We have a couple clumps of flowers (Faith knows what they are) which have started blooming again with gusto. In fact the only thing around the pond without blooms these days are the bee balm and Queen Anne's lace. Maybe it has something to do with watering them from buckets of thick, green fish filter water? Mmm, mmm, nitrogen!

And where there are flowers there are bees. Daylight finds hundreds of them busily bumbling from blossom to blossom in a pollen gathering frenzy. Bumble bees, honey bees, long bees, short bees, bees that climb on rocks...

Sometime Sunday afternoon I hit on the idea of getting out the Canon A70, a telescope lens (40mm), and trying some microscopic photos of the flowers. Maybe the bees, too? The small lens of the A70 matches up nicely with the telescope lens to make this possible. Previous close-ups are here, here, and here.

The bees were pretty tough to capture. Bees, you see, are very busy and sticking a lens in their face doesn't help in slowing them down. Nobody bit me and for my part I didn't smash anyone. On the other hand I couldn't get a nice, face first view of a bee. Plenty of bee butts.

With this Jerry-rigged microscopic camera setup there's hardly any depth of field. That means the area of focus is about the thickness of a pencil and the lens needs to be within two pencil thicknesses of that area.

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