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Bee cute furry face
Link to tweet
From https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/close-up-photos-of-bees
How Close-Up Glamour Shots Are Generating Buzz for Bees
The pictures were taken for science, but found a wider audience because they’re gorgeous and a little trippy.
BY JESSICA LEIGH HESTER NOVEMBER 27, 2018
Droege dubbed this unknown species, part of the Mourecotelles genus, "Bee cute furry face."
USGS BEE INVENTORY AND MONITORING LAB/PUBLIC DOMAIN
Sam Droege really loves bees. He thinks they’re cute, for one thing. (Just look at that wee proboscis, those dangly antennae, and those compound eyes, wider and more open than a doe’s.) He can’t get enough of them and, at times, his enthusiasm gets the better of him. “I would argue, as would many other beeologists,” he says, “that most bees are arguably cuter than most kids.”
It’s hard to tell if he’s joking. But Droege’s job at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is part-science and part–public relations. His clients are the bees, and he’s on a mission to persuade humans to love them as much as he does.
Droege is a wildlife biologist at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, where he is developing a program to inventory and monitor North America’s native anthophiles. Some of his duties involve fieldwork, which he enjoys so much that he describes a trip to analyze the bee fauna in South Africa’s Kruger National Park as a “vacation.” “I can’t think of anything that feeds my spirit more,” he says, “than to be doing uninterrupted natural history in a warm, sunny, bee-filled part of the world while others endure snow up north.” Fair enough. Even if you never trek along with him, Droege will do his darnedest to convince you that bees pausing above the dry landscape’s flowers are just as worth swooning over as the pride of lions stalking past.
For that, he turns to Flickr, where he has mastered the unsubtle art of hype. Droege has shared thousands of photos from the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab, mostly portraits of specimens posed against inky black backgrounds. This makes the insects’ features easy to observe and document, but it also looks badass, evoking glamorous portraits of rough-and-tumble rockstars, or a still life of luxury handbags in a glossy magazine. Each photo is accompanied by tidbits of information about the subject’s appearance and habits—as well as, often, a bit of bucolic verse by Emily Dickinson and an old-school emoji that looks a little like a bee’s head. Nearly 800 of Droege’s favorite shots are compiled in an album he calls “Eye Candy.”
...
The pictures were taken for science, but found a wider audience because they’re gorgeous and a little trippy.
BY JESSICA LEIGH HESTER NOVEMBER 27, 2018
Droege dubbed this unknown species, part of the Mourecotelles genus, "Bee cute furry face."
USGS BEE INVENTORY AND MONITORING LAB/PUBLIC DOMAIN
Sam Droege really loves bees. He thinks they’re cute, for one thing. (Just look at that wee proboscis, those dangly antennae, and those compound eyes, wider and more open than a doe’s.) He can’t get enough of them and, at times, his enthusiasm gets the better of him. “I would argue, as would many other beeologists,” he says, “that most bees are arguably cuter than most kids.”
It’s hard to tell if he’s joking. But Droege’s job at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is part-science and part–public relations. His clients are the bees, and he’s on a mission to persuade humans to love them as much as he does.
Droege is a wildlife biologist at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, where he is developing a program to inventory and monitor North America’s native anthophiles. Some of his duties involve fieldwork, which he enjoys so much that he describes a trip to analyze the bee fauna in South Africa’s Kruger National Park as a “vacation.” “I can’t think of anything that feeds my spirit more,” he says, “than to be doing uninterrupted natural history in a warm, sunny, bee-filled part of the world while others endure snow up north.” Fair enough. Even if you never trek along with him, Droege will do his darnedest to convince you that bees pausing above the dry landscape’s flowers are just as worth swooning over as the pride of lions stalking past.
For that, he turns to Flickr, where he has mastered the unsubtle art of hype. Droege has shared thousands of photos from the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab, mostly portraits of specimens posed against inky black backgrounds. This makes the insects’ features easy to observe and document, but it also looks badass, evoking glamorous portraits of rough-and-tumble rockstars, or a still life of luxury handbags in a glossy magazine. Each photo is accompanied by tidbits of information about the subject’s appearance and habits—as well as, often, a bit of bucolic verse by Emily Dickinson and an old-school emoji that looks a little like a bee’s head. Nearly 800 of Droege’s favorite shots are compiled in an album he calls “Eye Candy.”
...