Monday, July 20, 2009

Close Encounters of the Bee Kind

Holy crap! I just came tearing down the hill and into the house after a 3+ minute ordeal with a bee who mistook me for a flower. I was sitting on the top of our hill in the backyard when I heard bee wings. I said, "Oh, is that a bee?" and looked around. Didn't see anything. Then I looked down and saw he had landed ON MY ELBOW. He was probing me with his cool tongue (or whatever you call it that bees use to get the nectar out). I got a very good look at this while I "remained calm" and tried not to do anything to annoy him. He wandered around on my arm for a few minutes, trying again and again to get any nectar at all from my elbow, but it wasn't happening. His tongue felt very cool and soft. It would have kind of tickled if I wasn't so scared. Then, he started to take off, only to re-land once again on my arm after a microsecond! He was convinced this was the spot he heard there was nectar, and wasn't leaving until he got some! So, I knew the next time he took flight, I'd have to run. And when it happened, I ran like a bat out of hell. Nearly fell down the hill, it's quite steep, and the dogs thought it was great fun and ran with me. The bee looked a little stunned for a second as he tried to re-land, but that was the last I saw of him. Hopefully he found the flowers that were behind me a few feet, that were a kind of peachy white color like my skin, which I'm assuming he was looking for. ???

An abrupt end to our sit outside! At least I didn't get stung, and the poor mistaken bee got to live another day to gather nectar and didn't lose his life after stinging, as most do.

1 comment:

jennyfer said...

Glad you didn't get stung as I did. A painful experience and a swollen face for 4 days.