Oh yeah the lasw are wack in some places. If you are in the UK its pretty safe to assume collecting most things is okay. Double check species that are rare or unique. Things like cetaceans and otters require a license to own.
If you find something (in the UK at least) and you arent sure of its legality its usually safe to keep it for a few days while you email the wildlife law people (like the DNR equivalent in the US i forget what they were called) and ask them. If they say no you can just throw it back into the woods and they wont get mad. Its just worth asking. The same thing might work in the US but I cant grantee they wont go after you. I don’t have much experience collecting in the US.
Some things worth googling:
“[animal name] parts legal to possess”
“[state/area] roadkill collection legal”
If you’re in the U.S, you can’t have any parts of migratory birds, which is most of the birds, no matter how you got them.
my grandfather always had candy in his pockets, and one time when I got really sick and I was hospitalized my dad told him not to give me any candy. He pulled out his pockets to show he hadn’t even brought any and I got really sad but as soon as my dad walked out of the room he then proceeded to take off his hat and had 2 chewy chocolate candy toffees and 2 orange fanta toffees, and I’ll never forget the happiness and surprise I felt in that one moment in my entire life.
That will not help save the bees at all. They need the excess honey removed from their hives. That’s the beekeepers entire livelihood.
Seriously refusing to eat honey is one of those well-meaning but ultimately terrible ideas. The bees make way too much honey and need it out in order to thrive (not being funny but that was literally a side effect in Bee Movie). Plus that’s the only way for the beekeepers to make the money they need to keep the bees healthy. Do not stop eating honey because somebody on Tumblr told you too.
excess honey, if not removed, can ferment and poison the bees. even if it doesn’t, it attracts animals and other insects which can hurt the bees or even damage the hive. why vegans think letting bees stew in their own drippings is ‘cruelty-free’ is beyond me. >:[
the fact that we find honey yummy and nutritious is part of why we keep bees, true, but the truth is we mostly keep them to pollinate our crops. the vegetable crops you seem to imagine would still magically sustain us if we stopped cultivating bees.
and when you get right down to it… domestic bees aren’t confined in any way. if they wanted to fly away, they could, and would. they come back to the wood frame hives humans build because those are nice places to nest.
so pretending domestic bees have it worse than wild bees is just the most childish kind of anthropomorphizing.
If anything, man-made hives are MORE suitable for bees to live in because we have mathematically determined their optimal living space and conditions, and can control them better in our hives. We also can treat them for diseases and pests much easier than we could if they were living in, say, a tree.
Tl;dr for all of this: eating honey saves the bees from themselves, and keeping them in man-made hives is good for them.
✌️✌️✌️
Plus, buying honey supports bee owners, which helps them maintain the hives, and if they get more money they can buy more hives, which means more bees!
I tell people this. About the honey and what to do to save bees. I also have two large bottles of honey in my cabinet currently. Trying to get some flowers for them to thrive on. Support your bees guys
… uh guys… the whole “Save the Bees!” thing is not about honeybees. It’s about the decline of native bees almost to the point of extinction. Native bees do not make honey. Honeybees are domesticated. Taking measures to protect honeybees is as irrelevant to helping the environment as protecting Farmer John’s chickens.
To help save native bees, yes, plant NATIVE flowers (what naturally grows where you live? That’s what your bees eat!), set up “bee hotels,” which can be something as simple as a partially buried jar or flower pot for carpenter bees, and don’t use pesticides. Having a source of water (like a bird bath or “puddles” you frequently refresh) is also good for a variety of wildlife.
Want to know more about bees that are not honeybees?
Every place has different types of bees. Every place has different types of plants/flowers. Those hyped-up “save the bees” seed packets that are distributed across North America are garbage because none of those flowers are native in every habitat. Don’t look up “how to make a bee hotel” and make something that only bees from the great plains areas would use if you live on the west coast.
This is every bee that has been observed and uploaded to the citizen science network of iNaturalist. You can filter by location (anywhere in the world! This is not restricted to the US!), and you can view photos of every species people have added. Here’s the page for all bees, sorted by taxonomy, not filtered to any specific location [link]. Have you seen a bee and want to know more about it, but you don’t know what kind of bee it is? Take a picture, upload it to iNat, and people like me will help you identify it–and it will also become part of the database other people will use to learn about nature!
