Skunk Cabbage and the Bumble Bee

            Hpoefully next week you'll out for a stroll, it’s a warm spring evening, you look down and there you see a bumble bee walking along the ground. “Oh, the poor thing” you say to yourself, “it must be sick”, so you step on it, thinking you are putting it out of its misery.

            Back up a few hours:

            You’re fat and your little wings aerodynamically are not physically designed to give you the lift your bulbous body requires; but you can indeed fly.

            Benny the bumblebee, (or Beatrice), is getting ready to take on the day. He pops into the hive’s watering hole for some high energy bug juice, loading up on what he thinks is enough nectar to get him from where he is, to where he needs to go for pollen, and back again.

            But he runs into a head wind he didn’t anticipate, and Benny runs out of rocket fuel and makes for the deck, where he happens to cross your path and becomes a little wet spot in the dirt under your well meaning shoe.
            Benny was just walking home; he was fine, he just ran out of gas is all. What he was hoping for was a Skunk Cabbage plant to crawl into for a while, or maybe for the night.

            An interesting plant this Skunk Cabbage, it is located in wet areas where most of the very early flowering spring plants reside.

            Within this plant are two things for a tuckered out bee; a constant 72 degree environment, and a pool of high energy nectar. He could have rested throughout the night without freezing, and the nectar would have fueled him up for the rest of the flight home.

            But no, he found himself under your shoe……

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