Though it warmed up considerably later on, yesterday morning began decidedly brisk—chilly enough that a light jacket felt good as I ambled around the side yard while Moon-the-Dog made her usual investigatory peregrinations.
On the wild hillside, bloodroot's white blooms remained firmly closed, their leaves clasped tight around the stem, as if in prayer. Even the dense patches of lesser celandine down along the river revealed not a single opened flower.
Yet the narcissus seemed to be just fine, already up and at 'em, strutting their stuff for the newborn day. The various daffodils in shades of white and cream and pale butter seemed luminous in the burgeoning light, while the brilliant yellow jonquils appeared downright jaunty.
It was in one of these jonquils that I spied the bumblebee in the photo, tucked snugly under a protective golden petal…obviously waiting for the rising sun to heat things up a bit before he stirred from his comfy bed.
18 comments:
HI GRIZZ - beautiful picture - the yellow so bright and vibrant and the bee so safe and comfy. I, like that bee, stay tucked in and comfy until the sun comes through the kitchen window and warms the table.....well, almost. I do like to 'sleep-in'. We all do, me, Skipp and Gracie-Blue. :-)
Love to you
Gail
peace.....
Gail…
I'm glad you liked the photo. I thought it was a neat image, the way the bumblebee had tucked itself into the yellow jonquil.
I used to love to sleep in, but that's something I almost never do anymore—haven't for years, in fact. Would if I could, but "sleeping in" for me means like 9:00 a.m. and that occurs maybe once every couple of months at the most. Used to be, though, I stayed up all night, went to bed at daylight, slept til noon…
Ahhh, decadent youth!
If that bee was out and about she must have known that the day was going to warm up Grizz.
Ok, I haven't seen one of those yet. But yesterday I spied some sort of wasp on the inside of one of my living room windows. I let him out. The knats seem to be prolific this year, as are the ground squirrels which are keeping Beau busy. I'll post a photo of my blooming cherry tree when it's ready.We're getting much needed rain here.
Deb
just to clarify - "sleeping in" means between 9 and 9:30. That feels late usually, but who cares, right? Like today, I got up at 9!
Love Gail
peace.....
Weaver…
Actually, that bumblebee hadn't yet gotten out and about…it was still in "bed." They do that, tuck in and shelter overnight from the cold within the folds of flowers—waiting in their snug retreat for the sun to warm things up before venturing about. Still, it must haven known warmer times would soon arrive seeing as how it hadn't buried deeper into the bloom's folds.
Debbie…
We usually have a few wasps in the house early on, too—though haven't seen one yet this year. But honeybees, bumblebees, and wasps have been buzzing around outside—on the warmer days—for at least a month, sometimes in-between dustings of snow or hard freezes. Picking their days to meander, I guess. No mosquitoes or gnats, however, and haven't seen a ground squirrel, though they're pretty uncommon due to a plethora of roaming cats.
I'll look forward to that cherry tree pix.
Gail…
Well, huh…you're no better than me when it comes to sleeping in! :-) And a whole lot of folks wouldn't call 9:00-9:30 a.m. sleeping in a'tall. I would, as anything past 7:00-7:30 constitutes "sleeping in" to me—but I get up before daylight, "with the squirrels," as Mom and Dad used to say.
I can't seem to be able to sleep later than 7:30 a.m.--even if I got to bed well after midnight. I just can't do it. Kali, on the other hand, can (and often does) sleep until noon.
I know that bumblebees aren't colonial hive builders like honeybees where the vast majority of the hive is composed of sterile females, but are the bumblebees buzzing around both male and female? I just being this up because you assigned your snugged bee to the male gender.
Lovely picture! Spring is really late here too, celandines and wood anenomes have just appeared during the last couple of days and finally the temperature has risen a few degrees. Just as well since the first summer migrants are arriving now, I've seen swallows and hoping for a cuckoo soon.
Scott…
Nahhh, I generally can't sleep much past 7:30, either, though Myladylove can snooze until noon.
I've wondered about this and can't decide the actual cause. In my case, is it my history of self-abuse and battering that keeps me awake? Can I only sleep through a given amount of pain per night? Could there be a genuine male/female difference—are middle-age women are just better sleepers than middle-age men? Maybe we, as individuals, simply happen to be lousy late-sleepers? Or is there something more subtle at work—a little biological clock hooked into our male psyche/nervous system that reminds us with every tick-tock that, statistically, we aren't apt to live as long as our womenfolk, and therefore we are programmed to wake up early to get the day started because we know our time is running out?
Re. the bee's gender: two things, one philosophical, the other entomological.
