Light and dark have different meanings to honeybees.
Light means being outside, means doing work, and means being in danger.
Darkness means home (although not necessarily your home), means a promise of being with your friends and siblings (if it’s your home), means being safe (if you get in).
See, honeybees have this neat behavior where their guard bees will let bees from other hives into their own hive… but only if they bribe the guards with a bit of nectar! (this is the only part of this post that you’ll find in actual books about bees)
As far as I can tell, this is basically evolution sort of independently coming up with the concept of hospitality? Like, if everyone lets random well-behaved bees rest in their hives for a bit, then bees that get lost don’t necessarily have to die. At the same time, requiring tokens like that makes it harder to just be straightforwardly exploited. This all ends up making the species as a whole just that much more robust.
All of which helps to explain where the traditional honeybee beliefs about what night is comes from.
Night is the home of the night-bees, they say, and you have to get home before it enters the land, or they’ll get to you.
There’s even a series of myths about a legendary bee called Third Scout of the Southwestern-Lilacsmell who collects the nectar of a legendary flower that’s hard to describe without the particular technical terms bees use to describe flowers but is said to grant eternal youth, and then gets blown away by a particularly strong gust and doesn’t manage to get back home before dark, but! manages to parlay her way into the hive of the night-bees in exchange for her ambrosia.
The stories then go on to describe her adventures in the hive of the night-bees, as she encounters them and their strange customs and pets and tastes of their strange honey and bread (as is required of bee-hospitality), until she manages to make it back home to finally deliver what she has left of the immortality-nectar to her queen…
What, not enough Wing Bling our Carpenter Bee friends? Well check this out, Pilgrim, …. from Thailand. Another Xylocopa specimen found lounging around the Packer Lab.
So…did you know that Xylocopa lay the worlds largest insect egg?
Bad Luck Brian: Have you ever had a string of ridiculously bad luck?
Have I ever told the story of why I’m terrified of bees? Like, the conventional wisdom is that they don’t bother you if you leave them alone, sure, but… when I was five, I was playing out in the yard, and I got stung, and BOY that hurt. And my mom gave me the standard wisdom to reassure me- and also dropped a factoid that most people only get stung once in their whole lives, so I’m all set now because that’s how probability works for sure.
SO later that same day, Mom takes me to watch my cousin’s baseball game. And even though I was five, I could already tell that baseball was incredibly boring to watch, so I wandered off to the field nearby to pick dandelions, and GAAAAAH I stepped on a bee and got stung again. I feel shocked and betrayed and also I feel a lot of pain from a bee sting on my foot. Mom marvels at the unfortunate coincidence, and reassures me, and we go home.
And then I get out of the car, and walk across the lawn to the front door of our house, and BAM. THIRD TIME IS THE CHARM, THE HAT TRICK, LIGHTNING STRIKES THRICE, A FUCKING BEE STINGS ME AGAIN
i haven’t trusted those little yellow fucks since
Bee Movie: What’s your weirdest ship?
since perinaldo, my life has never known peace. the following day, snake people started manifesting in my house.
But no yeah I don’t tend to really ship stuff unless it’s obviously canon or whatever. The closest thing to a crack ship I have is like… there’s discourse around Mei and Junkrat from Overwatch, and frankly yeah, those two would never get along- and most of the girls in that series I can’t see going for Jamison. There’s a couple plausible Junkships, I think- Sombra, Lucio, and D.Va all seem like they’d gravitate to his wild attitude.
i didn’t ship junkrat and d.va but then i saw this comic and now,
We Are Number One: If you were a fictional character, would you be a villain?
short answer: YES
less short answer: i would go all in on the mad scientist supervillain aesthetic, but my evil schemes to take over the world would never be that evil, because i don’t want to be a dick, right?i’m thinking like a Dr. Doofenshmirtz situation.probably the heroes vanquish me at the end of season 1 and then i fall into that “becomes the team’s weird uncle” role
(or at least it would seem that way until the series finale where it turns out i’ve been preparing a scheme all along and manage to usurp the new big bad’s power source, OH SHIT, WHAT UP KIDS, BET YOU DIDN’T SEE THE GUY NAMED BENEDICT BETRAYIN Y’ALL, GAHAHAHAHAHA)
Tags:
#bees #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”BET YOU DIDN’T SEE THE GUY NAMED BENEDICT BETRAYIN Y’ALL”) #home of the brave
#bees #bugs #adorable #art #awww #(…does that bee have eight legs?) #(maybe it’s just a side effect of the mad science) #((oh wait I think the top leg is coming from the right side)) #((so there are only three pairs)) #((okay then))
Scary bugs hiding in fruit is a thing that worried me a lot as a child, because my family had a grapevine and my mom told me once that I had to be careful it I was going to pick any of the grapes and eat them, BECAUSE THERE COULD BE BEES IN THEM.
Yeah, guess who never picked another grape ever again, LOL.
I am generally compelled to cut strawberries in half before eating them, given that I did actually find a worm of some sort living in the middle of one a few years ago!
i have to look for holes in cherries, because if there are little holes in them there are little worms in them too.
It’s always been the possibility of moldy/rotting fruit that worried me (though I do check down the middle of raspberries for bugs), but I think I’ll have to start cutting strawberries open.
Tags:
#bugs #bees #food #worms #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #and while slightly annoyed at having a new reason for manifestation of this #is mostly glad not to have found out about wormy strawberries the hard way
Brinens and Things 