What?? Bees aren't all that busy?? Shocking news that I should have known.

In "A Book of Bees" Sue Hubbell writes:

"In an 1899 study, one Professor C. F. Hodge marked bees and watched them from daylight to dark. He reported, 'no single bee that I watched ever worked more than three and one-half hours a day.' In one case he saw a worker bee crawl into a cell and he watched her remain lying there quietly for nearly five hours. In the 1950s, Martin Lindauer, an entomologist, followed up on these observations. In a rigorous study, he tagged great numbers of bees and found that they spent a lot of time doing nothing at all, or very little. One typical bee during a hundred and seventy-seven observations hours, did absolutely nothing for seventy of them and "patrolled" the nest, as though looking for something to do, for fifty-six. During roughly two-thirds of her time she was performing no productive work."

And here I thought bees never rested, never slept. My cats work harder than these bees. Well... maybe not. But still.