Bees

I have a recent fascination with social insects, especially bees. Walking through the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, CA one day, I became enthralled with the dance and methodical foraging of the bees. I'd never noticed the enormous variety of species before, nor the fact that each kind of flower has its own specific kind of bee attending to it.

With the exception of the last photo, taken in the Swiss Alps, all this photos were taken on the same afternoon.

It's so easy to see the world, especially nature, in terms of learned categories and symbols of behavior rather than the real living thing, small as it may be. You look at a bee and think "it's collecting nectar" without actually seeing what it's doing. For instance, for flowers whose several blossoms are arranged vertically on a stem, I saw that some bees have a convention of always starting at the bottom. Intuition says that this convention allows them to know, after checking only one blossom, if the whole stem has already been pilfered and they can try a different one. Also, they have an amazing memory for which ones they've already tried and are never (that I saw) redundant.

It's amazing what you notice when you move past the mind's automatic categorization of experience and consciously look at what is actually in front of you.