The Birds and the Bees, the Flowers and the Trees

Finally a glimpse of sunshine appeared these past few days in the Champaign area.  I used the opportunity to go out and take some photos of the beauty of spring.  I am always in awe of the beauty of the Cherry Blossom trees over by the Arboretum South of campus.  The trees are so densely packed with fragrant and white flowers it just consumes your senses.  Some of the flowers I photographed were not in the Arboretum, but around campus.  There are so many places on campus that bloom, I wish I could catch them all, but alas it is impossible.  Where there are flowers in bloom there are bees to grab pollen.  The bees at the Arboretum were kind enough to let me take their picture without them stinging me, which is the way I prefer it to be.  Also while down at the Arboretum I encountered a robin with whom I had a staring contest.  First I challenged him eye to eye, then his eye to my camera.  I have to say he was pretty good since he could stare and hop around at the same time...thus I wasn't able to get more than one or two decent photos of him.  Usually these spring activities happen earlier on in the semester, but thanks to God's choice in weather these past couple months it didn't happen until just now.  So it's off to go study for finals, in a corner of a library where there is nothing good to photograph...This work by JD Maloney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.