Your Daily Photo (Now I Kind of Miss the Bees Edition)

Your Daily Photo (Beepocalypse II, The Vacuuming Edition)

A special 'moving' photo edition of Daily Photo. Los Angeles County West Vector Control District sent out a representative with a bee suit and a reverse leaf blower to vacuum the bees out of the tree. Didn't shoot the scene of him working, no good vantage point to shoot from where I could have been protected from the bees he was stirring up as he was collecting them.

As this video shows, there are still a good number of bees hanging around, but doesn't look like enough to form a hive, and the vector control dude said this weekend's rains should disperse (or kill) the rest of the stragglers.

Also, shooting fully zoomed shots at 200mm with my telephoto lens is not conducive to providing steady handheld video, especially shooting a subject at a high angle like that.

Your Daily Photo (Is That a Ball of Bees in Your Backyard, or Are You Just Happy to See Me? Edition)

Gladly, taken with my zoom lens, would not want to be too close to that swarm. Watching them come in the backyard and pick a place to build their hive was an impressive sight, but one best viewed at a safe remove through a window. Once they were engaged in hive building, I felt pretty safe taking pictures, but given that they chose the upper limbs of my loquat tree to build, they're a good 20-30 feet away in the pictures I snapped.

Waiting for Vector Control to take care of the situation.

According to the vector control webpage, 80% of honey bees in LA County are Africanized, so probably best to get that hive out of here, given their propensity for aggressively defending their territory.