In the bee-loud glade...

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We'd just pulled into a carpark (parking lot, if you prefer) somewhere in the countryside. From memory, I think we were going to buy fruit -- it was one of those places where you pick your own. They give you a bucket, point you at the orchard, and weigh your haul when you get back down the hill. So: turn off the engine, open the door ... and the silence is counterpointed by the drone of bees. You've heard the line in the poem, about "the bee-loud glade" --? This was it. There must have been a thousand of them, working over a bright-orange native shrub, and these insects were so focused on their work, they didn't care when a human brought a camera within inches of them. It would have been one of the Fujis ... I suspect it was the FinePix S6500fd. The setting would have been Macro, and it could easily have been manual focus, though the automatics do a fine job on this kind of work. Photo by Jade, 2007.