The first being I dislike referring to animals as an "it" for the same reason I would feel odd calling a human I couldn't discern the gender of an "it." I don't, for example, ask the parents of a newborn, "What's its name?" I'd maybe say, "What's your child's name?" or, if being flippantly casual "What did you decide to call this snazzy new kid?" With luck, that would give me the clue I needed for future use. I know it isn't the same, but I feel that same twinge of mild disrespect sometimes when writing about—yes—a bumblebee. Not always, sometimes. And sometimes it's just unavoidable. Plus I should also add that I write hearing the words in my head, like music, and often I need that gender to make the sentence—and thus the thought—flow or sing or whatever you want to call my admitted peculiar goofiness regarding my writing workflow. Rather than take the French way and refer to everything from stones to gateposts as female, I tend to favor male pronouns…which may indicate an unintentionally sexist leaning.
So that's one reason in general. But in this particular instance I kinda thought the bumblebee looked like a male. You're unquestionably a far better naturalist, and what I know about bumblebees is probably junior-grade stuff. I can only recognize a few of the different local bumblebee species, for instance, and am likely wrong half the time. But I know that both males and females fly (the queen, being queenly, stays put) and seem to remember that you can tell the gender difference afield by counting abdomen segments—one has 6, (male?) the other 7—and more easily for me, the lack or presence of a "pollen basket" on the back legs of the female. Which is what caused me to guess male for the bee in my photo—and might just have easily been wishful thinking so's I could define it as a boy bee. :-)
A nice, thoughtful reply, Grizz. As my father got older and older, he found himself sleeping fewer and fewer hours each night, so there's no way that he could sleep in. Maybe that's starting to happen to me, too.
Kali attributes her ability to sleep very late to the fact that her mother (also a very late sleeper) forced the kids to stay in bed until she awoke in the morning. So, Kali thinks she's been trained to sleep late. I think (based on Mom's ability to sleep very late) that it's genetic, not entrained.
I like (and fully appreciate) your analysis of pronoun use with animals (and babies). I don't use "it" when referring to animals, either, but then I torture the sentence so that I can avoid a construction requiring a pronoun.
Your "limited knowledge" about bumblebees is far greater than mine. I think that the most I know about bumblebees is that they live in small, subterranean colonies, are not prone to sting unless really provoked, and some belong to the genus with the wonderful name Bombyx.
Rowan…
Spring has suddenly sprung here! That is, the first wave of woodland wildflowers seem to have all bloomed at once. It's been raining off and all since last week, and naturally, every nice hour weatherwise, I'm stuck at my desk or driving somewhere. I haven't yet managed a real ramble…just a few brief roadside pauses. Today is warm, but over the next few days it's supposed to be much cooler. I'm getting rather frustrated!
Scott…
Both my parents were early risers, 5:30-6:00 a.m. Dad went to bed about 10:00 p.m.; Mom might sit up until midnight if I was watching TV, and she never was much of a sleeper. A trait which I've inherited. As a kid, I always wanted to stay up all night and sleep late the next day…though still seldom more than 4-5 hours.
Ha! You sure aren't the only one occasionally flummoxed when trying to square the way you need to refer to an animal—pronoun use—with the sentence you're trying to form while keeping from becoming clumsy, stilted, or a purveyance of pure gibberish. Good writing is never easy—not if you're trying to write up there at the edge of your talent/ability which is always where we should strive to work.
After a few thousand feature articles, many thousand more columns, and any number of various other writing projects, it's now pretty easy for me to write to the level I managed, say, a decade ago. But when you move your own cheese—and you should—the task remains endlessly demanding. When I'm really pushing, I can spend a hour on a sentence or reworking a paragraph, sweating blood, trying to reach some ideal that "sounds" polished and lyrical in my head…which, als, seems to be as elusive as an ivory-bill in a cypress swamp.
Trust me, my friend, what you feel is just your artistic integrity wispering. There is no cure.
I knew 'nats' had another letter in front of it. So it's a 'g'!
THanks :D
Debbie
Debbie…
Hey, I thought of teasing you a bit about how such big ol' complicated four-letter words boasting a silent "G" can easily flummox a Texan's straightforward attempt at spelling—but then I figured, nahhh…that might cause her to gnash her teeth, get all gnarly, and whack me with a garden gnome.
I just read your comment and I'm still laughing. Thanks, sometimes I wonder what I'm thinking! :D
Debbie
Debbie…
Well, "sometimes" for you. Me, I wonder what I'm thinking ALL the time. And regularly never manage to figure it out.
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