I was minding my own business the other day when something blundered onto my T-shirt and held on. A bumblebee. With another bumblebee stuck to it. And all I had to do was lift my shirt hem up a bit to watch them.

The one on top started out by cleaning the eyes of the one on the bottom. I wouldn’t have thought that was a comfortable thing to do, getting a toothy leg scraped over your eyes, but no one was objecting. Once he was done with that bit of hygiene, he backed up and maneuvered his buttular region underneath. I just knew that first bee was no Bottom. She was a gol-dang Queen Bee! On my shirt!

That’s when it occurred to me that I might be witnessing a rare event. I mean, if the Queen Bee is the only female that has sex, and not all that often, you can’t count on her doing it in front of you like a bunny. And the way I figure it, you can give yourself extra points if she’s doing it on your shirt.

Well, I said to myself, what I need now is a video, and my phone is inside. My phone is hardly ever anywhere handy. Could I get in and out without accidentally dislodging my bumblebees inside the house? I started walking across the yard with a smooth, slow, keep-on-truckin’ fluid kind of movement and my t-shirt held weirdly out in front of me, the exact sort of thing that my neighbors have learned to shrug at and just wonder about. Get away from the window, George. It’s none of our business.

I wanted a video because I have a tiny blog audience I need to feed. And something about this event, which I decided was extraordinary, said “blog post” to me. Unfortunately, my queen bee lost her grip when I was climbing the stairs and the two of them bumbled off together in flagrante still-stucko.

I always thought it was just an expression: a flying fuck.

Well, I have seen other insects like that, dragonflies and such. But this was remarkable: here is a fat insect with wings so small that science was once at a loss to explain how they get in the air at all, and that queen bee was doing all the winging with no help at all from the male, who was excess baggage at that point, IMO.

My research into bee porn was not satisfying. I could not get two neighborhoods of the internet to agree with each other. (For instance, I read that bee sperm stored in a female bee can be viable up to four years, but the bee only one. So.) As a result, I have selected the information I prefer to believe, and concluded that nobody really knows much about bumblebees. This will be seen as a challenge to any readers who do know about bumblebees, and thus we will get the whole story, because my readers are super smart. You’re welcome.

The Queen Bumblebee of the current year has spent the previous autumn stuffing her face and the winter taking a nap, usually underground where it’s warmer. Nobody disturbs her because her whole original colony is dead. She has already mated, once, with one male, or more often, with more males, depending on where she is on the internet. In either case, she is full of sperms, and has stored them in her personal bodily pantry. She also has a nice stock of eggs, and she can fertilize them as she wishes—which seems pretty precise, if you’re asking me—and so she goes in search of a nest site, and she fashions herself some containers for eggs, and honey pots, out of wax she made herself. She goes out to find nectar to make honey, and lays eggs, a total DIY project. If she fertilizes them, they make female worker bees. Within a couple weeks, the females start working for her, gathering nectar and such, and she retires and never leaves the nest again. It’s just as well. She didn’t make a cool, efficient, Stalinesque hexagonal honeycomb like other bees. She just sort of clumped her honeypots up in the dirt like a pile of socks in a hamper.

If she doesn’t fertilize the eggs on the way out, she gets males. Not so many. It’s just as well. Because all the male does is go out and feed himself, and dip into the honey pots the female workers have worked hard to fill, and hang out looking for new queens to mate with. And then—and THEN—he has to ejaculate so hard, to get past her stinger and into her designated sperm closet, that his entire beephallus rips out of him, and he drops dead, happy.

I didn’t get to see that part. Not that I give a flying fuck.