Seamlessly Repeating Bees...Or Fireflies?

I decided to do a little pattern exercise today, but it's become a little puzzle. For some reason I keep losing the lines when I try to make it into a swatch (at the bounding box >> crop part). If anyone knows why that's happening, I'd be most appreciative if you could help me out.

They're meant to be outlined like this:

But when I crop they end up looking like this (and they do repeat perfectly so at least that's fine):

So they look more like fireflies than bees (which is cute but I want to know why it's happening!)

edit: OK! I managed to get around the problem (sort of) my transporting the image from Illustrator to Photoshop (de-vectoring it in the process I guess) and making it a Photoshop pattern. Voila!

HEY! Hi! Hello.

So I know I've been seemingly pretty quiet lately (I'm actually not at all quiet), but it's mostly due to things I can't show you yet (SOON I will be able to... But not yet). However I have been working on some personal design exercises here and there, and those I can show you. And so I will! Right now.

OKAY! I signed up for skillshare a while back and it has been so totally worth it! I love it! I'm enrolled in about five classes and the latest assignment I did was Edward Boatman's "Illustrate Your Day: An Intro to Symbol Design" class. Here was what I came up with (I'll include my class summary notes too).

"My average day is pretty monotonous so I decided to cut down the icon count by four [so I did 16 instead of 20].

I'm a little unhappy that I didn't end up doing ANY narrative icons (in fact I had planned out loads of them, but they didn't work for one reason or another). Next time I'll concentrate on fitting some of those in so hopefully things won't be too boring as a whole..

I'm new to Illustrator, though, so I primarily used this as a chance to get to know the program better and I actually learned a lot! I also learned a lot about how different people perceive the same visual symbol and how tiny changes can make something readable or confusing (for instance, adding meatballs and swapping out the bowl for a plate transformed my dinner from 'noodles' to 'spaghetti'! Or having my stylus pen in motion on my graphics tablet turned it from "maybe a cell phone thing?" into my graphics tablet.)

I guess the biggest thing about icons is "readability" when simplifying things to their core and this was a good mental exercise in doing that too.

Anyway, I am very pleased with the outcome overall (though I might redo the last one) and I think I'll do more practice with icons (and Illustrator) in future."

I also redid my CV and made this silly Valentine's Day card (get in touch if you want one for £1.50) to give to the big, lovely man in your life (hah).

Excuse the poor photo quality...

Other than that, January isn't even over yet and I can proudly say I've already made great progress on my New Year's Resolutions.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, FOLKS!