I don’t know the name of this flower and have never seen it before.

Do you know or have a guess?

I very much doubt that it is a native since I found it growing on the property of the resort. Regardless, it sure was reinvigorating to see blazing colour in the middle of winter’s greyness. Sigh.

Even the bee was pleasing. Life! The hundreds I saw last year and the hives I could see and hear buzzing loudly up in the cliffs…. in that context the word “pleasing” doesn’t really come to mind. I was stung walking through some bushes. Good news: I lived!

Whether or not the bee in this photo is actually a killer bee is beyond me, but I’d like to think it is. I have a small obsession with killer bees. I know they’re a small menace, but there is something almost fantastical about the idea of killer bees swarming the world and taking over. Dun, dun, dun. What can I say, I watched a lot of giant ant and flying piranha b-movies as a kid. And of course, the Wu-Tang Clan have forever made it impossible for me to think about killer bees swarming the world without thinking of them. Their exploitation of the killer bee phenomenon and what was implied in some of the over-the-top reporting of them (the “Africanized” bee) was completely BRILLIANT.

And on that note, here’s my favourite Wu-Tang song (NSFW).