A Swarm of Golden Space Bees can't find Manchester because it is raining.
or
A terrestrial globe semée of bees volant, all proper.
Totally ©-free. Use as you like. If you care give me credit.
This is my interpretation of the top of the crest of the coat of arms of Manchester Council, made a little more realistic than the usual stylised heraldic cartoons such as that at the bottom of this page. I had a desire to know what it would look like done properly and realised the only way I was going to get to see it was to do it myself.
More after the break.
The heraldic term "proper" means the object(s) should have their natural colours so I should have made the bee wings grey and transparent. That would have been more of a bother to do well. As usual, click to embiggen.
I used a NASA image, the only one I could find of the whole Earth that included Britain. Quite unusually for midsummer, the area around Manchester is covered with dense cloud. The photo was taken on the 6th of July 2015. It was one of the first images taken by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite that sits at Lagrangian Point 1 at about one million miles from Earth. The golden space bees are obviously much closer to the camera as golden space bees can't be 2500 kilometres (1500 miles) long. That would be silly.
Rather than North being at the top, the Earth is seen here at an angle that is showing its inclination to the ecliptic, about 23.4°. Just above the right wing of the uppermost bee on the left you can see a little of East Anglia, Kent and Scotland peeking out from under the clouds. I just adjusted the contrast up a little and reduced the brightness to get the blue a bit more intense, aiming for a lapis lazuli colour.
Reality: not azure enough.
The bee images came from an engraving of a single bee on page 192 of The ABC of bee culture: a cyclopaedia of every thing pertaining to the care of the honey-bee; bees, honey, hives, implements, honey-plants, etc., facts gleaned from the experience of thousands of bee keepers all over our land, and afterward verified by practical work in our own apiary. by Amos Ives Root (Medina, Ohio, 1891). Many different editions of this comprehensive guide to bee-keeping from 1884 to 1920 can be read on archive.org and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, both amazing repositories of many old and fascinating books.
(though with my caption)
I had to adjust the image of the bee quite a lot as the engraving was of the bee resting and I wanted it flying, I rotated the wings out, removed the traces of wings from over the body and removed the legs (rather tricky from under the wings) mostly by cutting and pasting bits. I worked on a half-bee then at the end I copied and flipped it to get the result convincingly symmetrical. I decided these bees hold their legs neatly under them when flying for artistic reasons. Those reasons being that I don't have the artistic talent to ever make the legs work.
For the alterations I used the relatively easy-to-use and free GNU Image Manipulation Program.
The full Manchester Council coat of arms.
Some artist clearly had a bad experience with an antelope.
That lion is dead now the chain is loose.
Some artist clearly had a bad experience with an antelope.
That lion is dead now the chain is loose.
