Hello! I am in search of bee photography tips due to the upcoming bee season of late winter and spring and am trying to get back into photography, especially macro. Any advice or tips are welcome!
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General:
- Get as close as possible – I recommend no more than about half a meter, ideally quite a bit less, though this will depend on your camera setup and the size of the bee (I find the big ones are often more people- and camera-shy than the little ones).
- Avoid casting a shadow on them.
- Try to get as many photos from as many different angles as possible.
- Learn how to effectively use your camera’s focus/autofocus settings; burst mode or taking a video and extracting stills may be another option.
What to photograph for ID:
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A full body shot from the side and from the top is generally useful.
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A view of only the face or a bee with her front half buried in a flower is generally going to be difficult to ID.
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Wing venation is always good, as it a standard criterion for determining the genus.
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Other details that may be useful for a species ID include: the color of the scopa (brush of hair for collecting pollen), details of face and mandibles, length of certain antennal segments, notches at the tip of the abdomen. However, what features are needed vary significantly depending on the species in question, so it is not always easy to predict what will be useful
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You should be aware that for many species, particularly the little ones (e.g. Halictidae) you will likely need details that aren’t normally visible in field photos (e.g. texture of the surface of the thorax).
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Be very critical of the CV. It likes to make suggestions based on flower preference or amount of pollen on the bee or other random factors.
Finding (cooperative) bees:
- Sometimes in the early morning/evening or during cool weather you can find bees sleeping on flowers or they are sluggish while warming up. They also are likely to be less active after a rain shower, but wet bees are rather difficult to identify.
- Spend some time learning about the species in your area; it is often possible to find oligolectic (pollen specialist) bees by looking for places where their host plants are abundantly in bloom.
- You may be able to get more precise IDs if you temporarily capture them and photograph them in hand (males cannot sting) or in a clear container. Some people also like to carry an ice pack to chill them so they are more cooperative.
- Note that in many places bees are protected species and capturing them – even if they are released unharmed – may require a permit, so check the local laws beforehand.
Many of these principles will also apply to other small, actively flying insects such as hoverflies.
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Super handy tips, thank you!
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What spiphany said was great, on a more general point, be patient! They can be very active, but you may find it best to wait by a group of flowers for bees in general, or for solitary bees, by their nest they are constructing as they will continue returning there.
You can prepare yourself with knowledge; some bees cut little bits of leaves off to construct their nests, and if you can recognise the patterns (it’s quite distinctive!), you can wait by the leaf for them to return.
Also take some time to become familiar with different groups of bees, and who is associated with them. At this time near me, I find a lot of Adrena (fuzzy white), so I know that I will also find Nomada (long antennae and hairless), since they are their parasite. If I see anything that doesn’t match that description, I know there is a chance that I am looking at something new to me!
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For the most part, I’ve had very good luck running a Canon. I generally don’t use a macro lens, as I find that for the larger species I shoot, having a bit of range makes it easier to follow them around and allows me to stand back a bit if needed.
When following bees around, watch your shadow. It can startle bees you are trying to get close to.
For some species it does help with ID to know what flower they were on, so if you capture bees to take pictures include a note for what the flower was. Better though is to shoot them on the flower.
Camera can have a very fast rate of fire, I tend to slow mine down though. Otherwise I have dozens of photos of one angle that I’m trying to figure out which one is slightly better than the rest.
Make sure you give yourself an easy way to distinguish individual bees when out in the field. What I do is take a picture of the sign at the entrance to the site I’m visiting when I enter, and then take a picture of a tree in between each bee that I shoot, and then shoot the site sign again when I leave. This makes it a lot easier to sort photos when editing later: these twelve shots were of this bee, then a tree, and these sixteen shots of that bee.
Finally, always crop your photos.
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to add to your suggestion… associated bits of info beyond photo tips
For pollinators, there is an observation field of “Interaction->Visited flower of:” For those insects not interacting with flowers, I use the observation field “Plant that organism was found on”.
There is a project for leaves cut by leafcutter bees: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/megachile-bee-leaf-cuts
This last summer, I tried to make a concerted effort to record/note the plant on which I found an insect or spider (with some exceptions for insects that just don’t seem to favor plants but land anywhere and everywhere) and then make a note or use an observation field to connect to the two (plant + insect / spiders)
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I have a flower bed that, each Spring, is suddenly dotted with holes of Colletes building their underground nests - so look for the holes in the ground. I find my first Nomad bees each year on last year’s dry, fallen leaves on trails I walk. On sunny days they are very active and you can hear them rustling over the leaves. I find these ones particularly difficult to get good photos of, so I’m going to have to figure out if my camera has the burst feature mentioned above and try it! Great topic! (-:
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I use a macro lens for nearly all of my iNat photography, including bees of all sizes – because it is amazingly sharp at all distances and it enables me to get the close-ups when I need to. Most modern macro lenses aren’t limited to close-up photography (an exception here are things like specialized high-magnification – 2:1 and higher – macro lenses which typically can’t focus to infinity).
What can be challenging with flighty and quick-moving insects are setups that involve clip-on macro lenses, because these usually have a fixed, limited working distance and this requires unusually calm subjects who don’t mind you getting in their personal space. I have used this method, but it involves a lot of luck and patience.
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Curious, what is your camera setup? I have been thinking about doing more with a macro lens.
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I do something similar. I am often watching bees in my garden or yard, and if there are lots of different bees on the same plant, I take a picture of the ground between shots of different individuals or species. Otherwise it’s easy to get confused when editing or posting.
