drunk bee!

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I return once again to the bee bars at Indian Gap. Happy Hour begins at dusk and like Hotel California, you might check in but you may never leave.

The bee in the center of this Smoky Mountain wildflower: filmy angelica (Angelica triquinata) is drunk. Shamelessly. Or at least, I think it was. I didn't ask it to fly in a straight line but I did stroke it a couple of times and it didn't want to move. It wiggled, perhaps even cooed. (Do bees coo?) Sober bees do not let you stroke them, although they may have a temper, bees are by nature temperate.  


So, this bee was alive, just out of it. Inebriated. Loaded. Plastered. Smashed. Something more than just a buzz. It wasn't a sloppy drunk or a mean drunk, but rather, more of a sleepy, Auntie Edna kind of drunk.

Pam Petko-Seus, the wildlife biologist at Ijams Nature Center, did black bear research on the top of the Smoky Mountains in the early 1980s. She told me they often saw drunk bees on angelica that "didn't seem to know their way home. They just spent the night clinging to the flowers, and in the morning they were covered with dew."

That's intoxicated!

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