> when the environment becomes stressful, in this case, due to a drop in temperature
Back when I was doing insane things like marking all the bees in an obhive with those little German color and number-coded tags, the way I'd "tag a bee" is to follow the common protocol of putting small groups of bees very briefly in the freezer. This slows down their metabolism to the point that they are immobile.
One has time to apply a drop of glue to a tag, and the tag to the bee, and then simply set it aside, where it will warm up, and to the observer, act a lot like a cartoon of a human waking up in the morning - first one leg stirs, then another, then a BIG STRRRECTH to "wake up", then the bee looks about a bit to find itself on a table, at which point it takes flight, and goes about its day as if nothing had happened.
Being cold-blooded, bees simply slow down in the coldest temperatures, and while too cold a temperature for too long is not survivable for a lone bee, it is clear that, for them, their reaction times slow down with temperature. This temperature-temporal relationship may only extend to physical processes, not to mental ones, but the bees I tagged never took any notice of me, even though I was busy tagging more bees - they "woke up" and took off to finish whatever errand I had interrupted by shaking them off a frame into a tub for chilling and tagging. Never got stung doing all this, no bee decided that I was a threat.
Do cold bees "hibernate"? Do other cold-blooded species provide a model for how a bee reacts to cold, yet still survives? I dunno, I sat next to a very pretty co-ed in bio, and wasn't paying much attention to the classes, do I don’t remember much 40 years later.
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