Observing a Mining Bee Mining

I had finished with my run, and was rewarding myself with a 60p Magnum clone from Jas' place on Banbygate - I'll wager I've written that before somewhere - and had headed to the library to do some research on bird nests for a putative newspaper article when I noticed a little, and now familiar, russet flash of colour on the ground.

Closer inspection revealed it to be a mining bee of some description, although its yellow legs seem to mark it as a different species from the tawny ones I've photographed.

As I watched, it began to dig down into the earth, backside up in the air until that was all was that left visible. Presumably this species lays its eggs underground, although the stripy abdomen would surely indicate this specimen was a male.

It ad almost disappeared completely when an angry ant attacked it, and presumably a dose of formic acid caused the bee to think better of mining here, and fly off.

Sadly my first pictures of the encounter failed, but I still got a few.

Si

Digging down

Getting further in

Ant attack!!!

Blogger Photography Woes

As you may or may not have noticed, I've had a lot of trouble in the last few months with how my photographs appear on the blog. Although they look great if you click on them, until you do that they appear rather blurred and fuzzy. 

This is posting using the "Bloggeroid" app; All my photographs are taken with my mobile phone, and are uploaded straight from the gallery into the app. The official Blogger app by the way, is utterly hopeless and refuses to upload photographs as anything other than a black square, and crashes when you try. 

I have just tried sharing a gallery photo via Blogger, and although it seemed to work on the phone, when I check on my little linux notebook, the whole post has failed. 

Yet when I try to  upload a photograph using Blogger on the web in the chrome browser on my mobile phone, I seem to have a full resolution image, see below;

However, there is no mobile website for Blogger, and using the full website is incredibly difficult to upload just the one picture, let alone the numbers I normally put up from my travels. From where I'm sitting, the photograph is oversized as well, despite the image size CSS script I fixed the blog with.

This is all incredibly frustrating to me. I don't have any great equipment, but feel I take some pretty darn decent images with my mobile phone, and once upon a time they displayed perfectly. For all sorts of reasons, most of them perfectly natural, I need this blog to appear fantastic, and it at the moment, it just doesn't.

I understand that there might be some kind of issue with Google chopping back on image quality to save bandwidth, and many people are complaining about the official app. I wish they would fix it, these blurry images are a real pain.

Especially if I've been lying down trying to photograph butterflies in the nettles!

Si

A Word about my mobile phone nature Photography

Looking back at that last post I had a bit of a wince, as I realised that some of those images really didn't turn out as I'd hoped, and then got paranoid wondering what you, the reader would think.

"What a load of out of focus rubbish!"...

...is the thought that crossed my mind. So I would like to stress that the vast majority of photgraphs on this blog have been taken by myself with various mobile phone cameras I've used over the last few years. They haven't Iphone 5s or Samsing Galaxy S5s either, in fact much lower end £15 a months cameraphones.

So I'd like to apologise initially for the poor image quality by even decent amateur standards. However I am pleased with myself for lying silently on the floor, wriggling along the ground closer and closer to my target, praying the darn thing doesn't fly off, and finally getting an image with my shakey hands that doesn't look like it was taken a blancmanche. My close ups are taken by getting very close up to my target without breathing, and my action pics are pure flukes.

But I enjoy the challenge of trying to photograph nature with a mobile phone, and will continue to do so, no matter what.

A Miscellany of Newark Images

A variety of pictures taken by run, bike, or beer!

Tree bumblebee queen on ceonothus

Pollen collecting

Female muslin moth at Prince Rupert! The males are dark, and hermaphrodites half and half!

Elusive red tailed bumblebee queen rummaging at sunset

Fungus

Vestal cuckoo bumblebee, washing itself on ivy on the driveway

Bee on flower by the library

Interesting ladybird