But still the best shot I’ve managed with the new DSLR setup so I thought it was worth posting. Setting the aperture to f/8.0 and using a flash helps a lot.
The advantage to shooting honeybees is that they’re common, easy-to-find, and not especially nervous around people or cameras. In fact, in most locations they seem to easily outnumber all other bees combined. In the Americas and Australia, they are an introduced species that weren’t present at all until a few hundred years ago. Possibly they have displaced native bees and pollinators, though the evidence is unclear. (Alien Species in North America and Hawaii, George W. Cox, p. 48.) If they did, it likely happened several hundred years ago, before most folks noticed and now they just seem like a native part of the fauna. Possibly reduction of honeybee populations in non-agricultural areas might have a cascading effect on many non-native plant species that depend on honeybees for pollination.