Yes, it’s true.  You’re Uncle Beehive has become an uncle yet again this past weekend to another little boy, whose older sister is a mere 13 months old - so close to being Irish twins.  It’s the fifth of the new generation that finds me to be the coolest and best person in the world.

This little guy got me thinking about the time that I gave birth a couple of years ago. 

Yes, you heard me correctly, I gave birth, or maybe I actually birthed it – depends on your point of view, and grammar.

It was the summer of 2004, and I was fiddling around in the pumpkin patch that I was growing in my backyard.  I was examining the dozen or so pumpkins that were growing on the vine, and looking at all of the flowers that the vine had. 

See, each flower on a pumpkin vine blooms once only.  Early in the morning when the sun rises, it opens up wide and full, flaunting its huge amount of pollen spores for bees and other insects to come and taste. 

By noon, the blooming flower is past its peak, and it begins to slowly close up.  Around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, the flower is mostly closed, never to reopen. 

If it was successfully pollinated, a pumpkin will grow, and if pollination did not succeed, then the now dead and useless flower would fall off to the Earth below the very next day – pumpkin vines are very intelligent in this way.

Anyways, I wanted to get a better examination of a flower, and so I very easily plucked one closed flower off the vine.  As I held it in my fingers it reminded me of the human cotton candy pods from Killer Klowns From Outer Space – only yellow. 

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The flower felt oddly hallow, and full of air.  I squeezed it gently to see if I could get some of the air out, or even better, see a small explosion of pollen. 

As I squeezed I heard something.  It sounded like the air was escaping through the tiniest of openings at the top of the flower.  I squeezed again, and heard the same nose, only this time it felt as though something was inside of this flower. 

I took out my clippers, and cut the top of the flower off, and then carefully cut down the side of the flower, peeled back, and there it was, A BEE!

It was at this moment in life that I realized that anyone could be pregnant without even realizing it.

So the tiny little yellowjacket was inside the flower, still digging around in the pollen. 

It must have not realized the speed at which the flower closes, cause it had been stuck in there.  It definitely would have died had I not plucked that particular flower, and opened it up out of sheer curiosity.

After a moment of watching this little creature have the time of its life, doing backstrokes in pollen, it decided to fly up and away, hopefully back to its home. 

I stood there stunned.  I had just saved the life of a bee, it was as if I was a doctor bringing life back into this world, and it felt so cool.

So maybe it wasn’t birth, but it was still one of the coolest things from nature that I have ever seen.