Here at The New Leaf Journal, I have often espoused the charms of the changing seasons. For example, our resident Emu Café touts being attuned to the seasons: “The traits of the seasons are most crisp in the morning.”
In a subsequent piece, I used a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson as a prompt to explore the transition to darker mornings and earlier nights as we transitioned from summer to autumn. Therein, I advocated for appreciating each season:
[Each Season has] something unique to appreciate. The clean yellows of spring, warm yellows of summer, and soft orange of early autumn are traded for something with less color, but no less warm if properly appreciated. The dark afternoons of winter have some of the charm of a fine black and white photograph, with all the sharp contrasts entailed.
N.A. Ferrell in Bed in Summer, Bed in Winter
While those two excerpts were about appreciating each season for what it is, this article is about standing (or flying) athwart the changing seasons. Humble bumble bees are normally associated with spring and summer, when they busily frequent flower beds in search for nectar. For this reason, I was surprised to find a good number of bees hard at work in a Carroll Gardens flower bed in the final 10 days of October.
Although the temperatures are cooling and the foliage is browning, the bee in the picture and several of its colleagues were hard at work in the daisy patch collecting nectar. While most people are in the midst of changing their wardrobes and adjusting to shorter days and longer nights, a few bees at least continued to work, unperturbed by the shifting seasons.