Sunflower Celebration: Bee Somersaults With Joy!

After yesterday's photo, you just knew it was going to be another sunflower blip, didn't you? :-)

Tempted by the promise of more sunflower blooms, I returned to the sunflower beds at the Arboretum on this morning. (And I plan to visit there every day this week, so sunflower lovers, keep watching these pages.) It was the start of a gorgeous, perfect, early-September day. Cool in the morning, clear blue skies in the afternoon, sunshine galore, perfect temperatures. What the weather peeps would have to call "a hall-of-famer."

The happy news is that many more sunflowers have opened; and that the bees have found the sunflowers! And on this day, even in the early morning, they were there, buzzing around from bloom to bloom. Honeybees. Bumblebees. Every kind and color and size and shape of bee. A sunflower celebration, bee style!

I heard this particular bumblebee before I saw it: "VZZZZT!" the sound of a bumblebee, stuck inside the bloom. And then the fuzzy body of the bumblebee (which I think of as tiny, flying teddy bears) came tumbling out, like so!

The song to accompany this photo of bumblebee gymnastics is the Culture Club, with a celebratory tune just loaded with 80s kitsch: I'll Tumble 4 Ya, from their 1982 album, Kissing to Be Clever.