Quantum bees

Bees. I've been concerned about them.

Last year the decline in the bee population was on the radio a bit and even featured in the Guardian (by which I don't mean to imply that the paper habitually treats bees with the same disdain that, happily, it reserves for the royal family). I was so very worried about the bees that I even texted 'save the bees' or similar to a Friends of the Earth 'phone number after seeing a poster on the train, which resulted in an attempted mugging over the telephone by a chugger.

This last three weeks or so, though, one particular tree in my garden has been attracting bees like nobody's business (if nobody's actual business consisted of producing pollen laced with the apoidean equivalent of catnip). Indeed, the tree is engulfed in a fine cloud of bees from dawn until dusk and there are so many of them that I can hear their choral hum from my bedroom, two floors above.

All this has resulted in me taking a rare foray into gardening earlier this week when I cut back the clusters of small branches overhanging the path because much as the bees seemed happy to bob out of my way as I passed, there's no telling what might have happened had a few grains of pollen been dislodged and tumbled into my sparse barnet, which would afford scant protection from an angered bee.

This afternoon, it occurred to me that I could celebrate the return of the bee photographically, even if the sudden proliferation was limited to one tree in a small northern town. Now, bear in mind that there are a lot of bees in this tree - loads, in fact - but every time I raised the camera, they all disappeared. I was, in quick succession, bemused, confused and then wondering whether I was in a dream. (My neighbour across the lane parked her car and got out: "I'm not even asking.")

Anyway, eventually, after taking a couple of dozen bee-reft* photos, I went indoors to look at the photos on my laptop. This one picture yielded a solitary bee in the centre of the shot, caught, I suspect, in the act of camouflaging himself as a bit of tree. Still, I *did* catch him on camera: my wildlife photography skills are on the up :-)

*sorry