The bumblebee's knees

It may look a little sozzled and slow, but one bumblebee is all it takes to make a prairie and its buzz is the soundtrack of a thriving world, finds Harry Pearson

- Harry Pearson

THE hum of bees is the voice of the garden,’ wrote Elizabeth Lawrence. Certainly, there is no sound so evocative of a pastoral British summer than the rumbling baritone buzz of the bumblebee. For ‘the red-hipped bumblebee’ (as William Shakespeare styled him in A Mid summer Night’s Dream), it always appears to be Sunday afternoon. Although the honeybee is a perpetually revolving cog in an industrial machine, the bumblebee meanders lazily around. It never appears to be in a rush. Bumbling and tumbling in the flowerbeds, it seems a little sozzled, perhaps the consequence of all that amber nectar slurped with its long and hairy tongue from lime blossom and borage, blackthorn and honeysuckle. You feel that, if the bumblebee could talk, it would sound like The Fast Show’s Rowley Birkin QC.

Like Mr Birkin, the bumblebee is hairy and rather dishevelled. Its feet—as Raymond Bradbury noted—‘are dusted with the spices of a million flowers’ and its shaggy, rotund body is at times so coated in pollen it looks like a water spaniel after ransacking a familysized box of honey-nut cornflakes. The bum- blebee whirls and undulates, falls from petals and bumps into walls. Portly and unflustered, it appears happy with life. Perhaps William Blake was right when he said: ‘The busy bee has no time for sorrow.’