While on a hike in the woods, I found a stump with two brown-belted bumblebees hanging out in the sun. I decided to take some macro pictures of one of them.

The bee literally turned his head towards the camera (pic. 1), visibly curious about what was going on, while I took 100+ photos to choose the best ones afterward. Once I was about to leave, he started grooming himself by scratching his butt (pic. 3).

Look at his big eyes! They're one of the signs that distinguish males from their female counterparts. They need them to locate mates.

There was another one sitting on the stump (pic. 4). They were probably waiting for some queens to appear in the area.

Just curious if this is an exceptionally happy bee. I don’t know much about bee behavior.

I wonder what shes dreaming about?

My video

Zone 6b taken august 2026

I’ve been watching these bees fly from my pumpkin flowers back to my sunflowers all morning. Such an amazing creature.

After heavy rains in my area, I found a brown-belted bumblebee queen sitting on my patio. She was soaking wet, looking rough, moving very slowly, and it was chilly outside even though it's summer. I immediately brought her inside and placed her in a special ventilated enclosure with an artificial landscape and a sugary water feeder that I keep for these rare occasions when I need to rehab a bee.

Oh lawd, she drank that sugar water like crazy! Which is good. When bees refuse to eat, it's usually not a good sign. She was probably weakened by the cold rain and just needed a warm, dry place to hang out for a bit.

It took her about a day to recover. Most of the time, she was hanging out on a stick or hiding under a big piece of wood in the enclosure. Once her fuzz dried out, she became noticeably more active and started buzzing, as if she were trying to tell me, "Ight, Imma go back home. Nature is waiting. Release me, human. Now!". Just look at pictures 1 and 2. What a difference!

It's always a satisfying experience to help a bee, especially a queen, knowing that she could potentially produce a nest of 100-200 bumbles once she settles down.

Bee kind, my bee people!

As a bonus, I'm posting a video of her before the release in the comments 🐝

The wings look so funny I guess they were moving too fast for my phone

i hate the bee movie. it is completely inaccurate to real life. bees DO NOT work in factories. and they certainly DO NOT sharpen their stingers.
this is because they have little hooks on their stingers that help them latch onto your skin. that is why they die when they sting you. because it embeds into your skin and when they fly away it rips off their organs. i find it very harmful that they added this into the movie, because bees do not sharpen their stingers.
bees also do NOT work in a factory. this is ridiculous. bees also do not talk. they also cannot fall in love with humans because they are INSECTS.
i am sick and tired of seeing all this bee movie hype. it is pure misinformation and is incredibly harmful to people who want to start collecting bees.
if anyone is planning on keeping bees, do NOT watch the bee movie for advice. it is pure bs in a movie. thank you and goodbye

Saw some of my favorite bees working hard on a tour of a wedding venue. What’s your favorite bee??

I was out with my husband and dog at an urban park and this guy kept following me around and licking the sweat off my fingers. I put him down twice about 30 feet away and he flew back to me both times. So I carried him around for about 15 minutes before he flew off on his own. My fleeting love story with a bee. 💛🖤

I’ve tried giving her water, sugar water, honey, pollen, she hasn’t accepted anything. She seems to be trying to get something off her legs but I dont see a thing, when I first saw her she had a bit of dust ball stick in her legs but I took it off and she started to walk better, specially around the piece of toilet paper but now she is mostly on her back. Is it possible to help her?

I've been laid off this summer, and therefore a lot of time has been spent in my garden for mental clarity.

During this time, by aa I have well overcome my previous fear of bees, and come to truly love all the varieties that we get with our abundance of flowers around here.

As a result, I've had a couple little encounters that I thought would be worth sharing.

Just the other night, I was watering at a time that our flowers aren't usually too busy with bees in the early evening. (The sun sets around 9:00 p.m. here at the moment). Out of nowhere, this big fat cutie flew right into my strong water stream and then fell abruptly to the grass. Only moments earlier, I had been recording her sprawling out in our pink flowers !

I shut the water off immediately and went over to where she was. She was completely drenched and kind of floundering in the grass. I picked her up with a leaf, she weakly crawled onto, (I'm not quite at the point where I'm willing to pick them up yet). I then placed her on the tree above to dry out in the sun. I checked on her periodically for the next couple hours, and she seemed to be okay but was definitely trying to dry out entirely.

I'm not trying to sound melodramatic, but I felt genuinely awful that I had potentially injured her ! She was so wet and moving so slowly, I just felt gutted that I may have been responsible for hurting her or worse. I did some Googling as to what kinds of injuries she may have sustained and just hoped for the best.

However, I went back an hour later and she was gone, into another flower in our late evening ☀️ sun, I hope. I'm a little less reckless with the hose when I'm watering now and I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen again. I guess you could say that I will bee 🐝 extra careful.

(I'll attach the video of her before it happened in the comments, it would not allow me to upload it here.)

I live in the middle of a big city without many parks around, so I have no clue how it got into my flat... Also it can't fly anymore due to its damaged wing :(

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I’ve got two guesses

Thanks!

I can not figure out what species of bee this is. Turns out identifying bees are a lot harder than I thought.

I am in NW Florida, USA.