Bee-draggled

A quiet day of catching up with shopping, present buying and entering data, all made more bearable by the fact that it's poured with rain all day. The sun appeared briefly in the late afternoon and I dashed into the garden to try and find a blip. Of course the sun disappeared again almost immediately!

A common blue damselfly was sufficiently cool to allow a close approach and I got a couple of decent images - blip done! But as I was heading back into the house I spotted this bee, looking very sorry for itself on the flowers of the golden marjoram.

This bee is a male buff-tailed bumblebee Bombus terrestris, also known as a drone, and exists solely for the purpose of mating with the queen. The queen will have several drones lined up to mate with her, and if a drone is lucky enough to mate with the queen the two bees will go into a mating flight, and have sex in mid-air. Unfortunately, this can only happen once as his penis and abdomen get ripped from his body during the mid-air hookup, and he quickly dies.

Life isn't so good for the drones that don't mate with the queen either. Worker bees feed the young drones until they are ready to mate. Those that don't mate with the queen get kicked out of the nest and starve to death. So while all the workers and queen will have been able to stay warm and dry during the deluge, this little creature had to sit it out, hence his bedraggled appearance.