot from any angle: shoot first, sort out the good pictures from the bad latter. When I pointed to the various kinds of bees that were my real target, the man nodded. “It’s always good to see them,” he said, and I agreed. Just imagine the level of revery Emily Dickinson would fall into given the luxury of multiple bees?
Click here for a photo-set of images from today’s bee-inspired revery. Isn’t this what everyone does on their way home from another day at work?
Hoarded Ordinaries 
Jul 30, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Great shots! I’d assumed you had your SLR with you. Cute little busy bees!
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Jul 30, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Love that green bee!
I’m always amazed at how many bee-like, or is that fly-like, bugs there on my flowers once I started taking close-ups of them.
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Jul 31, 2009 at 11:01 am
No SLR for me: both of my cameras are point-and-shoot, with one “just” being bigger than the other. The little, banged-up one did just fine in this case.
And yes, there was an amazing variety of different pollinators in this particular patch: at least three different kinds of bee, two different kinds of beetle, one fly-like bug, and who knows what else. So much activity going on right under our noses.
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Jul 31, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Aha, the luxury of digital. The first picture is striking for the foreground.
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Aug 2, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Great shots, all the more so because bees are tough to shot. Luck plays an important role. Pro insect photogs know that one of the secrets of a good close-up is the freezer, but I don’t go there so I’ll always depend on serendipity. BTW, there are thousands of species of hymenoptera (bees, wasps), diptera (flies), lepidoptera (butterlies, moths) and other winged pollinators on the East Coast….
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Feb 20, 2019 at 7:08 pm
[…] psychic energy of the cosmos. Faith came easily on sunny summer days when all Dickinson needed was a clover, bee, and reverie. But on winter afternoons, her mood dipped toward […]
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