I was recently invited to be the inaugural guest for a new podcast called The Bee’s Knees and enjoyed a great conversation with the host about wild bees for about half an hour. If you’re interested, you can check it out here.

As you know, I spend a lot of time photographing small creatures in prairies. Bees draw a lot of my photographic attention for a couple reasons. First, they are relatively easy to spot, especially when they’re on flowers. Second, of course, they’re critically important to prairies and a healthy bee community can indicate that other aspects of a prairie are probably also doing well. In addition, they’re just fascinating little creatures and I’ve been on a long and joyful learning curve with bees over the last 10 years or more.

Recently, I’ve been scanning through my library of bee photos for a couple different projects. I thought it might be fun to throw a bunch of those photos into a colorful array of fuzzy wonder. Once I had it, I figured maybe you’d enjoy playing a little game with me.

Here’s the game, if you’re interested in participating: Looking through the 42 bee photos below, how many honey bees can you find? You don’t have to identify the other species, just the honey bees.

This will work best if you click on the photo to get a better view of it. If you’re reading this in an email message, click on the title above (“Counting Bees and The Bees That Count”) and that’ll open this post online and allow you to click on photos to see them more clearly. I’ve also split the big matrix into four smaller pieces and included them below.

Here are four sub-sections of the bigger image array in case that makes it easier for you to search for honey bees.

Well? How many honey bees did you count? Five? Ten? More?

I’ll give you a chance to look one more time before you scroll down to find out how many are actually present…

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Ready for the answer?

The answer is zero. There are zero honey bees pictured above.

“But Chris!”, you’re thinking, “That’s not fair! You said there were honey bees!”

Actually, I didn’t say there were any honey bees, I just asked to you look for them. You wanna know what’s really unfair? The fact that most people think way too much about honey bees and not nearly enough about all the other bee species out there!

Those of you familiar with this blog will already know this, but it’s worth restating anyway. Honey bees are non-native (in North America) livestock animals that not only aren’t essential for pollination of our natural areas, but can compete with the pollinators who are. Honey bees pollinate a pretty small subset of our native wildflowers, which all evolved and made it through thousands of years without honey bees, thank you very much.

That doesn’t make honey bees bad – they’re wonderful, fascinating creatures who help pollinate a lot of crops and are fun to watch and learn about. However, it does make them the wrong kind of bee to focus on if you’re concerned about potential bee extinction and the broad pollinator declines we’re seeing around the continent.

In case you’re interested, honey bees tend to be honey colored, which should be easy to remember. Their hind legs have flat plates for storing pollen, as opposed to the females of most wild bees, whose back legs have long stiff hairs for pollen to adhere to. Honey bees also have hairy eyes, which is unique among bees in North America.

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While they face a lot of challenges, honey bees are in no real danger of extinction. After all, humans are playing a very hands-on role in keeping them around. If a bee keeper’s honey bee colony dies out, they can just order a few replacement bees to be shipped to them so they can start another colony.

The 4,000 or so wild bee species in North America have no such support system. They face all the same challenges honey bees face, including habitat loss and fragmentation, pesticides, diseases, and more. Unlikely honey bees, though, they face those challenges alone.

In fact, most of those bees are literally alone against the world. They’re solitary bees, meaning they aren’t part of a colony that divides labor among many individuals. The nests of solitary bee species are built, defended, and provisioned (with pollen and nectar) by single moms working all by themselves. They gather food for themselves but take most of it back to the nest. There, they lay an egg next to a cache of food, seal the egg/food up in a little cell, and then repeat that process many times – stacking cells on top of each other within their nest burrow or hollow plant stem.

Other native bee species like bumble bees have similar social structures to honey bees. There are also lots of native bees that are somewhere between solitary and social, living in groups and sharing nests and/or tasks between them to varying extents. Each of those species has its own complex and amazing life story worth learning about.

If you’re already someone who knows and loves wild bees and the diversity of those and other pollinators that keep our ecosystems humming along, thank you! If this information is new to you, fantastic. Welcome to a new and crazy cool world of ecology and pollination that will only get more intriguing as you learn more about it!

Do you want to help with the pollination crisis we’re facing? Don’t do it by becoming a bee keeper. There’s nothing wrong with being a bee keeper, either for fun or for profit. It’s a great thing to do and can be both satisfying and valuable to food (including honey) production. But if you want to help with pollinator conservation – and conservation in general – there are lots of other things you can do to help.

Habitat is the biggest need. Large, connected swaths of natural areas (prairies, woodlands, wetlands, and others) can support big and strong populations of bees and other pollinators. Managing those areas for high plant diversity helps ensure abundant flower resources too. Support organizations that build, protect, and manage habitat. If you’re not sure where to start, The Nature Conservancy would be glad to help.

