When a good photo is all you want, the world is your oyster. You can do anything you want. You can even play games like telling yourself “This month I’ll concentrate on taking photos of honeybees.” You can go stroll in your garden and come back with a bagful of photos of honeybees. All very nice looking, with flowers in glowing colours in the background.
It’s spring, and you can play more games. “Now I want photos of bees with filled pollen baskets,” you say, knowing that honey bees, like all animals, need proteins to grow big and strong. So you go for other long strolls in gardens, and you come back with photos of honey bees collecting pollen from flowers in the panniers that hang by their legs. You think that’s the bee’s knees? No.
You can tell yourself “I need a good photo of a honeybee without a flower in the background.” You can do it. Find a sweet shop in a clean village in the countryside, and you’ll see bees swarming over the open rosogollas. Spend an hour or two and you will have another bagful of interesting photos. Nothing to it. So is there never a problem? There is. If you say “I want a good photo of a honeybee, but I’ll spend only a couple of minutes in this garden,” then you are setting yourself up for a hard time. You need to up your game so that every photo counts. That’s hard, and I’m not there yet.
Not Apis cerana indica. Not Apis florea. Could it be Apis dorsata? I wandered around a small garden in Dras town, the coldest place in India, where January temperatures often fall to -20 Celsius. Right now, on an afternoon at the beginning of September the temperature was a balmy 22 Celsius. In a month the temperature would begin to fall to frosty lows. I guessed that’s why the pollinators were so busy. This bee had eyes the likes of which I hadn’t seen in any Indian honeybee, genus Apis. If it was one, it and its hive-mates would soon begin a seasonal migration to warmer places down the hills. But it could be a polyester bee (or cellophene bee), genus Colletes. They are solitary. Do they have seasonal migrations? I couldn’t find the answer.
Annie H pointed out that this is not a bee but a hover fly (family Syrphidae, aka flower flies). Thank you, it fits. The insect has one pair of wings like any fly, it has wrap-around compound eyes, stubby legs, and its colour mimics a bee’s. They will hatch out of eggs before winter and enter diapause as an adult, waiting for the spring to thaw out and start drinking nectar again.
A Common grass yellow (Eurema hecabe) butterfly on a marigold
The garden was full of common flowers like marigolds and cosmos. And with them were the usual butterflies. A Common grass yellow (Eurema hecabe) briefly held an inclined pose on a marigold for me. After I’d got the shot it waved its wing at me as it flew to the next flower. Some Eurema species are known to show seasonal migration. However, the females of the E. hecabe are known to hibernate after copulating in autumn. The mated females lay their eggs in spring after a winter’s diapause. Does this work even in the ultra-low temperatures of Dras?
Common copper (Lycaena phlaeas) on a cosmo
This Common copper (Lycaena phlaeas) is a high altitude butterfly species which may have evolved a different mechanism for survival in winter. Some species of Lycaena enter the pupal stage before winter, and the pupa enters a seasonal diapause until spring. I wasn’t able to find a specific study of L. phlaeas, so its wintering strategy still allows us to find interesting new insights into biology.
Carpenter bee Xylocopa valga on marigold
My attention was first drawn to the pollinators by this large bee, which I initially took to be a bumblebee. I took several photos, and in some of them the wings and the body look quite blue. Even in this photo you can see the purple colouration. When I looked for bumble bees of Ladakh I found a warning that the carpenter bee, Xylocopa valga, is often mistaken for one, and the way to tell them apart was by the shiny abdomen and the purple and blue sheen of X. varga. So that’s what it is. This was the first time I knew that I’d seen a carpenter bee (I would see another of the three Ladakhi species later). If, like me, you’d never heard of carpenter bees before, then the first thing to know about them is that they live in shallow holes that they bore into wood. They do not have hives, but nest singly, and they hibernate through winter. They have been reported from Ladakh only recently, and there is much to be understood about them still.
Sunrise in Bhandup pumping station was spectacular. The vegetation dripped with water; either there had been a short shower late at night, or the ground was saturated with water and the vapour had condensed through the night. A shot against the rising sun gave the golden photo that you see above. The light changed rapidly, and part of the fun in photography was seeing the change.
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whipers.
The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot
When I walk through the waste lands inside Mumbai, where nature has reclaimed the space abandoned by people, I do not quite feel as if I’m in a forest. You cannot forget the ghosts of the city: the boisterous boys cycling by in a rush, the distant infrastructure of ports, the paved roads falling into ruins. I am constantly reminded of the short fourth section of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land.
Two hours later the light was beautiful, warm, and full. Perfect for catching this hovering honey bee (genus Apis). From its small size and colour, it was probably a red dwarf honey bee (Apis florea). With an exposure of 2.5 milliseconds, my photo sees an invisible blur of wings! Wingbeat frequencies have been recorded for several kinds of bees and flies; the wings beat slower in hover, and the records say that there would be around one beat in about 2.5 ms for bees. Clearly that is not true for this one; that blur indicates a significantly faster beat. Human muscles cannot move that fast for that long. The biochemistry of converting sugar into energy is the same in insects and mammals, so it is the actual muscle which is different. Fascinating thing to follow up on.
Don't hold your breath 