Another

Another day, another bee. And also, another day of furiously stormy winds, making photographing anything that wasn't nailed down a bit of a mission. Even though I don't believe in astrology, I risked checking the Met Office app this morning to see when we might expect some respite from all this weather, and the answer appears to be... never. They even seem to think it necessary to issue a wind warning for the middle of the week, so apparently this is just a foretaste, and by Wednesday we'll be having to nail ourselves down too. On the plus side, all this airflow is drying out the sodden garden a bit.

Sigh.

Anyway, I ventured out into the gale for ten minutes or so in the middle of the day, pointed the camera at a few things, and fired off some bursts of frames in the hope that some of them might be approximately in focus. Most weren't, but I'm not unhappy with this female plumpie, intent on a mission to grab herself some lunch and get back home as quickly as possible. I sympathised, but was determined to get at least a record shot while she was out and about, so I spent a minute or so stalking her as unobtrusively as I could around the pulmonaria. 

When they're fresh, and before they start working on provisioning a nest (which was the case with this individual, as you can see from the fact that her ginger pollen brushes are entirely clean), female Hairy-footed Flower Bees react with something like outrage to being followed, probably because they're genetically primed to have to fight off the unwanted attentions of desperate males later in the season, and they're inclined to make the leap into hyperspace if you annoy them too much. So I was careful to stand off at a reasonable distance, knowing that in post the R5's 50MB raw files would let me crop in enough to produce an apparently close image. Not only did this keep me out of the plumpie's eye line, it also delivered sharper images than I might have got at closer quarters - the latter being partly down to depth of field, of course, and partly, I think, because of something to do with vectors. Which by an odd coincidence R and I later discussed, in an entirely different context, over lunch.

At times you could almost believe that some kind of planning goes into this stuff.