Such cool photos

Yesterday, my wife, my daughter, grandson and I went on a little hike up near the mountains in Alpine. There is a field there where over a hundred years ago, poppies were planted and they have been coming back each year ever since.

One of the coolest things about the bees in the poppy field is that they turn purple from the pollen in the flowers. A lot of these bees belong to someone's bee hives that are nearby and they make wildflower honey that is actually purple because of the pollen.

The purple colors inside the flowers is from the bees buzzing and cleaning their wings off so they can fly out of the flower. As I was taking pictures, I would hear strong buzzing coming from some of the flowers and when I looked in, the bees were cleaning themselves on the sides of the flowers. I wonder how heavy they would get from all the pollen that was covering them.

It was super fun taking these pictures. I would normally just try and get pictures of the bees as they landed on the flowers, but my goal for the day was to get pictures of the bees in flight.

Catching bees midflight was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Getting the camera to focus on such a tiny object that was constantly moving proves to be pretty difficult.

At first I was a bit annoyed as I was taking these pictures because I wasn't getting the bees completely in focus, but I think some of the shots where the bees are just a bit blurry really captured how difficult it was to get these shots since a fraction of a second changed everything that was in focus.

But every now and then I would get a part of the bee that was in focus and it really showed off how delicate and beautiful bees are. Bees are so cool and such an important part of the ecosystem here on Earth. So go out and say hi to the bees. They have a very important job.