The bees are back!

I have seen the odd bee flying about on its own, recently. Today, I decided to photograph the wattle blooming in the lane near our house. I was thrilled to find it had bees in the blossoms. I’ve used the Nokia Lumia 520 Windows Phone, on auto.

I have sharpened and cropped and scaled for the web using IrfanView & GIMP and applied the frame masking with FastStone. Yeah, I over-fiddled!

I guess you will see only a few of them on a small screen!

Thanks for looking. Hope you are having a good weekend. 🙂

Trees

Eucalyptus spathulata: swamp mallet

With prompting from Claudette in the comments yesterday, I collected a sample piece of that tree which has the wonderful bark I featured in my previous post.

I spent hours trawling websites and – hurrah- identified it as a swamp mallet which is native to Western Australia and does well in poorly drained and saline soils..

Feature photo was taken with the Nokia Lumia 530 while walking the dog.

Then I put the piece on some cork board and photographed with the Nokia Lumia 520 in poor daylight. I was surprised to see different coloured clusters which had up to seven buds. From memory, the cream flowers were not at all showy. Some old fruit is left on the branch.

I discovered the difference between a mallee and a mallet tree – the former grows many trunks from a sort of tuber underneath the ground, and the latter grows from a single trunk. I bet Claudette could have told me what the tree was, just from the images! However, I did enjoy my jaunt around the web looking at all the lovely Australian natives.

Thanks for looking. 🙂

Animals

Cattle Collection

After walking the dog this morning, I grabbed the Nikon D3000, put it on auto, and went down the side lane to take these pictures of cattle, just for you. I’m liking this theme and wanting to blog photos to see what happens with them. 🙂