The sun is setting and you see a motionless bee on a flower. Is it dead, dying, sleeping? Bill Anderson explains what’s likely going on and the best way to lend a hand

Even our hottest summer days rarely reach the comfortable working temperature inside a beehive: honeybees must maintain their hives at a non-negotiable 35°C, night and day, just to keep their children alive.

So while for many of us a visit to the chill of a highly air-conditioned supermarket can be a welcome relief in the summer heat, honeybees must deal with the relative cool of our summer days as they fly to flowers to collect nectar and pollen to feed their young.

The day’s work done, foraging bees will fly back to their cosy hive where their sisters carry on distilling the gathered nectar down to honey well into the darkness of the night.

But some especially busy foragers can find themselves hard at work some miles from their hive as the sun goes down. The three fixed simple eyes on the back of their heads that they effortlessly use to track their position relative to the sun can no longer allow them to navigate. If they’d been closer to the hive they might have been able to use local landmarks to guide them home, but further away, without sight of the sun, they can’t reliably return.

So they have to stay where they are till dawn. And while we uncomfortably lose sleep to sweaty 20°C summer nights, honeybees are shivering in an overnight deficit of 15°C. The equivalent for us might be having to sleep in our cars on a frosty winter’s night, unable to run the engine and turn on the heater because of a near empty fuel tank.

When bees fly, the muscular effort of doing so generates substantial heat, but when they’re inactive, the flight muscles cool down – to the point where the bees can’t use them, can’t move their wings until they’ve warmed up. Whether it’s sleep or just acceptance of a cold night away from the hive, these bees will lie still. If they’re able to curl up in a blossom, the temperature there can be as much as 10°C warmer – and even more if they have the luck to be stranded in a flower that closes its petals overnight. Plus they’ll get breakfast in bed at sunrise to help them on their way.

The warmth of a human hand is easily enough to rouse a chilled, comatose bee’s wing muscles back into action. Witnessing such a “resurrection” of a “dead” bee in the palm of a kind, helpful hand was the inspiring incident for this idler to become a beekeeper. But if you’re lucky enough to discover a bee lying apparently dead on a flower after sunset, defer your desire to resurrect it: if you warm the bee in your hand it might well come to life and fly off, but where to? Its navigation system still lacks the sun on which it depends. It’s still lost, and the flying ability you have so satisfyingly re-enabled is now using up fuel that the bee might be depending on to keep it alive till morning. Instead, come back before dawn.  The bee will still be there, and you can then warm her, and the cockles of your heart with pure joy.

Bill Anderson will be talking about bees at the Idler Festival 10-12 July 2026.

This article is from Idler #110.

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