We've had a strange bee event this week. Outside the hive are a number of dead bees. This is one of them. There're are probably a couple of hundred in all. Unlike the big starvation incident back in September, this time they have stores in the hive and the hiv entrance is clear. Most of them, like this one have big baskets of pollen so these dead bees had been out foraging with some success. So they haven't starved and they didn't get lost. They made it back and died right outside the hive. I don't know why. My only theory is that the temperature dropped suddenly and didn't quite make it home.

Update 8th Nov: Unbelievably, one of these 'dead' bees, which had spent 1 or possibly 2 nights out in the rain and then a night on the studio table, was still alive. I fed it some sugar syrup and it lapped it up. Unfortunately though, it was in too bad a way to survive so I had to put the poor thing out of its misery...