Most folks don’t know a lot about insects. Insects move fast and we have some sort of phobia. We urbanized animals have a penchant for cultivating turf grass and concrete and tend not to have that many insects around us. But the pollinator-plant connection (and sometimes dependency) is real.
Apparently while tiny and almost a thousand times smaller, a bumblebee brain is vastly more efficient than our own brains and can compute visual information 15 times as quickly. With each repeated tracing of a path from flower to flower, bumblebees progressively wayfind more efficiently. They navigate by the sun and landmarks from trees to swing sets. A bumblebee’s working memory is eight seconds long (a point we actually are better at) and can tell when a flower has already been visited that day and the nectar thus emptied.
A few weeks back, Tomasz found a very weak bumblebee. It was a queen, because she was so large and out so early in the season. He gently caught her and made a beehome for her out of parts from a honeybee hive—a large bottom board, a hive box with some residual wax stuck on its sides, a bit of comb with both pollen and honey. He covered it with a piece of acrylic sheeting, confident she had everything she needed—safety, warmth, and food to refuel herself.
