Sleeping Bees

While I was out rummaging in the garden several mornings ago, I made a surprising discovery:

I found a bee asleep in one of my hollyhock blossoms.

You’ll have to take my word for it, I suppose. But you can kinda tell by the way she is deep inside the flower, and yet not gathering pollen.

I knew bees slept — I don’t know of a creature that doesn’t, except things like protozoans and bacteria and such.

But I had always assumed that bees go back to their hives to sleep.

By the time I took this photo of a huge bumblebee sleeping on a sunflower, the bees were beginning to warm up, and wake up. The next bee I saw was slowly flexing its abdomen to get the juices going. Then it took off.

When I went inside, I had to look up “bees sleeping in flowers” on the internet. Right? I mean it’s what you do. There I found this article on Bored Panda.https://www.boredpanda.com/bees-sleeping-flower-nature-wildlife-photography-joe-neely/?utm_source=duckduckgo&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic. Really great post! Interestingly, the scarlet globemallow that the bees there are curled up in is a close relative of hollyhocks. (On a photographic composition note, notice that the photographer kept zooming in on the bees until they filled the frame. Nice technique. I did that for two shots here, but held back a little for the other one because I wanted to show the bees in context.)