This is it: the best honeybee picture I’m going to get. By chance, this bee was right at the closest point my camera is able to focus on. The background is clean and uncluttered. And the autofocus did its job perfectly. A different camera might be able to do better, but this is as good as it gets for mine.
Of course, when I say “by chance,” what I really mean is “I took a huge number of pictures.” According to my painstaking recordkeeping, the burst mode on my camera allowed me to take 6,070 pictures of bees between March 9 and April 26 even though the total elapsed time spent on this was probably no more than an hour or two. I think I can now stop taking pictures of bees on my morning walk.
