A bee died in front of my very eyes this summer — or at least I think it did.
I was sitting on our deck one evening and noticed a fat bumblebee flitting from flower to flower. It would stick what I’ll call its nose in one flower, dig around in there for a couple of seconds and move on to the next one.
The scene became rather mesmerizing, and as I watched the action, I marvelled at how little time the bee spent at each flower.
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But then something weird happened — the bee buried itself in a flower … and didn’t come out.
I watched, curious at first and then with a growing sense of alarm.
Its back end wriggled a bit in what I originally interpreted as an ecstatic attempt to go deeper into the motherlode of pollen goodness, but then I started to wonder if it was more a frantic attempt to escape.
The back-end wriggling stopped after a few seconds and there the bee hung, half in and half out of the flower, motionless.
I wasn’t sure what had just happened. Had the bee just fallen asleep? Had it picked this moment to give into the great circle of life and die among the petals?
We eventually moved inside but kept an eye on it occasionally throughout the evening. It was still hanging there when we turned in for the night and was still there all the next day. On the morning of the second day, it was gone.
It would be nice to think it eventually woke up and returned to its nest, but I’m assuming the more likely scenario is that its corpse was found by something that considers dead bees a delicacy.
I turned to the internet to see if it could shed some light on what I had witnessed, and it turns out bees getting stuck and passing away inside flowers is definitely a thing.
I found lots of stories about people finding bees “stuck” in flowers, although most of the writers weren’t sure if they were stuck or had simply died.
Some people wrote about gently extracting the bee from the flower and offering it sugar water in an attempt to revive it, with questionable results.
Whatever happened that night on the deck, it was one of the oddest nature events I’ve witnessed in awhile.
