Giant Hawaiian Bumble Bee

This immense Hawaiian bumble bee may be a type of Carpenter bee, but I have not been able to find pictures of this particular type anywhere. It was so big that when it decided after 15 minutes of me taking macro photos of it, sometimes having the camera lens brush its' body hairs, that it had had enough, it could barely keep its' rear end airborne while chasing me, accompanied by the sound of its' thumping helicopter-like wing beats, all the way out of the marsh, across a football field, past an assortment of my laughing friends, and into the relative safety of my car.

Crab in the Hole

A case of patience: the crescent of sand from the upper left of the picture, down around the foreground and up the lower right is the curve of the crab's hole into which an extension tube on my camera was inserted and then followed by a lengthy wait. I'm not sure who was more surprised, the crab or I! This is from my 2005 archives and was taken in an inland mangrove swamp in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico, way down south closer to Guatemala. The crab's pink colouration is one of the food sources that give flamingos their coral feather colour.