BeeButts
The world of bee look alike is big! This seems to be a pollinator, and has a decent amount of pollen on its hind legs. It does have an ant body type, but also appears to have wings. Bee? Hover fly? Ant? Hybrid? Something else?
Yeah, I know they're called basket or corbicula, but pockets is more fun.
Yesterday's photo may or may not have been a hover fly. This is certainly a bee.
Tongue first, ready to go for it. Just like when Aragorn kisses Arwen at the end of the last OG LORT movie. 
Most of the time when bees visit these flowers they completely disappear from view. I suspect this one was about to do just that.
As a fun note, if you pop the photo out and zoom in, you can see that its head looks a bit like a helmet with a narrow neck going into it. This bee was big/beefy. If any of you know what species it might have been, chime in. If it helps, I'm in SE MI.
Focus in the right spot for this community ;) Not that you can see its head, lol
I'm pretty chuffed with this shot. It's not cropped, so zoom! Taken on an OM-1 with the Olympus 12-40mm pro. I've only recently realized how good Micro Four Thirds sensors are for macro work. The the 2x crop sensor means twice the depth of field and also twice the magnification (eg a 1:3 lens on a crop sensor is effectively the same as a 1:6 lens on a FF sensor). Backgrounds are still nicely blown out.
I don't know what to say....
The bees love my garden but I'd never noticed these orange things on any of them before. I thought it might be a parasite but nope! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollen_basket
Bees absolutely love our Rose of Sharon, but I guess I could say that about a number of other plants in our yard too.
[Image description: a bright green bee with pollen covered legs on a lilac colored flower with jagged edged petals.]
