Pollen Drunk

"Help! I have pollen and I can't get up!" - Bumblebee.

I stopped by the Arboretum on Tuesday morning to pay a quick visit to the lily pond and the pollinator gardens. As I passed through a small group of rose of sharon bushes that were just full of lovely pastel pinky-purple blooms, I saw something unusual: white, fluffy bees that looked like they might be bumblebees, except that bumblebees aren't white!

I did a double-take. Looked a little closer. Yes, those WERE bumblebees, and they were white because they were laden down with pollen from the rose of sharon blooms!

This bee visited numerous blooms, acquiring more and more pollen with each flower it visited. It would crawl to the very middle of the bloom, roll around in the pollen, then stagger drunkenly out of the center of the bloom and fly (rather crookedly, I must say) to the next one.

When the bumblebee got to this particular bloom, it had apparently surpassed its legal pollen limit for flying. It landed on the pinky-purple petal, crawled to the flower's center, rolled around in the white pollen, then staggered two steps . . . and fell down in a pollen-drunk stupor. It lay there for a few minutes recuperating, before picking itself up and flying off to the next flower.

The song to accompany this scene of pollen-drunk revelry . . . well, actually, I couldn't decide between these two, so here they both are. The Irish Rovers, Wasn't That a Party. And Metallica's rocking cover of what was originally a traditional Irish folk song, Whiskey in the Jar.