Last night, I sat marveling at the scene before me. Stretched out on a steep hill, lazily picking blueberries while Hilary sat beside me, eating the blueberries I was picking and nattering away incessantly. Below was Marcil Lake and beyond that Adam's Sound. There was barely a breath of wind, and in the late evening the light shifted and changed before my eyes. Not a soul was in a more beautiful spot than I was in that moment.
Travis was off exploring and soon I could hear him calling from above. When I didn't appear, he came to me, telling me he had found a Bumble Bee. We climbed up to the road and across it he searched briefly for the insect, until his eyes caught it again. I had expected to see Bumble Bee flying amongst the few remaining flowers, instead I had to follow his pointing finger to a bee sitting under a flower, not moving.
To get a decent photo I would have had to lay in water and mud, so instead I set the camera near the bee, and took a photo using the timer. Then I'd look at the photo, adjust the focus, and the zoom, reposition the camera, and then repeat the process until I was satisfied with the result.
The bee was so motionless that I thought it was dead, but when I gently brushed its back, it slowly moved. It seemed to be in a state of torpor, waiting for the sun to return and warm the air, and it. Once warm it could return to searching for ever scarcer flowers, before the return of the inevitable snow.
The detail is worth clicking on to see at a higher resolution.
Comments
7 responses
That bee is the craziest think I’ve ever seen! HUGE…
Your son is amazing!
Most children would have rushed by those flowers and never even noticed the bumble bee.
Unfortunately, this is another sign of the approaching fall – but what a wonderful one!
It seems to be about average bumble bee size Morena, a little bigger than a couple of the other common species up here.
My son is amazing allmycke. He is, in many ways, a very cool kid, with a very keen eye.
Being a pollinator around Arctic Bay must be a very tough job but hey, if you’re a bumblebee you just gotta do whatcha gotta do.
Well, its a very short job, with a lot of time off to sleep. But they have quite a cornucopia for about a month. We also have a species of Bumble Bee that murders and cheats. It takes over another species hive, killing the Queen and enslaving the workers, to raise its young for the following season.
Do you know if they actually survive the Arctic winter in their hives? That would be quite amazing, but I suppose they do. I never thought about insects in the high Arctic, not very much anyway, except for how to get rid of mozzies while scanning the tundra for Snowy Owls (yes, those were the days…).
Jochen,
apparently just Queens overwinter. The drones and workers don’t. They usually only have time to raise one set of workers, and one set of drones/queens.