I’m still in need of beauty to get me energized for the coming week.
This is the bumble bee, Bombus Impatiens, loosely translated from Latin means, “impatient buzzing” or “buzzing impatiently.” Minnesota is home to 22 of the 49 bumble bee species in the U.S. Overall, Minnesota has 400 of the world’s 20,000 bee species.
All pollinators are under stress and many, like the Honey Bee, are endangered and deserve strict protection. I know that many people start hyperventilating and flail about when a bee comes near. Some even kill the little guys.
Don’t! They are attracted by sweet and salty substances, depending on the species. Share with them. A gentle wave is all that’s necessary to get them to move along. You are far less likely to get stung if you’re cool than if you flip out.
The biggest thing that anyone can do to protect bees is to make your yard bee friendly. Ditch herbicides and pesticides. You want to see a crisply manicured patch of grass? Take up golf. At home, plant native plants and let a portion of your yard go native. There will be flowers through out the growing season. Pollinators and butterflies will visit and add their colors to the mix.
If you’re a close cropped grass person, in time you’ll begin to see the beauty that a wild jumble of native life offers. Native plants are resilient and offer us a quiet lesson about how to deal with the tumult of life. They have deep roots, are flexible and are able to stand back up after being knocked down, and they keep flowering.
About the Photo
It was a beautiful day when I took this photograph. The light was almost ideal. I used my cell phone. But there were some issues; it was breezy, the bright sunlight made it difficult to see the screen on my phone which made composition difficult and promoted camera movement.
When I went through the images I found several that I liked. However they all had imperfections mostly to do with focus and motion. Little things that made the pictures not technically perfect.
At one time I would have filed them away as unusable and forgotten them. I wanted fine details and rich tonality, I aspired to the perfection of Ansel Adams. I have 10,000s of negatives, slides, and digital files. Most I have put away because they didn’t seem good enough. Which is what would have happened to the Bumble Bee photo back then.
Something changed, years ago, around the time of Becky’s illness and death. I began to look at my photography more in terms of feelings, impressions, something inexpressible. Since then my idea of a good, worthwhile image has expanded. Now, I see more than the object or the event. I have begun to see the ephemeral, the poignancy of the mundane and the transient.
With the above image I have chosen to celebrate the blur of life, the boundary between now and then.
Photo: Les Phillips, CC BY-NC