Don’t Worry. Bee Happy.

Welcome to Bumble Cottage!

The owners of my current charming and cozy home, Bumble Cottage in Great Ayton, are definitely Bee-Happy people. They are Mad about the Bee, and have not stinted on the Beeluxe Bee-themed cottage decor.

Here you will find Bee Everything. Beelieve it.

I love it. I am Bee-dazzled. I might find it all overwhelming if it were another creature theme, like, say, wolves. Or spiders. But bees are happy and stripey. Bees have a nice peppy energy.

Bee Happy! Beeleaf in Yourself. Bee In the Moment.

I think that every room has something apian or melittological (words for beelike!) going on, from mugs and glasses to soap containers, pillows and vases, signs and decorated pots.

I also happen to have some actual bees visiting right outside Bumble Cottage. This is a good thing! The visitors are large, sleepy white-tailed and buff-tailed bumble bees, very lethargic as they wait for the weather to warm up.

One or two have arrived at a time, to chill on the back patio. They show no interest in coming into the cottage.

I am not sure if there are white-tailed and buff-tailed bumble bees outside of Britain. These bees — Bombus lucorum are the white-tailed, and Bombus terretris are the buff-tailed — are large and they buzz loudly, making them very hard to miss.

A visiting bee, with a spoon for scale.

The bees are very furry, with furry white or buff-colored tails. This one was in my back yard for two days.

The bees seem to just drop down onto my patio, and then they hang out there for a while, sometimes several days. They walk around slowly and then they sit. And sit.

Here is what they are supposed to look like, atop flowers. This bee was several blocks away, in the local garden allotments.

At first I had no idea what to do when a lethargic bee arrived and wouldn’t leave. So I went outside with some maple syrup on a spoon, to try to set a little syrup pool in front of the bee to drink.

I imagined this would be a fairly simple operation.

But the bee walked away, and I tried to spoon-guide it back to the syrup, and then the bee flipped over and got maple syrup all over it, and I got it back on its feet and backed away, but all I could think was, “Great! I just turned you into a candy-coated treat for the birds!”

Then it started to rain, so I went indoors. Hours later the bee was still there, rinsed by the rain and no longer sticky, so I used a magazine to gently shift it to the bottom of some pansy plants, where it would at least have shelter.

Then I went and did some online bee reading. I searched “Bees are sitting on my patio” and “What do you do with bees who won’t fly?” Newly informed, I now knew to put a small puddle of warm sugar water in front of the next bee to arrive, so the bee could get energized and fly off to start pollinating. The bee under the pansies was gone the next day, but then a new bee arrived, so I actually got to see that bee stick its long proboscis into the sugar water to drink.

This is the bee that I fed, drinking its warm Bumble Cottage sugar water on my patio. Note the extended proboscis — It is so thrilling to come to the aid of actual wildlife!

Two short weeks in North Yorkshire and I am Sir David flippin’ Attenborough!

I have never met Sir David Attenborough, the famous English biologist and nature-show broadcaster, but back when I taught at Goldsmiths College, University of London, when I was working on my Ph.D. there, I took a train way out to the west edge of Greater London one day to visit the home of one of my Goldsmiths English Department colleagues, a professor named Ro, who kept a lot of birds at her home in Richmond. Sir David Attenborough was her neighbor. Apparently he approved mightily of her bird activities. Ro had a very large house in this suburb where she raised and looked after all of her birds. There was a huge flower garden at the back, full of 10-foot-tall walk-in bird houses the size of garages, but with screens for walls. Most of her birds lived there.

But not all of her birds.

Particularly memorable was the fact that all three of her Victoria Crowned Pigeons, a type of dramatically decorated blue ground pigeon from New Guinea, lived in her living room.

Victoria Crowned Pigeons are noisy, have bright red eyeballs, and stand a foot and a half tall. They are very substantial birds.

Here are some more pictures of them from the internet:

Do note the bright red eyeballs of the Victoria Crowned Pigeons.

So at Ro’s bird-filled home that day, we ate lunch outdoors in the garden with many birds watching us, and then we went indoors for coffee with the giant blue-crested pigeons in the living room. Except in London, that room is called the sitting room. The three giant blue-crested Victoria Crowned Pigeons each sat in a wingback armchair. Well, I guess that’s where they would sit.

Ro loved all birds, and was just delighted that she’d managed to cram so many into her home and her life.

Some of Ro’s birds, like the giant blue-crested Victoria Crowned Pigeons, were rare, so she was always trying to encourage egg-laying amongst couples. Then she’d often end up on chick-feeding duty. Feeding chicks requires syringes of goop, and later tweezers with insects, all dropped hourly into the wide-open gullets of a clutch of screaming baby birds sitting in some kind of bird-warming carrier apparatus. A baby bird incubator.

I know all of this, because Ro would bring the latest bunch of chicks in their incubator to work, setting them up in her office/classroom, right up the stairs from my office, where she’d hold literature seminars while feeding the baby birds.

For the record, as I learned from observing Ro’s chicks, the younger the baby birds are, the more they resemble starkly the images we have of their dinosaur relatives: bald, beaky, scaly, and insistent.

And did I mention what Ro taught? Ro was the English Department’s Gothic Literature expert. She taught all the creepy ghoulish tales: Frankenstein, Dracula, The Castle of Otranto, The Fall of the House of Usher, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“The Raven.”

So I did not meet Sir David Attenborough, but I did have lunch next door to his house. And I have now taken a fairly decent photograph of a bumble bee proboscis. We now head back from the birds to the bees….

This is my Bee Hydration Equipment: A glass of warm sugar water (decorated with bees of course) stirred with a spoon.

I am now the Bumble Cottage Bee Bartender.

But I am a little worried that all the bee visitors may be here for more complicated reasons. My cottage resembles a veritable Bee Temple. A Bee Shrine. A Presbytery.

The House of BZZZZZZZ.

The bees might be arriving here simply to rest for a while. Why not? It’s a lovely restful place.

But what if there is some Great British Bee Pilgrimage, and my home is one of the stops: The Bumble Cottage Bee Abbey. In which case, the sleepy bees will continue to drop by, and I may be bee bartending for a while.

Hey Bartender!

Bring me another!