Bee loved

Here’s my new little friend, sitting on my desk with me while I write tonight. I think she is Apis mellifera? I’m sorry to say I don’t know my bees as well as I should.

I found her half drowned in a rain-filled bucket. I have a bird and bee bath with a nice piece of driftwood they can walk up and down to the water safely, but of course this one found the slick-sided bucket 😦 Since it was almost dark and kind of cool, I wasn’t sure she’d get warm and dry enough to fly home before night. So I picked her some alyssum and put her in a whiskey tumbler. (Everybody knows real writers drink whiskey!) She wasn’t looking good earlier, but I blotted her dry and stuck her next to my gecko’s undertank heat pad, and she’s perked right up.

I’d read on the internet some weeks ago that you can revive exhausted bees with a bit of honey. In the picture, you can see she’s eating a drop of local wildflower honey off the tip of a toothpick. Thanks for some true info, internet!

Tomorrow morning I’ll release her back into the wild.

Bees are having a rough time of it these days. With the now rectified exception of the watery bucket of death, we try to keep a good bug-friendly garden. We don’t spray chemicals. We save the cutworms for the gecko. We live peacefully with the predatory wasps under our eaves. Spiders are relocated to the side of the shed near the compost bins. The aphids… The aphids I crush like the vile monsters they are! Mosquitoes and fruit flies also get swatted. But other than that…

As a gardener, I try to bee the bloom I want to see in the world. I hope this fuzzy little cutie has a fruitful season of pollinating ahead of her!