I saw my first bee of the year yesterday, which had made me very excited for multiple reasons:

• Spring isn’t *really* here until the pollinators are out and about
• Bees make me happy (as insects do <- entomology nerd)
• Pollinators can mean fruit production. And I like fruit. Noms.
• Bees aren’t around when it’s raining, snowing, hailing, sleeting, slushing, etc. Sunshine! I love sunshine!
• The bee was fat, fuzzy and had her* head buried in a flower. So cute.

In other multi-legged animal news, I freaked out this morning when I saw the fattest, ugliest spider ever on the wall. I don’t like spiders. Spiders =/= insects. Insects have 6 legs, spiders have 8. Not the same thing. Insects are more fun. Spiders, not so much. That being said, when I took an invertebrates zoology class, I had to do a lab with spiders and they were called “garden spiders” but their bodies were the size of a loonie (for non-Canadians, that’s huge but not quite tarantula huge). Creepy.

My classes ended lass week (yay!) but that just means that finals begin soon (boo!). I have a lot of review sessions to attend (thankfully run by professors… which is both a good and a bad thing, I suppose – some profs are very difficult to understand, others are fantastic, some put me to sleep, some sound slightly better than fingernails on a chalkboard…) and a lot of study group sessions that I went and kinda made all the people I generally interact with in class join into. The more the merrier. Plus, I can’t singlehandedly book all the study room time by myself (I’m limited to only being allowed 2 hours per day, which is horrible!). So if notice that I’m never around, never tweeting or just never… around. I’m probably studying. Or procrastinating. Or have been locked in a room and forced to listen to my profs talk for hours on end.

* For non-solitary bees (and there are a lot of species of bees that live by themselves and not as part of a hive), the ones that go around collecting nectar are females. The only purpose of males is for mating with the queen, all the ones that collect nectar are female (but not capable of reproduction).