15 October 2014

Yesterday I went out to get my shoes from my car. They had socks tucked in, so I sat down on the stump in my driveway and put my shoes on. It was cool, but without the hard edge to the chill that we sometimes get in the morning. It felt kind of balmy, like a southern California morning marine layer. The sky was a soft blue with white streaks of clouds. I like this kind of morning. As I put my socks on, I noticed bees on the ground in front of me. One was clearly dead, the other was still right side up with her wings tucked in. I brushed her with my shoe lace, and she rolled from the weight of that, but settled back into position. But she never moved, that I could see.

Once I was done putting on my shoes, I came into the house, got a plastic spoon, took some sugar from the canister and added water to the spoon to make a sugar solution. It didn't all dissolve, but I figured it would be sugary enough. I poured a little bit on the ground in front of the 3 bees out there, but they didn't react. Two of them were dead, but I ended up holding the spoon up to the one I thought was alive. I saw some little antenna like things at the front moving, but I could tell if they were just swirling in the sugar water. I gently took the spoon away, and thought I saw some movement. I ended up using a twig to brush the bee into the spoon. Unfortunately the bee flipped over and was on her back in the sugar water, but I carried her through the house to my back deck which had sun.

I emptied the spoon into the big pot of dirt, and made sure the bee was upright on her feet. She seemed to move a bit. I left the spoon with the remaining wet sugar next to her in the pot. I took my daughter to school and then walked the dog in the cool, humid day, although it was already a little warmer than I wanted for a walk in that time of day in this time of month. I saw bees buzzing around the remnants of lavender and other flowers. When I came home, I went out to my deck to check the pot, and the bee was gone.

Last night was very windy, it kept waking me up. We had the fan in the window, and I had to take it out because it was causing our door to slam in it's frame, even with towels trying to keep it from moving. And then, even with the window open and the fan on, it actually wasn't very cool in the bedroom. But it is cooling off and is going to continue to get cooler, and I was thinking of the wind and the cold and the bees. Pretty soon I won't be able to help them at all, so I hope they can find somewhere warm to weather.

Current weather conditions, according to weather.gov: 56˚F, 47% humidity, winds steady at 8 mph, gusts to 17 mph.