Striped with bright yellow and black like their distant cousins the yellow jackets but fuzzy like any true bee, ground bees made their nests in abandoned burrows previously belonging to such creatures as rabbits, ground squirrels, and culcarnix. They were social insects who presented a hazard because of their numbers and astounding coordination. Worse, their carefully hidden nests were hard to spot; when any unfortunate being stepped in or near the nest, the ground bees, warned by the vibrations, swarmed out and mobbed the unlucky intruder. Multiple stings could cause temporary weakness and even paralysis. Like other bees, ground bees produced honey, but their underground location made the prospect of stunning the bees with smoke and harvesting the honey rather unattractive, so any ground