Busy as a bee...

Now I know where that phrase comes from...

This little bumble bee is the fastest little worker of all of the bees I've witnessed. And so hard to get a good image of! My Yellow Bumble Bee above is different than the one I posted earlier this week (the drunk one), she was a queen (much larger at almost an inch long). This bumble bee worker is around a 1/2 inch in length. The queen was so much slower and the sweet bees I've followed move around a lot, but not quite like this little buzzing bee. The worker performs a constant, flitting movement, seemingly never stopping to rest. Because of this, I found it hard to get a good look at her, other than to see that she's a fuzzy smaller bumble bee. So I was tickled to see the detail here and realized just how COVERED in pollen dust she was. (Makes you want to sneeze, huh?) ;)

Pollen collection lesson... In case you don't already know and are interested: If you'll notice the waxy looking flesh colored glob on her right thigh (seen here above the wing), that is her collection of pollen for the day. Apparently, when a bee flies onto a flower, the pollen sticks to the bee's body. Now, bees have three pairs of legs, and each pair is used for a different purpose. All the legs have sticky hairs to collect pollen, but the second pair is covered with bristles that are used to remove pollen from the bee's body. To gather pollen, a bee might visit between 50 and 1,000 plants a day, depending on how much pollen each plant has. Then, the bee uses the second pair of legs to transfer the pollen from its body to its back legs. The back legs have small indentations on the outside of them called pollen baskets. The inside of these legs have combs and brushes that the bee uses to put the pollen in a joint in its back leg, which compacts the pollen so it will fit in the pollen baskets. The pollen is stored in the pollen baskets until the bee returns to the hive.

So this little busy bee has some combing to do to get all of that pollen dust into her baskets.

Blip runner up: The Western Tailed-blue again. I really liked this shot, but since I posted her 2 days ago, I relegated her to flickr. Today, she was just as intent on staying put... unphased by me and my camera. (In fact, she seems to be laughing at me... see that little smile.) ;) Though, unlike the other day, she moved in circles constantly and moved the rear portion of her wings up and down like a mechanical toy. This went on for the whole time I watched/photographed her. I wish I knew what she was doing. Any thoughts?