7.20.2007

Rebel Rebel's Queen

Last week, during a "check in" on Rebel Rebel, I was fortunate enough to see (and hear!) the queen. Below, you can see some of the workers gathered around her, kind of encircling her. She's the larger "redder" bee below them. This stance, whereby the bees face inward toward their queen, is one of the easiest ways to spot a queen. Maeterlinck describes this encircling as looking like a grandmother's brooch, while a more recent book describes it as a daisy, with the workers as the petals and the queen at the flower's core.
Here's a better shot of the queen as she makes an all-too-brief appearance, only to be subsumed again moments later by her attentive and protective compatriots.

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