BEES!

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Re: BEES!
« Reply #15 on: May 17, 2019, 11:57:40 am »

DIABOLIZER TIPPED 128 CORAL FOR THIS POST

*spork*

Re: BEES!
« Reply #16 on: May 24, 2020, 07:55:28 pm »

RACHEL TIPPED FOR THIS POST

RACHEL TIPPED FOR THIS POST

m'lady

Re: BEES!
« Reply #17 on: June 05, 2020, 05:33:00 am »


Are each of those yellow spots a bee?
aka luke

Re: BEES!
« Reply #18 on: June 05, 2020, 05:39:54 am »


Are each of those yellow spots a bee?

Yes. Last year we had a wild swarm move into one of our empty hives
*spork*

Re: BEES!
« Reply #19 on: June 05, 2020, 09:48:45 am »


Are each of those yellow spots a bee?

Yes. Last year we had a wild swarm move into one of our empty hives

that's so freakin cool. I wonder how they decided it was the perfect place, was it the smell of old honey or something?
m'lady

Re: BEES!
« Reply #20 on: June 05, 2020, 02:25:59 pm »


Are each of those yellow spots a bee?

Yes. Last year we had a wild swarm move into one of our empty hives

that's so freakin cool. I wonder how they decided it was the perfect place, was it the smell of old honey or something?

Yeah they probably scouted it out and were like "hey there's a bunch of honey and shit already here, let's move in". It's actually a pretty common thing for beekeepers to leave "bait hives" in trees in the hopes that they'll catch a wild swarm.

It was intense. I walked out of my room to get a drink from the fridge downstairs and as I passed by the door to the deck I heard a strange buzzing sound. I looked outside and realized there were thousands of dots in the sky and I was like "wtf???" so I opened the door and walked outside

As I opened the door I was surrounded by the sound of buzzing. Not very loud, but somehow my brain interpreted it like a huge rattling surface. Imagine a speaker that was 30 feet wide and 50 feet tall.

By the time I took that picture the swarm had already dissipated by 60-70%

The whole event from when I first noticed it to them all casually hanging out in the hive took maybe 30 minutes
*spork*

Re: BEES!
« Reply #21 on: June 05, 2020, 02:30:33 pm »
Literally 15 minutes after that first pic

*spork*

Re: BEES!
« Reply #22 on: June 05, 2020, 02:53:37 pm »
that's really freakin cool. so fast!
m'lady

Re: BEES!
« Reply #23 on: July 06, 2020, 05:50:51 am »
m'lady

dont fight the bees
« Reply #24 on: July 23, 2020, 11:23:10 am »


im so glad we have video embeds now :)
m'lady

Re: dont fight the bees
« Reply #25 on: July 23, 2020, 12:35:07 pm »


im so glad we have video embeds now :)

dang I wish this clip was like 7 seconds longer
*spork*

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!
« Reply #26 on: August 17, 2020, 04:36:01 am »
m'lady

Re: BEES!
« Reply #27 on: August 18, 2020, 02:02:38 pm »
This thread is solid. Many excellent jokes were had, and new learnings were learned. I hadn't ever seen a bumble bee hive before, neat!

Re: BEES!
« Reply #28 on: August 30, 2020, 11:42:33 am »
Quote
The scopa of a bee uses electrostatically charged hairs of varying length and shape to collect pollen.  The scopa can vary in shape, size, and location, depending on the type of pollen collected. Scopa tend to have a top layer of long, stiff hair to hold pollen and an underlayer of short, flexible hair to absorb oils. The bottom layer can be made up of separate hairs or hairs branching off the upper layer. Generally, the larger and more interspersed the hairs, the larger the pollen grains that the scopa can hold. Bees that collect small pollen granules have denser, multibranched scopal hairs compared to bees specialized for large grains.

The scopa is often found on the hind legs, characterized by dense rows of hair. The scopa may also be found on the underside of the abdomen, such as in the Megachilidae family. Pollen caught on other places on the bee, such as the head, can be brushed off using the foreleg using special hairs and packed into the scopa as needed.

The corbicula, or pollen basket, is a specialized scopa that is able to carry both pollen and nectar. The moisture of the nectar allows the pollen to be tightly packed down, increasing the carrying capacity. This kind of scopa is found on more familiar bees like honey bees and bumblebees.

Some bees lack a scopa entirely, such as kleptoparasitic bees which lay their eggs in the nests of other bees and have no need to forage for pollen. Other bees ingest the pollen instead, storing it in a specialized part of their gut known as the crop.

https://asknature.org/?s=bees

Re: BEES!
« Reply #29 on: February 03, 2021, 06:28:56 am »
20,000 honey bees took over a tech company’s empty office during lockdown
Sarah Todd, for quartz


On the main drag of sunny Santa Barbara, California, four blocks from the Pacific Ocean, sits the three-story headquarters of Invoca, an artificial-intelligence software company. Like many offices, the building has been empty since March, when Invoca sent employees home to shelter from Covid-19.

Well, not quite empty.

For amidst the building’s abandoned desks and silent phones, 20,000 honey bees were hard at work, building a hive filled with 10 gallons’ worth of honey, beeswax, and pollen, as Invoca’s leadership learned in January, much to their surprise.

“We were talking a lot as an executive team about how and when to bring people back to the office and how to make sure it’s safe,” says Dee Anna McPherson, Invoca’s chief marketing officer. “It never occurred to me to think of bees.”

It never does.

Looking back, though, there were clues. Invoca’s workplace experience manager had noticed a few dead bees in the entrance hall when she first stopped by the office in April to get the mail. “She didn’t think a whole lot of it,” says McPherson, “just, Oh, they must have somehow blown in.”

The next month, the office manager saw a few more dead bees. And then more and more. Finally, Invoca decided it was time to investigate, calling in Santa Barbara’s local Super Bee Rescue & Removal squad, which, true to its name, specializes in safely re-homing honey bees that have chosen impractical places to set up shop. “We consider ourselves bee-vangilists,” says owner Nick Wigle, who doubles as a beekeeper.

Using a thermal imaging camera, Super Bee’s technician located the bee colony nested between the building’s second and third floors. “So they cut a hole in the ceiling and she had to shimmy up between the floors,” McPherson says. It took the better part of a day for Super Bee to attract the bees into a box, using the scent of a queen bee to lure them in.

A crucial part of the rescue process, Wigle notes, is spotting and capturing the queen bee, upon whom the survival of the other bees depends. “Without her, there will be no future baby bees—and if not replaced, the colony will be dead in a few weeks,” he says. Luckily, the queen bee has a few distinctive traits; she’s about 10% to 15% bigger than the other bees, and has a fully developed abdomen for laying eggs.

Initially, McPherson says, Invoca had hoped to process the bees’ honey and give jars of it to employees. But Super Bee explained that it tries to preserve the honeycomb, so that the bees can rebuild their hive when they’re relocated to a natural habitat. Invoca did get a plate-sized piece of the honeycomb as a souvenir, which a couple of employees divvied up to sample.

The bees are a reminder of just how long we’ve been away from our offices—long enough that nature may have more surprises in store for companies as they begin to reopen their workspaces. Their legacy lives on in Invoca’s Slack channel, where employees have been abuzz with puns.

“Everyone’s like, Oh, they’re our new employ-bees,” says McPherson. “Or, Our office has become an AirBeeandBee.”

But the removal itself was a serious matter.

“Our CEO actually is allergic to bee stings,” McPherson notes. “He has to carry an Epipen. So it’s kind of a fun thing to think about the bees, but it’s really important that we get them out of there.”