Bees and Me

My salvia is in full bloom.  Although unless you knew I have several clumps of salvia in the flowerbed that runs along the front of my house, you probably would overlook them for all the weeds that have run rampant since I started planting and tending the vegetable garden.

Tonight, since the garden is still waterlogged from our approximately 3.25" of rain received in a 24 hour period Wednesday and Thursday, I decided it was time to give the flowerbeds a little attention.  So I went to work pulling out weeds.  Dandelions, ragweed, lambs quarters, horsetail, shepherd's purse, several types of grass. . .  I have a 'nice' variety of weeds. . .

As I weeded, the front flowerbed actually started to show some color other than shades of green (darn weeds!) and I could see the red of my 'pinks' and the deep purple of my salvia.

The closer I got to the salvia, the louder the buzzing became, and I found them to be occupied by numerous bees all busily collecting nectar.  One bore bee (aka carpenter bee) carried a load of pollen on it's hind legs, making it look like it wore fuzzy legwarmers.

I had come upon the bees slowly and innocently enough, working my way from the edge of the flowerbed a good eight feet away, and they apparently didn't feel threatened.  I slipped  into the house to retrieve the camera, then returned to the flowerbed.  Despite my childhood fear of bees (I tended to step on them a lot, running barefoot, and consequently got stung a lot), I now see them as not out to get me.  They just want to do their bee things without being bothered.  Watching them do their bee things is kind of interesting.

Sitting on the pavers of the front walkway, I sited myself right in front of a big clump of salvia, and tried to focus the camera on the busy bees.

The bees didn't mind me at all, and I sat for probably twenty minutes trying to get non-blurry pictures that also had bees in them.  The bees moved pretty fast around each spire of salvia blossoms, so getting clear pictures was no easy task.  

Some pictures didn't even have bees in them, like this one, which I think is a pretty good close-up of a spike of salvia.

And one really close-up that was horribly blurry actually looks cool when I viewed the pictures on the computer.  Isn't this a pretty shade of purple?  It is the salvia, all blurred together.  I think it would be awesome to find some fabric in this shade and use it in a quilt sometime.