Summer's ending

The bumblebees are almost frantic in the search for nectar as the summer draws to a close. In the high, hot months, they crawl over flowers in an almost leisurely manner, but now - partly I suppose to keep their internal temperature up and partly because their reproductive standoff with the their queen is at an end and young queens and their own sons are maturing - and maybe because the flowers have less to offer? - now, at any rate, they move rapidly along the flowers, a single-minded seething along the white weedy flowers (I don't know their name) that makes some people swing to the other side of the path but never actually takes notice of passers-by. In the early morning, there are always several sleeping, legs clenched around a flower, out too late and grown too chilled to fly home. I used to think they were dead, but if you have the time to watch, or the nerve to stroke one gently, you'll see her waken and set out about her business. Soon, though, the summer will end and so will the lives of all the workers and guards in the colonies. Only the young queens, mating with a late-summer male, will find a wintering-over place, to waken from her hibernation with the spring and begin a new colony.















Here's a sleeping bumble...