A few days ago, I was shooting a vid of a stunning buff-tailed bumblebee queen on my crocuses when something rather intriguing happened. The first thing is that she fell off the crocus somehow, which you can see happening three seconds into the vid. I wonder if she was still a bit groggy after her long hibernation. After all, I sometimes feel groggy in the morning after seven or eight hours’ sleep, and can’t imagine what it must feel like to wake up after six months. Her visit to my crocuses might have been one of her very first flights after emerging from hibernation. A couple of days after this, the darling little common carder queen who spent three days and nights on and inside my crocuses also fell off the top of one while I was watching her, though in her case it might have been because the surface of the flower was wet and slippy after overnight rain.
I managed to grab a couple of screenshots from the vid of the moment when the buff-tail fell; they’re blurry because it happened so fast!
In the second pic, you can see that she hit her bottom on another crocus on the way down. Oopsie! Poor little bumble.
What happened next, though, is very weird to me. She climbed back up the crocus stalk and then spent a good twenty seconds or so standing on the stalk with her back legs and hitting the crocus flower repeatedly with her front legs, so fast that it’s pretty much a blur. At about twenty-seven seconds in, she had a brief go with her middle legs as well.
‘Take THAT!’
Eventually, she gave up and flew off to another crocus. I stopped filming there, but she seemed to be absolutely fine, and after exploring that crocus, flew to another of my pots of crocuses nearby.
I emailed the Bumblebee Conservation Trust about it, and even they couldn’t explain what the buff-tail might have been up to from my description of her behaviour. They suggested that she might have been trying to dislodge something that got stuck to her leg, or had a muscle spasm, or was attempting, in a misjudged way, to engage in buzz pollination (where bumblebees vibrate to encourage flowers to release more pollen).
I really don’t know, but whatever the precious little creature was doing, I’m delighted to have caught it on camera!
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