Will some of you bee people please enlighten me. Yesterday I saw a bee on the stump of a cutoff daffodil with another bee on it's back, I knew that they were not trying to flat dance, as they do that in their home, with the lights off. The ontop bee grabbed the other and flew off with it! Today a bee was on a walk across my patio and it gladly came up my hand and I put it on an available helitrope where it wandered and fell off. I gave it another lift to a geranium where it wandered and fell into the lawn. After it's last lift to a apple tree it ended up on the grass and was headed east. I expect someone upwind was likely spraying a pesticide or it had too much nectar. The question is.. do they loose their mobility before they succumb to age or was it a Murder by my neighbor?
Dunno if I qualify as a bee person (wasn't there a movie on this subj.---early 70s?) but I'll offer my guesses. Perhaps Incident 1 was a case of interspecies, or even intraspecies, cannibalism. This does happen---all potential food is valuable. (Remember 'Soylent Green'...????) As for Incident 2, your apicidal neighbor is likely responsible for this bee's ataxia. I daresay that bees rarely live to an elderly age: if they did, I think that they probably would exhibit signs thereof (e.g., age spots, chin hairs, and interminable stories about back in 1934...or was that '39?). I commend you, dunc, for being a friend to bees. You might just find some honest-to-Hymenoptera bee people at: http://bugguide.net
What you describe reminds me a bit of a certain type of bug fungus that grows in tropical regions. (The behavior of the bee, would be prior to death.) Ants are known to carry infected members of the colony far far away from their colony simply to avoid the spread of said fungus- it also effects other insects. (Different forms of the fungus, that is.) http://neurophilosophy.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/fungus_campanotus.jpg Yucky!
Bees live only 30/40 Days, weather permitting they work from sun rise to sun set, seven days a week, definitive! at the end they loos there mobility and die. I have observed the Mason Bees many times; when they emerge in early spring there flight is sure and swift, there body is of a shining metallic bleu. Toward the end there body is no longer shining, there flight became difficult, exhausted they fall to the ground. I have try many times to rescue them, but in vane.
