Mining Bees

I took another trip to a river bank near Wimborne to take the early mining bees that are common there.  These mining bees are a type of solitary bee ( Andrena family ), the mining bee coming from the fact that they live in holes in the ground.  They are fairly small bees, that appear in early April at this site.  They can often be found in the dandelion flowers that are abound on the river bank, and also resting on doc leaves.

These are the same type of bee that I took last weekend.

These macro images are from photographs of the bees on the aforesaid doc leaves.  They are all taken around 2x magnification on the Canon MPE-65mm macro lens + Canon 760D with Canon MT-24ex Twin Flash.

This first image is a combination of 3 photographs stacked together in Helicon Focus.

Next up the only image that is cropped in any way – I did the crop to really put the face of the bee in impact.  You can see the bee cleaning itself.

This is a more side on image of the same bee.

This next bee, I first took on a doc leaf that I held with one hand, whilst using the camera with another.  There is also a white card placed in the background.

The bee then later felt the warmth of my hand and crawled onto it.  This is an image of the bee on my finger.

Map of Location