a bumblebee doesn’t bite, hence ‘tis affable… the logic is simple and infallible… for what looks rather pompous with bulging bodies swaying twitchily on wings of underwhelming proportions turns out to be a rather humble and sincere disposition after all… the bee not only defies its physiology and the physics associated with it, but displays the bravado of a rookie pitched into the battlefield with little ceremony… 

time and again I slip into reflecting upon bumblebees… in thin airs where most of its flying brethren fold up their devices and retreat to the lower climes, it labours on uncomplainingly, a flying tortoise toiling from flower to flower, rising higher and higher to compete with the best of the raptors… pollinating against the elements with a characteristically heavy drone that permeates through the meadows in the muted murmurings of flowers, titillating some with its song to part with the pollen… even twenty-four hours a day where the sun refuses to give way to the nocturnal in the  polar summers…

one feels for the bumblebee initially, but then starts feeling for oneself, gazing around the pristine backdrop the apian spends its brief existence in… the unselfishness might just be a pre-programmed piece in the evolutionary jigsaw — nothing very spectacular in a faunal world where the spaces between life and death are filled with dispassionate and even ruthless sacrifices — yet it remains a bee that rarely irritates and rather enriches the biota for the human but receives little accolades in return, not unlike many in the faunal world… plush with pollen stuck all across it hairy body, it stutters from one flower to the next, coaxing the nectar-less and coping up with the haughty…

dwindling in large numbers are these creatures anyhow, as researchers across America and Europe scramble to pinpoint factors, our neck of the woods remain largely apathetic… maybe thankfully so considering that quite a bit of their habitat in the Himalaya and its precincts remains uninhabited for now, and we hardly use them as commercial pollinators for fancy berries or flowers… bumblebees here remain largely wild, randomly punctuating large swathes of silent meadows with the colours of spring and fall… yet the fear remains that it may bow out of existence sans any hue and cry… for the Bombus doesn’t bite, you see…

musings on bumblebees, hiking landscapes across the Himalaya…