Bees in the Peonies

Our peonies are in bloom, all the white ones now, a few pink ones to follow.  They're all single peonies, which is important, because that attracts the bees.  And the bees are all over our peonies these days!  Getting photos of them is another story though!

Single peonies have a number of large petals around the edge, and a big patch of stamens that the bees visit in the middle.  Double peonies have so many extra petals that you can't usually see the stamens.  They look frilly but they don't serve the bees.  There were 3 and 4 bees at once on some of these blooms.

It's fascinating to watch the bees continually move from flower to flower, and crawl around among the stamens gathering pollen.  You can see the bright yellow 'saddlebags' of pollen on each of these bees.

Photographs are another story.  The bees never stop moving, flying, crawling, upside down half the time.  They collect the pollen in passing by, not by sitting still, even for a tenth of a second!  I took over 100 pictures, and these are the best, but even these are not perfectly clear.  A lot were very blurry!  I'm not going to capture a bee, put it in the fridge for awhile, and place the slow moving creature on a flower to get a perfect picture!  I prefer my pictures 'en plein air' as Monet said in respect to painting!

But perfectly clear or not, they are amazing little insects!

This bee was a little unlucky.  Mrs. Furry Gnome usually spots the most interesting things, and today she got me to come and see this spider which had captured a bee.  I got one picture, and when I returned later, it had retired back under the petals to a hidden corner with its dinner.

I find this is a Goldenrod Crab Spider when I goggle it, known for sitting on flowers and grabbing insects, especially bees, that land close by.  They give it a bite that paralyzes the bee, then they can take their time.  They don't build webs.

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