Bees living a life of luxury?

About a year ago, in the UK, Flying Flowers, a flower deliver business, created what came to be known as “Honeysuckle Bee-tirement Home”. It was created in the hope of preventing the rapid decline of the bee population. Therefore, in this little retirement home for our buzzing friends, the bees can kick back and relax in tiny chairs and little beds, all crafted to fit the bee-sized behinds.

“At Flying Flowers, bees are vital to our livelihoods and passions – and to the ecosystem, we live in. The world would be a very different place without the help of these little creatures, so we wanted to do all we can to help protect them,” Sandra Varley, at Flying Flowers, said.

This project began after a study emerged of how a quarter of all bee species have not been seen in over thirty years. As well as this, many florists rely heavily on bees, who pollinate their flowers; prices would raise substantially if bees were not there to aid them. So, in response, Flying Flowers created this little retirement home for their bees to bring awareness as to how there ought to be more precautions to keep these fuzzy little insects alive and well.

In my evidently educated opinion, I believe that this is a quite humorous way of portraying this need to repopulate the bee population. Merely, upon my extensive research upon this topic, I chuckled at the images of bees sitting in chairs, and also upon the fact that there were little books for the bees to “read” during their time in this retirement home. I’m sorry, but how do bees read? How do they even manage to take the books off the shelf? Are we trying to teach bees English now? What is the UK doing? How does this work?