Western Honey Bee
"The bee is an insect admired for its industriousness, its economy and its way of working for the common good." — Charles Darwin
The Western Honey bee Apis mellifera one of a group of 7 honey bees world wideis probably the most well known and studied insect on the planet, it is also one of the easiest to photograph. This one was feeding on a wild rose in the garden. To photograph it I used a 105mm macro lens on my Nikon D850, the shot was handheld at f7, 1/200 sec at ISO 250
Due to their abundance little actual fieldcaraft is needed to photograph them but a little knowledge does help. If you observe a bee feeding on a flower and fly off the temptation is to setup the camera and wait for it or another bee to return, don’t, it won’t, at least not for a while. You may see bees fly up to the flower but yhey will probably not land, the bee and other bees will know that flower has been emptied of nectar. So how do bees know this? Well bees have smelly feet, they screate semiochemical such as pheromones that mark the plant, other bees will detect these using chemoreceptors on the antennae and legs and avoid that flower. The chemicals will gradually decay a process that roughly corresponds to the time it takes for the flower to create new nectar. This ‘labelling’ system is also true for other insects such as butterflies.
Apis mellifera is Polylectic meaning it feeds on a large variety of flowers, it prefers open flat flowers such as this rose as it has a short proboscis (feeding tube) not suited to deep tubular flowers such as foxglove Digitalis purpurea or tomatos which are more suited to bunble bees.
The honey bee is unusual in the world of bees in that it forms large colonies which survive over long periods of time, something it shares with it’s distant relatives the Ants. There are at least 20,000 different species of bee world wide and apis is unique in this. Beesand Ants evolved from wasps and all 3 groups form the family Hymenoptera. So bees can be descibed as vegetarian wasps. Wasps and Hornets of course do buld large colonies but these tend to only survive a single season wheras a hive of honey bees can survive many years as generations of queens are replaced.