My garden series now has me focusing on a tiny NZ native bee that is only 5-12mm in length. Maybe the width of your fingernail or even smaller! Until this year I had never seen a New Zealand native bee. I had no idea that they were black in colour. However they are in my garden and I have managed to photograph them successfully, so I am happy to learn about something new.
Having found these tiny NZ native bees, I then embarked on learning as much as I can about them. There are 28 different species of New Zealand native bees and I have only found one of them. They have distinct markings with the dabs of yellow in strategic places which helps me identify exactly what I am photographing. They are so small that from a distance they just look like a mosquito or hoverfly buzzing about.
With any new subject like these native bees that I photograph, it takes me a few days to learn how to anticipate its movements. To train my eye to be able to follow them around the garden and to identify any patterns in behaviour. At this point I have only found these bees on the Elderberry tree, so I will also be watching other flowering trees in the garden to see what else they are partial to.
For these images I have used my birding kit and pretty much the same settings. This allows me to stay at least 1.3 metres away from the bees when photographing them. I learned fairly quickly that they do not like me being too close. The full extension of my Leica 100-400 lens gives me nice macro images of these tiny insects.
Have a look at this link if you want to know more about our NZ native bees, there is a lot of information about them on that site. I have some more images from Nga Manu for my next blog post which will be later in the week. Thanks for the feedback, I really enjoy receiving your messages.
