Praise of the bumblebee queen
March 20, 2023, 9 degrees, sunshine and light drizzle. A young bumblebee queen has settled on the ground. She uses her tiny muscles in her rib cage to generate heat by shivering, reaching a body temperature that allows her to survive and fly. She awoke not long ago, a queen without courtservants, but they are already within her. She hatched last year, had mated and will create the new colony with the seed that is inside her. It is one of the few bumblebees that have survived the winter. The workers, drones, and old queens died before winter. When the temperatures dropped last year, she looked for a place to overwinter. When temperatures rise again in spring, the queen begins to wake up. Just awakened queens fly only a few seconds, then they have to rest for a longer time. In this way she laboriously moves on, looking for a suitable place for the establishment of the state, for the place where she can give birth to the new colony. The 36 images show the bumblebee queen during an extended rest between two short flights in search of a place for her colony. The photos express the state of the being that has just awakened – its hunger, its beauty meeting momentary disorientation and confusion, its trembling, its gradual enlightenment.
Untitled, Marta Herford
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