Bee on Lavender

I'd hoped to be blipping a rather larger flying creature today: a friend invited me to go with him and some others on a boat trip round Bass Rock (blipper Carol Dunham will know where I mean) to photograph the gannets (one of the others in the party had to cancel so I was a "substitute"). However, yesterday my pal received a message from the boatman that the weather conditions were going to be unsuitable so the outing was cancelled. The weather forecast hadn't looked too bad to me, but in fact even here in Newcastle it's been fairly windy so I guess the boatman reckoned the conditions would be too rough. As I'm not a very good sailor (I'd even bought some seasickness pills in advance) I certainly wouldn't have wanted to spend 2 hours in a smallish boat on a rough sea!

So in the end I had a chance for some more DIY work on our window frames (still a fair way to go, but they're starting to look much better). I didn't spot anything good for a blip on my morning walk but noticed lots of bees on the lavender in the garden. I've not blipped a bee (not a live one anyway!) for a while so here's one of them. Even at 1/1250th second the wings still show up as moving pretty fast: I suspect the almost-double appearance of the bee's right wing (on the left of the photo) is due to the fact that I was using the electronic shutter (on rapid fire): I believe this means that the "shutter" actually scans the photo so that the top and bottom parts are effectively "shot" at minimally different moments in time.