Issues like pesticides and diseases are also important, though they are often tied to habitat loss and fragmentation. We need to be smarter about using pesticides, especially by choosing the right chemicals, application methods, and application timing that limit impacts on non-target species like bees. But when bee habitat is big and intact, pesticides (and diseases) are less catastrophic.

If you don’t happen to control large swaths of land, you can still make a big difference at the scale of a garden or similar small plot. Installing and maintaining a diverse and abundant set of wildflowers will help support the needs of many bee species. Making sure you provide nesting habitat is also important. Don’t cover all the bare ground that many bees burrow into and leave last year’s plant stems for stem-nesting bees to use. You can find lots of other tips from the Xerces Society here.

…Now, if you answered the ‘how many honey bees are there?’ question with an answer of greater than zero, don’t feel bad. I’ve made some very embarrassing mis-identifications of bees, including when I had a photo of a native bee on the cover of a magazine and erroneously called it a honey bee. I’m getting better at identification, but it’s really challenging and I still have a very long path in front of me.

Being able to identify bee species from each other is cool, but what’s more helpful is recognizing how many bee species are around. Acknowledging the value and diversity of other pollinators like wasps, flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, and others is also important. The more pollinator species we have, the more overlap there is among them in terms of their pollination of all the various flowers out there. Like anything else, the deeper you sink into the world of pollinators, the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know, and the more you become entranced with the beauty and complexity around you.

Enjoy!

This post is going to make me sound like a cranky old man. So be it. I’ve been thinking about writing this for a long time and finally couldn’t keep it in anymore. If you don’t want to read a bunch of gripes about camera equipment, feel free to skim this or just skip it altogether. There’s a pretty photo at the beginning and another at the end. Apart from those, there’s probably nothing here most of you will care about.

You’ve been warned.

Much of my photography features small subjects in nature. Because of technical issues related to shutter speed and depth of field, especially in the kind of low light conditions that produce the best images, a tripod is a crucial part of my photography. I need to be able to hold my camera rock solid while trying to focus on the tiny hairs of a plant’s stem or the multi-faceted eye of an insect.

Because a lot of plants, insects, toads, and other small creatures hang out on or near the ground, I need a tripod that holds my camera down there too. That doesn’t seem like a huge technological challenge. SO WHY DOES NO ONE MAKE TRIPODS THAT DO IT??

I know what some of you are thinking, but no, I don’t want to mount my camera upside down on the center post beneath the tripod. What a ludicrous idea. If I wanted to photograph things upside down, I’d go to Australia, where the whole world is upside down. (I’m pretty sure that’s true.) Either way, it’s hard enough to compose photos right side up. I don’t need to add more degrees of difficulty.

I’ve tried the style of tripod with a center post that comes up and then is hinged so it folds down toward the ground. It seemed like a possible solution, but no. I had multiple issues with it, but the primary one was that it didn’t hold the camera steady enough. A heavy camera on a long horizontal pole bounces around. That’s the whole point of tripods – there are multiple legs to support the camera so it doesn’t bounce. Another issue was the downward angle needed to get the camera close to the ground. The angle was acute enough that my tripod head couldn’t get my camera back into a horizontal position. I could go on but I won’t.

I also have one of those little plastic tripods with flexible/segmented legs that can bend in any direction and wrap around things. It’s helpful in some specific situations, but isn’t build sturdily enough to hold a camera still for slow shutter speed photos.

Am I really the only weirdo in the world who wants a tripod with legs that splay out horizontally so the tripod head is at, or nearly at, the surface of the ground?? Apparently I am. I’ve been looking for years and still haven’t found anything that’s designed for what I need.

As a result, I buy ‘high quality’ tripods and chop them up to make them functional. It’s a dumb way of doing things, but for now, seems to be the only way to go. The tripod shown in this post can get its platform down to a fairly respectable height of about 7 inches off the ground. That might sound good until you remember that you still have to add a tripod head for the camera to sit on. That 7 inch height turns into about 12 inches, which is too high when I want to be face to face with a cricket frog or prairie violet.

The above photo shows the first part of the tripod I have to vandalize in order to make it work for me. It has little notches that allow me to lock each leg into one of three possible angles. The problem is that the topmost notch keeps the leg from spreading as wide as I need it to. To fix that, I get out my old bench grinder and make the notch bigger. I should not need to take a bench grinder to a brand new tripod. It’s obscene.

