I wasn't sure what I get today - I had the old camera, and it was quite dull and cloudy. As I was passing the Student Union building, I stopped to peer into one of the planted flower beds to see if anything caught my eye. A purple flower with pale petals and long deep-purple stamens has been on my target list for a while and I tried a few photos of it today. I have no idea what it is but it reminds me of
silky phacelia, a low-growing alpine flower. Those photos were alright but nothing special. As I was sizing up some more, a bee flew past the camera and landed in a barely-open poppy. I tried to catch it as it buzzed from flower to flower, but the camera was just too slow to focus. But it then flew over to a clover flower and spent a good few seconds searching out the pollen, long enough for me to capture it.
I liked this view in particular for a couple of reasons. The first is that it looks like the bee is playing hide-and-seek - it could be the hider or the seeker, but I first saw it as the seeker, not looking at the rest of the world and counting to the allotted number. The second (and main) reason is the symmetry between the bee's wings and the leaves of the clover at the base of the flower. At first I couldn't work out why I kept coming back to this photo, rather than any of the others (which are equally good from a technical point of view) and then the symmetry jumped out at me: my subconscious was hard at work before my brain realized what it was seeing :-)
Hide-and-seek bumble bee
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