Cold and Wet. Bombus pascuorum, Common Carder Bee, on Clinopodium calamintha, Lesser Calaminth, Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Myself quite chilled, I came upon our Common Carder Bumblebee clinging to - perhaps pleonastically - Beautiful Calaminth - καλαμίνθα - on its footstool - κλινοπόδιον (but in the photo you can hardly see the hairy sepals from which the really very tiny flower arises).
Bombus was utterly wet and cold. Though she tried to move whirring her wings, nothing came of it. She just hadn't the energy to whir fast enough. For that nectar is needed or the Sun to provide enough warmth for her thorax to get a temperature of above ca. 30 C. So I took her in my cupped hand and breathed into them; slowly she revived and when a bit of Sun came out I put her back on Lesser Calaminth. She didn't stay long but slowly and a bit stiffly, I thought, bumbled away right into another rain shower. Coward for rainy wetness that I am, I gave up and fled into the Tropical Glasshouse for my own warmth.
Cold and Wet. Bombus pascuorum, Common Carder Bee, on Clinopodium calamintha, Lesser Calaminth, Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Myself quite chilled, I came upon our Common Carder Bumblebee clinging to - perhaps pleonastically - Beautiful Calaminth - καλαμίνθα - on its footstool - κλινοπόδιον (but in the photo you can hardly see the hairy sepals from which the really very tiny flower arises).
Bombus was utterly wet and cold. Though she tried to move whirring her wings, nothing came of it. She just hadn't the energy to whir fast enough. For that nectar is needed or the Sun to provide enough warmth for her thorax to get a temperature of above ca. 30 C. So I took her in my cupped hand and breathed into them; slowly she revived and when a bit of Sun came out I put her back on Lesser Calaminth. She didn't stay long but slowly and a bit stiffly, I thought, bumbled away right into another rain shower. Coward for rainy wetness that I am, I gave up and fled into the Tropical Glasshouse for my own warmth.