Watching a bumble bee

For no particular reason

Bombus. lapidarius (red-tailed bumble bee)/Wikipedia.

A person can learn a lot from close, quiet observations of nature. No one has been better at it than Gilbert White, the English parson who wrote Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne in the late 18^th century. He’s an inspiration for those of us here at Just a Bit Outside. We will return to Parson White in detail in a few weeks.

As stressed by the parson, there is much to be said about paying attention to the small things in nature when they appear in front of you. You could learn something. On the other hand, you might, just for the hell of it, spend several minutes watching a bumble bee clinging to a window screen while you wash breakfast dishes.

This bumble bee was performing its morning ablutions. And it was the most thorough cleaning of a bee that I have ever seen, although my sample size now sits at… one. The little black-and-yellow fellow (or female, more on this later) spent those minutes smoothing and combing himself, from top to bottom and front to back. At one point, it held on to the screen by front antennae and groomed with legs, one or two at a time, preening away.

Bees have a special cleansing attachment on a front antenna to help with their combing. They are ridding themselves of the usual dust and dirt, as well as small irritating parasites. And it looked like this bee rubbed its compound eyes with a leg. Perhaps its mother didn’t lecture him about that habit.

I say “him” although I am not trained in melittology – granted, I get stung about once a year -- so I was not able to determine its gender. A keen-eyed bee observer would have known that male bumble bees have hairy back legs, while females do not. Males have long, curved antennae, while females’ antennae are shorter and jointed. This fellow’s antennae looked long and curved to me. Females have six abdominal segments and males have seven. I should have counted them.

The time was 6:30 a.m., and the wind was picking up. But the little half-inch bee held on, its body rocking back and forth in the freshening breeze while it determinedly finished prepping for the day. Bee experts tell us that females do the work around the hive, and the males, while pollen collectors, are mostly good for reproduction. And they die within weeks of mating. Perhaps that explains the detailed grooming. When you only have one shot, you'd better look your best if you are a male bumble bee.

Parson White, in 1797, correctly observed that bees have no ears. He wrote, “it does not appear from experiment that bees are in any way capable of being affected by sounds.” He shouted at them through a speaking trumpet placed next to a hive “with such an exertion of voice as would have hailed a ship at the distance of a mile,” to no response. In this way, he disagrees with the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, who wrote in 77 AD that the “clapping of the hands and the tinkling of brass afford bees great delight.” I did not have a speaking trumpet at hand, nor bells, and my hands were in the dish water, so I didn’t repeat these experiments.

When my little friend had finished, he dropped a solid inch-long light brown poop down the window screen. Feeling much, much better, I presume, he flew off.

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