I've Lost My Bee

I’ve Lost My Bee L

            Every morning when I go out to the garden to do the peanut thing and bird feeder and fish feeder and such, I check on certain plants.  I know you are supposed to pick off the dead blooms on a lot of plants so they will keep putting their energy into making new blooms.  So I was always stopping by my fuchsia and picking off the dead blooms.  Every day there was a huge bee that would fly up from around the bottom of the plant to see what I was doing messing with his blooms.  After all, he is making honey and doing grand things like that and I’m just taking away his pretty things.

            I learned last week at Highgrove gardens that there are brown bees and black bees.  I think we are supposed to want the black bees as they are hardier, sting less often, and are not the bees that are endangered.  Supposedly the bees in the United States that are disappearing are the brown bees.  I hope I don’t have it backwards.  Think I’ll need to look it up again. 

            Anyway, I thought I would check the next morning to see if my fuchsia bee was a black bee or brown bee.  He wasn’t there!  It was the first time in over 2 weeks that he had not come flying up to see me and check out what I was doing.  OK, maybe I was there at a bad time for him and he was off checking on little bees or something.  Next day, nada.  Next day, zilch.  Next day, un uh.  Are you getting the picture?  It has been a week now and I haven’t seen my bee in all that time.  Drat.  Is there something wrong with my fuchsia that he doesn’t like it anymore?  Can a bee suck all the goodness out of a flower and then move on and not come back?  Do bees find new areas of interest and get tired of the same old plant?  OR has he just gone through his life cycle?  Apparently he could have reached the end and I will never know what he was.  I miss him.  Think he was teaching me not to be afraid of bees and he had not finished his instruction yet.  Maybe one of his relatives will come and finish the course.