I am out of town at the moment and took along my Canon PowerShot A620, a somewhat glorified point-and-shoot camera. I had used this before for travel photos, but had never tried out the macro features of the camera. The manual claims that in macro mode you can get as close as 1 cm (.4 inches).
I decided to play around with macro on this camera by taking some shots of bees, one of my favorite subjects. The first photo is one of a bee taken straight on and I am surprised that I got the detail that I did. The other shots are pretty good as well. I would note that I had to get really close to the bees to get these shots. I also am feeling a little hamstrung, because I am producing these images on a netbook computer with somewhat limited capabilities and I am using Paint.Net to manipulate the images rather than PhotoShop or PhotoShop Elements.
Eye-to-eye with a bee
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
I could be wrong, but from the wings and legs the first and second photos look like a bee-fly, a type of fly which imitates a bee, rather than an actual bee to me. The third photo is definitely a bee – you can see how much more hairy she is (one of the features of a bee) and also her pollen baskets on her back legs.
Either way, you did amazingly well to get so close to such fast moving insects. Lovely photos.
Wow. I guess I will have to take a closer look at the other photos (I have a few more) to see what I have. I am definitely no expert on insects and recall thinking that this one looked different from the others I’ve usually seen (honeybees, carpenter bees, and bumblebees). Thanks for your help with identification.