Once I’ve got the topmost notch on each of the three legs modified, I still have to take a hack saw to the center post to get it out of the way. This means, of course, that I won’t be able to raise that center post higher than the height of the tripod legs anymore, but that’s apparently the price I have to pay to get the low elevation functionality I need. Some tripods allow you to unscrew most of that center post, but the remainder is still too long after I’ve messed with the legs. So, here comes Mr. Hacksaw.

Once I get done with the grinder and hacksaw, I’ve turned an expensive piece of camera equipment into a disfigured mess, but it’s a disfigured mess that actually does what I need it do. The next thing is to add the tripod head.

This is another source of frustration. If you think my tone is bad already, this would be another opportunity to stop reading.

The best style of tripod head for nature photography is a ball head, which gives you a lot of versatility in positioning the camera. There are two main designs on the market and I hate them both. …I warned you about my tone.

One head design has two or three knobs to control positioning. One knob tightens the ball itself and another controls the swivel of the overall head. Both are necessary to get into position, but having to manipulate multiple control knobs when you’re trying to focus quickly on an insect ready to hop away is maddening. The third knob controls the tension on the ball to make the camera move more or less easily/quickly. All those knobs have purposes and can be useful for some kinds of photography but they’re awfully inconvenient for most of what I do.

Also, when you swivel the head, the knob controlling the camera position/angle swivels with it, moving it into inconvenient locations to reach. You might think, “Well, chucklehead, don’t swivel the head!”. Unfortunately, the design of the head requires you to swivel it if you want to tip your camera more than about 30 degrees off of horizontal. If you only shoot horizontal format photos (landscape format), that’s usually fine, but vertical format (portrait) is often really nice too. It seems reasonable that an expensive tripod head would allow me to shoot vertically without having to contort my arm/hand.

So if I need to swivel the head, the knob I tighten and loosen to adjust camera angle moves toward the right side of the tripod, or – at best – the side opposite me. If I’m holding the camera with my right hand (so I can press the shutter button), that means I’m using my left hand to reach the right side of the tripod, which is awkward, and sometimes nearly physically impossible. This gets even more frustrating when I’m working up close to an insect on a flower, for example, and to swivel the head and move my hand around to reach the knob risks bumping the flower and causing the insect to hop/fly away.

The other style of ball head has a single knob that controls both swivel and camera position. That’s a helpful start, except it has the same flaw as the 2-3 knob versions. When I swivel the head, the control knob goes with it.

All I want is a tripod head that allows my left hand to control the knob while my right handles the camera. My right hand can then move the camera, adjust exposure and push the shutter button while my left hand tightens and loosens the single knob when needed. In this scenario, the two hands can work together quickly and easily, allowing me to keep my eye on the subject instead of worrying about where the stinking control knob has swiveled off to.

I’ve only found one tripod head that does all that, and it’s been discontinued for a long time. It’s the Bogen (Manfrotto) 3262QR. QR stands for quick-release. I’ve bought a couple used versions of this online (they’re super cheap, which is nice) because it doesn’t appear anyone is going to make more of them.

Someone, somewhere, saw the light and designed a tripod head that makes sense. Why isn’t it still being made?

If you want to be a close-up nature photographer, it’s easy and fun to get started. Just buy a decent camera and a good macro lens. Then go online and try to find a used version of a tripod head that has been discontinued for years. If you’re lucky enough to find that head, order a nice tripod to go with it. When that tripod arrives, attack it with a bench grinder and hacksaw until it gives up and performs the way you need it to. Then, and only then, will you be set up to photograph the small organisms that make up the vast majority of the biological diversity on earth. Good luck!

Ok, look. I know a lot of you photographers have read all this and think I’m a lunatic. I can hear you yelling at your screen.

“Just bump up your ISO and hand-hold the camera!”

“Use a flash to compensate for the low light!”

“Why am I yelling at this screen??”

Sure, I could do those things, but I don’t like using flash. First, it means more bulk to carry around with me in the field and I don’t want that. I’m often in the field for long hours and have enough to carry. Second, the look provided by natural light is a big feature of my photography and flash just can’t do everything natural light can do. I use flash when I really need it but it’s just not my thing.

Yes, I could hand-hold my camera and I often do. But there are numerous situations when that just doesn’t work well. When I’m trying to fine-tune my focus on something tiny, hand holding adds too much camera shake and frustration to an already challenging situation. A tripod also lets me be more thoughtful about composition and make small, but important changes in angle and perspective that produce the photo I really want.

I just want a tripod that gives me the option of a stabilized camera close to the ground. Why can’t I have a tripod that gives me that option??

Thanks for listening.