On the difficulties of photographing bees

The ceanothus in our garden is in full bloom and the bees are in paradise, you can hear them buzzing as they nimbly work from flower to flower.  Looking closer you can see that their pollen baskets are bright yellow and full, so full sometimes that I wonder how they can still fly.  But while the bees are great fun to watch, they are most difficult to photograph, being small and fast moving.  My camera is good, but not state of the art, so it struggles to focus fast enough and accurately enough.


Despite being a failure at its main aim, I rather like this photograph as it shows the problem, the bee appears as a sunlit blur in the centre of the picture, while the camera has focussed on the flowers.



These are probably my best pictures of the lot.  I think I shall have to send my sister out there with her big camera while I read up in the manual of my camera to see if there is anything I can change in the settings to make photographing these amazing creatures easier.



Then my next challenge will be learning to identify the different varieties, I find that a real struggle.