This species of bee was pollinating my chive plants today. I captured this frame with the Sigma 180 f/3.5 APO-Macro lens set to f/6.7, with the shutter in AUTO mode and minus .5 stop exposure dialed in. These bees are so large that at this magnification ratio and this f/stop it was hard to get the entire insect in good focus. Wind was a problem,and the overcast skies were preventing me from going to my preferred aperture range of f/9.5 to f/13 for close-in shooting,and so I deliberately chose to keep the aperture wider to combat both wind and the somewhat dim lighting. I think this species of bee is one of the prettiest ones we have. I cropped out a tiny bit of the left side and a bit of the bottom of this shot. This is STRAIGHT off the CF card curves-wise. I could have easily tweaked the curves for my web shot,and I actually did make a couple version with boosted "snap", but I felt that this lovely,soft lighting was so subtle,so natural, that I'd leave this shot as-is so you could see the imaging characteristics of the Sigma 180 Macro lens under heavily-overcast sky that was still relatively bright. You can also see six or seven sensor dust bunnies,which I didn't clone out!