From July 16, 2025. I was just the witness!
A lot of you have heard the sleepy bee story from me in person by now at various craft markets. But in case you haven’t, or were blessed with one of my two cards featuring the related images (Air Bee N Bee P2025, The After Party P2025), this REALLY happened July 16, 2025 in my community garden in southeast Portland, Oregon!
It was 97 degrees Farenheit (way too hot for me), and I went to save my cucumbers in my little plot. I was melting like butter when I got done and just wanted to slide home, but something said “Go see Sharon’s flowers!” two plots over. My neighbor has had a set of gorgeous flowers blooming for several years, and I often find bees sleeping or working in them when I stop by. I figured what the heck, I was already there and it was just 50 feet away. So I went.
Sure enough, I was rewarded with this magical scene, no kidding, of no less than SIX Melissodes longhorn bees sleeping away, bums up in one of her Gaillardia! (Also known as Indian Blanket Flowers or just Blanket Flowers.)
Boy was I excited to see them, and begged them to stay there until the next day, as it was too late and too hot for me to come back with my Nikon that evening. (I really can’t handle the heat well and dusk was coming on.) Thankfully my phone, a Google Pixel 8 does a nice job with both photos and video as you can see.
So I slid home and recovered on some ice, and came back the next day loaded for macro work with my Nikon Z50 and Kenko tubes only to find… there was NOT ONE single bee in any of the FRESH flowers. Oh no! No… they were there but…
They had ALL moved over to this one, where they were twerking as if to mock me, like a biker gang after a bender! LOL! I don’t make the rules! I just document the bees!
I died laughing – I think Gaia has a great sense of humor! And I was rightly chastened – I AM a photographer after all, and the first rule of photography is ALWAYS have your camera on you! But the second one is: the best camera to have is whatever you have at hand when a shot presents itself unexpectedly like this!
Again, I think my Google Pixel 8 did a very decent job. But the story makes me laugh every time I tell it, which I do over and over at the craft markets. I will never tire of it! Besides, the video is SO magical! I could not make this up if I tried! Ahh…
By the way, Melissodes Longhorn Bees comprise several species of native bees in the US, and are solitary ground nesting bees. The girls are all in the tunnels, which are filled with eggs and provisions, so the boys sleep in the flowers. (Such a terrible fate.) I don’t know exactly which species of longhorns these are that I captured, but clearly we have at least one in Oregon. (This was filmed in southeast Portland, Oregon, July 16 and 17, 2025 by me.)
And that is how this duo of images was produced. I call the left one with them in the circle the “Air Bee N Bee”, and the right one is “The After Party”. I don’t make the rules!
Thanks for enjoying this funny story with me, and these wonderful images. Enjoy!
Jan Groh, Photograbee 2025 – present