Bees Bees Bees Buzz Buzz Buzzin’

And now you ask in your heart,
“How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?”
Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.
People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.

– Extract from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet

It’s a gray and sultry eighty-one degree day here in IndeMO. Had a little rain earlier. A little. Enough to raise the sultry quotient.

The pollinators are out in force; takin’ pollen baths as they indulge in the copious amounts of flowers in all my gardens. Butterflies in the butterfly bush, and bees buzzin’ in the echinacea. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many bees in one place having such a flower orgy. There had to be a dozen or more different bees doing what bees do—pollinate.

My “inner kid” was very curios and wanted to get very hands on. So I whipped out my iPhone 15 Pro Max put it on 5X zoom and started snapping away. Twisting and turning the camera to get the best busy bee angles. It’s all about the angles.

I’ve been a gardener since I was a kid and I grew my first stalk of corn in one of our Linden gardens. Like I do now, we had multiples. I think that lonley corn stalk was an experiment. It must have been. Or a mistake. But that sucker was twice as tall as I was at 5, 6, 7? I was young! I was also proud of that sucker—just look at my smiling face! But I also loved we had a big vegitable garden in the backyard, and rose bushes on both sides of the cement walkway linking the front to the back of the house. My mom and dad planted them for my grandmother Rose. Of course! She loved them. So did I.

Meanwhile … back in IndeMO … I have to say: I am certainly amazed at the quality of photos the iPhone 15 takes, especially using any one of the three lenses to do macro photographs. But as I’ve been taught: it’s the photographer not the tool. Or does that make me a tool for saying that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I did make a post of some of these photos on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. But here in lies the problem with using Instagram: you have to post photos of the same orientation—all horizontal (landscape) or all vertical (portrait). If you mix orientations and start with landscape, then all portrait photos will be cropped. So I sometimes have to change a photos orientation to “work” with the Instagram odd insistence on sameness and or homogenization.

Anywho … being I liked these photos so much I decided to change back certain photos to their proper orientation, and add the vertical photos I couldn’t post. When you do flip photos it can make lighting look out of place. And some portrait orientation photos don’t and won’t cut it as horizontal images. Plus Instagram’s limit of 10 photos, is annoying, to say the least. Does the human attention span wane at photo 11 or 12? Then again if there were no limits, people would go bonkers! Billions and billions of cat photos. (not that that’s a bad thing) Whatever!

As Spring wanes and Summer takes hold (we’ve already had 2 weeks of 90° weather) more and more flowers will be blooming in my gardens. And it would follow, more and more happy pollinators feasting. I can’t wait for the goldfinches to come back and eat my multi-head sunflowers. Psssssst … tell your goldfinch friends!