I love those pink/purple stamens sticking out.
On a visit to the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney a couple of weeks ago, I came across a very large planting of Pride of Madeira (Echium candicans)*. The large flower spikes are at about eye level — and the bees absolutely loved them. I was very glad these were non-aggressive bees!
It’s interesting how the flowers appear in spirals.
Let me at that pollen!
The photo below is a crop of the one above, to zero in on the bee. That “pollen basket” (thanks to Jude for introducing me to that term) is so blue that it looks like an enamelled jewel adorning the bee’s leg.
This bee is kind of cute with its hairy front.
*Don’t be too impressed by my plant knowledge — being a botanic garden, everything has a label. 🙂
Oh what beautiful blues and photos 😀
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Thank you Cee. 😊
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That’s a super photo of the bee. There are a lot of the huge echiums around here, very buzzy in the summer, but I didn’t notice the blue pollen. I’ll have a better look next year, there are bound to be seedlings popping up somewhere.
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Thanks Jude. I’m sure that with your better camera/lens, you’d get excellent shots of blue pollen.
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I have seen it before on a bee on a particular hydrangea that has blue pollen. I didn’t know echiums had blue pollen.
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ah, I see. I didn’t know either, but until two weeks ago I’d never heard of echiums anyway! 😉
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They are quite popular here especially echium pininana which grows to about 2-3m.
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3m! That’s a tree! I googled it, it looks quite cool. “giant viper’s-bugloss”, what a name that is.
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Well, yes they do reach tree height!
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Love the contrasting colours here! Awesome clicks…
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ah, you’re only see the good ones, not the “bee blur” ones. 😉
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