I took some photos of this old bee on a flower a few days ago and I keep thinking about her.

Many people measure the lifespan of a bee in days/weeks but the better measure is in miles. A forager has about 500 miles in her before she dies. You can tell how old she is by her ragged wings and how she has rubbed off most of her hair.


In the last picture I took of her, she bends down and drinks a little nectar from the flower, but she still didn’t fly away. I imagine that she chose to die on that flower.

Do you think the colony as a whole will notice she never came back? Or is she a faceless worker in tens of thousands? I like to think that maybe she had a small cadre of sisters, perhaps workers who were hatched in cells nearby to hers, that will mark her passing with some bee bread and a little nectar before they go back to work.

The poet Dylan Thomas talked about death and “raging against the dying of the light.” “Do not go gentle into that good night,” he says. A noble sentiment to be sure but I hope, for her sake, that when death came after its 500 miles it found her at peace with the life of service she had lived. Perhaps that’s the most that we can hope for. And if it is, it doesn’t sound too bad to me.

When the end comes, whether I am called home to God, or simply return to the earth, I hope you find me on a flower.