These Bee Species Sleep in Flowers And it is as Cute as it Sounds!

We know the fact that bees are the most important pollinator in the world. Their pollination provides one-third of the food we eat. A wildlife photographer, Joe Neely, captured two bees snuggling in a flower. He shot this beautiful side of them that we do not see every day.

“The story behind this photos [begins when] me and my fiancé Niccole went out to find poppy flowers,” Neely told Bored Panda. “On the way back we saw this patch of pink flowers just off the highway so we stopped to take some photos.”

“Niccole was shooting over this since orange Globe Mallow plant that was hidden inside all of these pink flowers and she heard the bees buzzing about,” the 38-year-old from Phoenix, Arizona, said. “Then she notices that some of the flowers had bees in them but they were not moving.”

“I came over and study it for a while and more bees showed up. Soon, all the vacant flowers were occupied and this one bee was left out.  She crawled over to this open flower and got inside with the other one. I was watching as he stumbled around almost drunk-like and then got settled in.

Do they actually sleep?

“ ‘Wel,l I never knew that bees slept in flowers but as it turns out these bees (Diadasia diminuta) sleep in the orange flowers called Globe Mallows.’ The Diadasia diminuta – or simply the globe mallow bee – collects pollen from its favorite food plant, globe mallow (Sphaeralcea). According to Forest Service at the United States Department of Agriculture, their nests are commonly found in partially compacted soil along the margins of dirt roads in the western United States. The globe mallow bees play a major role in the flower’s reproduction. ‘The bees become covered with pollen visiting the flowers [and] most of this pollen is groomed into the pollen basket on the hind legs and taken back to the nest,’ the organization writes on its website. ‘However, some remains on the body and is deposited on the stigma of each of the next few globe mallow flowers visited. Thus, Diadasia contributes to globe mallow reproduction.

When it comes to bees sleeping, there are a few interesting details. ‘They don’t have eyelids, so you can’t just look for bees with their eyes closed,’ Brandon Hopkins, a bee researcher at Washington State University, said. ‘By carefully watching bees, scientists have found that honey bees stop moving their antenna and in some cases fall over sideways.’ The nuances of exactly how and where a bee sleeps depend on where it lives. After all, there are more than 20,000 known species of bees living on our planet. Honey bees, for example, work day and night and take shifts sleeping inside the hive. Their sleep patterns change as they grow up. Younger bees sleep less but older bees catch between 30 minutes and an hour and a half each night, taking little naps of about 15 to 30 seconds at a time.”