I usually think of bees as being yellow and black, but I encountered this cool-looking metallic green bee (of the Agapostemon family) yesterday at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Virginia.
I remember The Green Hornet on television when I was a child, but I had never seen a green bee before. At first I was not even sure that it was a bee, but as I watched it gather pollen, I concluded that it had to be a bee.
It seems appropriate that I would be suffering from color confusion at that moment, because the bee was perched on a Purple Cone Flower (Echinacea purpurea), a flower that in my experience is rarely purple—they normally appear to be more pink than purple.
Now that I have freed my mind and broken the bonds of my conventional thinking about the color of bees, perhaps I will be able to bee all that I can bee.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
Great pics!! What a cool bee…lets just call him the Green Lantern of Bees!!
Yes, the moral is to bee all that I can bee…Well done.
what a photo mike, did not know about green bees!
Great photo Mike.
Thanks. I was not sure if the green would look as good in the photo as in real life, but it retained most of its metallic shine.
All cool shots as usual!!
That flower sure does look pink. It’s also darker than most.
I tried not to mess with the color too much and I think it;s pretty close to the way it looked.
I don’t doubt it. Many flower colors can vary from plant to plant by quite a bit.
Stunning photos! The bee looks electric.
great shot!
What a beautiful bee, Mike, I am very jealous. The photographs are amazing.
Thanks. The more I take photos, the more interesting things that I see. I think I have become much more attuned to my environment.
Love this! Are these bees native to Virginia?
Thanks. I think that they are pretty widespread, though I have only done a little research on them after realizing that I didn’t know what they were.