Taiwan 2025 - Little Pink Roadside Flowers with Bee / Good-hearted Lady Warms Bees

Bees are great subjects for picture-taking:  they have good coloration and are not grotesque (like so many other insects); they are relatively slow (unlike most butterflies); they're somewhat predictable in setting up for shots; and they are the good guys of the insect world.

Other posts featuring bees linked here.

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On the subject of bees, one time I went back to Mexico for a spring break visit during my college years at SFA.  It was a miserable visit, as a vicious March cold front was blowing through and stalled overhead for the entire week.  Cold and rainy the whole time.  So I couldn't do much but sit around, no matter where I was, and get depressed.

One day I was doing exactly that at a neighbor's house, when I noticed that the neighbor, Elizabeth, was constantly going in and out of the kitchen.  She had a rag in her hands and appeared to be handling it very gingerly.  After seeing this about ten times I asked what she was up to.  She invited me to come over to the fireplace to see for myself, and this is what I saw:

Since it was so unexpectedly cold, when the confused bees from a nearby hive flew out to get water they could not fly back!  They couldn't flap their wings enough to get off the ground.  Many were beginning to flounder after falling in the trough or simply walking around on the dirt.  Thus, Elizabeth, caring soul that she was, made probably a hundred trips to rescue these critters until they warmed up enough to get along on their own.  Witnessing this was enough to lift me out of my funk for the day.

These are the kind of people I hung out and lived with in Old Mexico while there in '80-'81.  Lots of fodder for good-guy stories...