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If your camera supports video mode with manual shutter speed and aperture (especially high def 4k), it’s also worth exploring. Set at say 1/400s shutter freezes most frames in sunlight). The files are huge but it’s very liberating for the photographer as you’re often using available light (or a low-cost camera-mounted flood). I set the ISO to auto-range at say 1200. Beyond that, grain usually is a big issue, but not always!
You’ll need a video editor to poke around the file for good shots but that can actually be fun as you’ll discover stuff you didn’t notice while shooting.
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I mostly use a Sony 6400 and a Laowa 65 mm macro lens; one major consideration here was size, as I wanted a compact setup I could carry around with me everyday to go out looking for bees after work and whatnot. There are some tradeoffs – no autofocus, focal length is a bit short for opportunistic shots of passing birds, etc. Probably neither the lens nor camera are an ideal choice if you plan to include focus stacking as part of your macro practices, but this wasn’t something I knew enough to consider when purchasing.
However, I don’t think the particular model of either camera body or lens are crucial here: there are lots of good choices for current mirrorless cameras, including both macro lenses that will focus to infinity and telephoto lenses with decent close-up (1:2 or 1:1) ability.
There are numerous other threads discussing camera choices; I don’t know that it would be helpful to get into detailed discussions here, since I think for bees it is really not so much a question of equipment as technique in approaching flighty subjects and learning how to capture the right features (and what features are needed in any given case). I mean, I will absolutely admit that my main reason for purchasing a camera was because I wanted to take better bee pictures, but in general, the biggest problems I see with observations are that the observer did not get close enough and they did not manage to get useful angles.
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Roosting male bee https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/233644031 using Nikon D300 and 100mm autofocus lens and ring flash
Foraging bee with same gear https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/229154671
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This may be a tad redundant with what others have said, but my two cents as a bee researcher who takes a lot of bee photos:
- I use a 60mm macro lens on my Canon, it gets high resolution down to bees about 3 mm I’d say (depending on where you are, you may never encounter any that small!). I use manual focus, as autofocus never does what I want. Instead of trying to adjust focus constantly and risk scaring the bee, I just use the teeter method to bring the whole camera in and out of focus while shooting on burst mode. Yes, I do have thousands of photos to sort through afterwards, which is a pain…
- I do get very close to the bees when photographing them, I’d say a foot or less. For small bees I’m pretty much on top of them. Every species is different in how much disturbance they’ll tolerate before they take off. Sometimes you can sneak up on them if they’ve got their heads buried in a flower, then park yourself there.
- You may very well need to chase a bee for a long time. A very long time. When trying to photograph specialists on deerberry I sat in front of the shrub trying to snap a few frames of every individual that came in quickly to forage, each one staying for only a few seconds. All in all it took two hours to get something decent. With specialists on a particular host plant you can often learn their foraging rhythm and come to predict when and where they’ll return.
- Some flowers are really unphotogenic for foraging bees. Anything bell-shaped, tube-shaped, where the bee is hanging at a strange angle or disappears halfway into the flower, will be frustrating. Composites are nice because they’re essentially a flat plane. For the tube flowers, especially mints, bees will often back out of the flower and take a split second to reorient before flying off - as soon as I see it start to back out, I start burst-mode snapping, because they’re quicker than my reflexes.
- Angles I would recommend getting in general - top view, side view, 3/4 view, straight on of the face, are essential. Back of the abdomen and wing venation are a nice bonus. Species ID is often only possible by looking at the microsculpturing (pits, ridges, etc) and we really need high resolution for that, so that comes down to camera/lens and luck of the draw on a cooperative bee.
- If scientific contribution is your goal (vs artistic photos) then capturing the bee and photographing it in a vial or chilling it and posing it on a stable background can allow you to get those necessary angles. I always appreciate people who photograph bees on white backgrounds. It’s like their official portrait and I think it’s really valuable for science :)
- As mentioned above, photographing the bee on the flower and/or noting what flower it was on can help with ID and add to the scientific value of the observation.
Good luck bee hunting!
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I use a Nikon D7500 with a Tamron 90mm Macro with a flash, usually the pop-up flash on the camera. It recycles almost immediately so I don’t miss any shots. I also use autofocus with focus tracking on with single focus point in the centre of the frame. The shutter speed is 250 which is the maximum flash synch speed, but with the flash you get a much faster effective shutter speed.
I use very small apertures - from f/22 to f/32 because I am usually at the minimum focus range of the lens (about 6 inches from the subject) so need all of the depth of field that I can get. All of my shots are handheld, sometimes with only one hand if I have to hold something steady.
I have realized that I have to be able to shoot quickly, especially for bees foraging and I also need a setup that allows me to not think about camera settings - everything is in autopilot.
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I have a 90 mm macro lens but rarely use it other than when taking photos of moths on a moth sheet. My workhorse lens is a Sony 100-400mm lens which can focus to under a meter (the Canon 100-400mm has the same characteristics). This means that from the end of the lens to the subject the distance is about 40 to 50 cm which doesn’t disturb the insects and makes me more comfortable with wasps and hornets. I found that with the macro, the end of the lens was about the same distance from the subject (to get good depth of field) but my face and head were closer. Anyways it’s all personal preference and both macro or telephoto lenses can do the job.
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I think I cast a shadow on a bumblebee before and it made it look like it was at night and dark when it wasn’t, so it made it look cooler. So yeah, it is cool.
For many insects, casting a shadow on them will cause them to startle and fly away, which is not useful if one wants to get additional photos.
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It only startled lepidopterans.