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Interview with Rosemary Georgeson
Story transcribed from audio recording by Andrew Simon, Galiano Island, November 22, 2023
(Rosemary recounted that this event occurred sometime in the late 70's or early 80's)
I know it was a mid-August to late-August day, out there on the Salish Sea. It was hot—it was
very hot. Dad and I had been trolling Sockeye all day. We were closer to the Vancouver side, to
the mouth of the (Fraser) river there. The bite had dropped off, so I was just sitting in the stern. I
had cleaned all the lines off, and Dad was in the wheelhouse steering the boat, hoping we’d pick
up the bite again.
While I was sitting in the stern, just watching everything go by, I caught something out of the
corner of my eye, and I looked off towards the Galiano side of the boat, which would have been
the port side. And I saw something moving on top of the water. It was kind of bouncing around
and… hmmm… I wonder what it is? It just kept coming towards the boat, we were the only boat
out that far. All the other boats had lost the bite, too, and they’d gone in. So, I’m just sitting there
watching this thing, and it keeps coming towards the boat. I realize it’s a bumble bee. It was a
big one—a fat, fluffy bumble bee. And it came and landed on the arm of the gurdies. I thought,
“Wow, that little bee has just flown all the way from Galiano and we’re almost at the mouth of
the river. We’re about two miles off the mouth of the river. So that little bee’s flown from around
Salamanca Point, across the Salish Sea. I thought, hmmm… I had some fish guts in the box, as I
had just cleaned some fish, so I put some guts down for this little bee, it walked off the arm of
the gurdies and found the fish guts. I guess it could smell the blood. It ate for a while, and I just
watched it eat. Then it just sat there; it must have been tired.
Dad came out of the wheelhouse, and he goes, “What are you doing?” And I pointed at the
bumble bee, and he goes, “Oh.” And he goes back into the wheelhouse, and he comes out a
couple of minutes later and he’s got a bottle cap full of water. And he goes, “Here.” And I put it
down beside the guts for the bee. And the bee ate a little bit longer there, and he kind of climbed
into the bottle cap with the water, or was on the edge of it or something, and… yeah, the bee
hung around for about twenty minutes, ate its fill, drank its fill, and it just sat there on the corner
of the fish box, and then it just flew off, heading off towards Richmond side. That’s a long ways
in a hot August sun for a bee to travel. And we were the only boat between where we were, just a
couple miles off the mouth of the river, all the way over to Salamanca Point on Galiano. So that
bee flew a long ways, all on its own, with no sustenance, in that heat, in that August afternoon.
And it made its way from there into Richmond, I guess. I assume it was Richmond it was heading
to, because that’s what was on the starboard side of our boat, so. Yeah. It probably had about
four miles to go before it hit land again. Might have stopped at the light ship, I don’t know. Yeah.
My friend Woody Morrison, he was another old troller from Metlakatla. He’s Haida. And we
we’re always talking about fishing. And he spoke about “The magic in what we do…” And I
shared with him this bee story, and he said, “That’s it. That’s the magic of what we do out there
on the water. Those are the moments that we always remember.”
Simon, A. D. F., L. R. Best, B. M. Starzomski. 2023. Evidence of bumble bee extirpation and colonization,
Galiano Island, British Columbia, Canada. Northwest Science 96(3-4):206-219.
2 June 2022
Re: Reliability of collections of Bombus fervidus and B. flavidus on Galiano Island, 1981, 1985.
Bombus fervidus (SEM-UBC HYM-14361)
The Bombus fervidus specimen belongs to a series of collections made by Geoff Scudder in
1985: more specifically, this specimen belongs to a series of four specimens from the following
dates: 1985-05-19, 1985-05-20, 1985-05-20, 1985-05-20.
Bombus flavidus (not yet data-based)
The Bombus flavidus specimen belongs to a series of two collections made by me on the
following dates in 1981: 1981-04-18, 1981-04-19.
I don’t recall the exact circumstances of collecting Bombus flavidus, since I was collecting
broadly and not paying specific attention to bumble bees per se. But I can say that I labelled our
collections with collection codes promptly (paper labels in the collection vials, and then pinned
those label codes onto the appropriate insect pins that evening), and recorded the sites and
collection codes in a notebook (which I still have). I am confident, therefore, that this specimen
represents a true occurrence of this species on Galiano Island. It is not a rare species in the
region, and could normally be expected to occur there.
I was not present when Geoff Scudder collected the Bombus fervidus specimen, but I know
Geoff to be a prodigious but meticulous collector and careful note-taker. He owned a property at
Spanish Hills on north Galiano, and made extensive collections of all types of insects on the
island, including many that one might consider rarely collected. He is not a specialist in bees so
would have been unaware at the time of the species he’d collected. The specimen has been
identified by a specialist in the intervening years and is properly accessioned in one of Canada’s
best-managed regional research insect collections.
Syd Cannings
Species at Risk Biologist
Simon, A. D. F., L. R. Best, B. M. Starzomski. 2023. Evidence of bumble bee extirpation and colonization,
Galiano Island, British Columbia, Canada. Northwest Science 96(3-4):206-219.