Nature works in some pretty mysterious ways . It’s pretty safe to say, in fact, that there are a lot of things about the plants, animals, bugs and all that stuff that we simply don’t understand.
Coming across something weird or hard to explain can almost feel like you’ve stumbled upon some cosmic conspiracy theory. But there’s probably someone out there who has the answers. Right?
A Twitter user very recently went viral for her strange discovery.
In the tweet, Sophie Klahr ( @sophieklahr ) shares multiple images of small piles of little, yellow flowers. On top of each of those piles was a single dead bee, to her amazement.
“I have put Twitter back on my phone specifically to show you these circular arrangements of petals I found around multiple dead bees,” she says in the tweet.
“If you are a scientist who knows what the hell is going on here, please tell me!”
She also added a second tweet, this time with a video.
The video shows a closeup of one of the dead bees. A group of ants is also visible, crawling around the bee corpse. As if this couldn’t get any more mysterious.
Since posting the pics on August 28th, it was liked over 266k times.
The tweet also has over 25,000 retweets, and a few thousand quote tweets, too. Plenty of people replied to Klahr, adding their own theories as to what could be happening.
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Some offered pretty convincing theories.
Many users were pretty committed to cracking the case.
One Twitter user’s theory involved flower petals gathering around a dead bee as a result of rain, which is honestly pretty convincing if you ask me.
Others likened what was happening to a “funeral.”
Apparently, this is something ants do to themselves. One theory points to the similarities between ants and bees (how they both communicate using certain signals), saying that the ants are doing this for a bee the way they would for their own.
In a similar theory, this could be the ants “hiding” the bee for later use.
Ants are scavengers, but they can only carry so much back to their colonies at a time. One user ( who also linked a pretty interesting article on the subject ) suggested that the ants are probably hiding the bees from competitive species, so they can come back for more later.
In fact, that one seemed like a pretty likely scenario.
Other users shared that they saw similar displays with other animals in piles of leaves, dirt, or flowers. They found small rodents, snakes, and other bugs like cicadas or grasshoppers.
In other words, the ants are probably just hiding their food.
To be honest, this seems like a pretty convincing theory regardless. If you’ve ever had an ant infestation in your yard (or worse… your house), you’ve probably seen them relentlessly scavenge a single place for hours, if not days.
For other users, though, this was a pretty fun thread to flex their writing muscles.
I’m not gonna lie, I love the idea of an ant and spider battle, and bee reinforcements. Obviously not the write answer, but I appreciate the creativity.
