hairy footed flower bee release

Over the last few years, every spring, bees emerge from the chimney and the wooden sash window surrounds of our room as the mornings lighten and warm.  I’ve never worked out exactly where they come from – but a bee buzz is suddenly audible and there they are. They head for the window, crawl around in the muslin curtain – some awake and eager, some very sleepy – and then get released outside with human assistance, a glass and a piece of card.

I wrote about the bees marks left on the condensation in a post a few years ago.

The first year we lived here, about 20 or so bees emerged over a couple of weeks.  The neighbours were unenthusiastic as they appeared on their side of the chimney too, and discussed imminent destruction.  Even though I was a bit unnerved at finding them crawling around in the duvet sometimes, I found the emergence of the bees was a brilliance.  How to live amongst animals? How to co-exist with the unpredictable bees zooming around at 6am looking for escape and crashing into my sleeping head? How to let the indoors out and outdoors in?

Over the last few years, the bees have got fewer and fewer. Next door are renovating, and taking out the chimney, so the bees have certainly lost part of their winter hibernation.

This year 3 have emerged, each one a week or so apart.

And this year I looked at them closely, identifying them as Hairy footed flowers bees, Anthophora plumipes, a species of solitary bee, two males and a female, partly through the distinguishing feature of the male’s hairy feet.

This one, as filmed in the video below, was very dozy and stuck in the muslin curtain.  It was hardly moving when I manoevered it onto the back of an envelope. I took it to the back door (to the sunlight, the flowers, the early lungwort).  As I opened the door and the sun fell through the glass, it awakened – a magic energy to its body – compound eyes widening, antennae stretching, body expanding.  Within a few seconds, the bee was a different energy altogether, alive. It gave me life too watching it occur.

Looking around for the right word to describe this effect, this sun-warming, this direct response of living matter to sun, (it’s not really heliotropism), I came across the ‘disused’ word apricity. Victoria Sheinkin has written eloquently about it here.

“Apricity – represents a simple and familiar yet a very specific phenomenon- the sun’s warmth on a cold winter’s day. Apricity is a noun stemmed from the Latin apricus representing a sunny day but also used to describe objects warmed by the sun.”