Some native Texan bees I’ve met!
A sweat bee! [link to iNat]. These flowers are tiny, no larger than a dime.
A longhorn bee! [link to iNat] I don’t know where they nest, but I often find them sleeping on the tips of flowers at night (so cute!)
Meet your local bees! Befriend them! Feed them! Make them homes! Love them!
This is one of the native bees I met in Arizona! This handsome man is a male Melissodes sp., AKA a type of long-horned bee. I saved him when he was drowning in a puddle.
I love him
This is a great post all in all but I’d just like to note that colony collapse syndrome is definitely a thing, so domestic honeybees are absolutely in danger as well
Europen Honey Bees are an invasive species in the US and compete with native bees.
Native bee populations are specifically evolved to pollinate certain native plants. Most are unlikely to have a significant effect on the pollination of the non-native crops that people need to grow to survive. It’s true that honeybees will compete with native bees as well, and can be classified as an invasive species, but so long as native bees are supported and native flora is maintained, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to coexist. And while there’s a whole different argument to be had about the negative effects of growing nonnative crops at all, if they fail, as they likely would without the honeybees that a large percentage of farmers keep to pollinate their and other local crops, the effects on humanity will be catastrophic
Lest people think I am anti-honeybee (no? I love honeybees?? They are precious??), the above is correct. Like it or not, the way we grow our food (much of which is not native to where it’s farmed) absolutely requires pollinators like honeybees. We would have a hugely massive food crisis on our hands without honeybees.
But, because so much $$$ is tied into the continued production of food, governments and food production companies will do whatever they can to mitigate the effects of colony collapse and other honeybee health issues. What can you do to help honeybees? Buy and eat food. Easy, right?
What is being done to protect native bees? Well,
1) Scientists and researchers are feverishly trying to get them listed as protected species and absolutely failing (see @thelepidopteragirl’s post about colleagues of hers: [link]).
2) Scientists and researchers are trying to get pesticides known to have devastating effects on bees and other pollinators banned and absolutely failing ([link]).
3) Scientists and science communicators (like me now, apparently) are trying to spread this information about native bees and their importance so more people can do little things like plant native flowers (lookup North American species for your zip code here: [link]), change how often they mow their lawns ([link]), and vote out the assholes who are profiting by destroying our environment ([link]). Success on this one: TBD, and by people like us.
As a gift to the honeybee lovers out there, please accept this photo of one making out with a stinkhorn mushroom:
^An excellent post on the complexities of the “Save the Bees” movement
To add, honeybees are also having problems in, you know, Europe and Asia, where they are native!
I feel like that gets forgotten by many, as Tumblr is very USA centered.
oh and i don’t wanna hear “it’s just anime it’s not real who cares” from any of you because that’s not a valid argument
yes, anime is not real, but anime contributes to the real-life normalization of the sexualization of minors
you can already see the consequences of this happening. the rurouni kenshin author got busted for possession of real child pornography and you know what happened to him? a 5,000 dollar fine and a warm welcome back to his old job. dude paid the fine and went right back to work.
no jail, no loss of his job, no ostracisation in the industry. he paid a fine and went back to work.
because in his line of work, that sort of thing is normal, and nobody paid it any mind
you can’t oppose real-life pedophilia and ephebophilia and then look the other way when it’s “just anime.” saying it’s “just anime” makes the whole mess that little bit more normal, more socially acceptable. and then eventually people get busted for having real illegal porn and nobody cares enough to fire them. real kids are getting hurt and nothing’s getting done about it because the cartoons are making it normal.
that’s happening right now because people scoff and say “it’s just anime” even when the consequences of that attitude are right there to behold.
Use the Walgreens Brand which is pretty cheap and it does wonders and doesn’t leave me with a white cast. And I’m dark as hell so I hate looking ashy but not all sunscreens are made equally and it’s one of the better ones I’ve used.
Wait cocoa/shea butter and coconut oil don’t protect you from the sun we really do need sunscreen??
Yea fam. All that “we don’t need sunscreen” shit is a myth. Combine that with the fact that most dermatologists don’t know how to spot skin cancer in Black people and it’s a nasty combination.
Yeah, it’s harder for us to get it but when we do it’s deadly. I know two people who died of skin cancer, both were Black.
“While incidence of melanoma is higher in the Caucasian population, a July 2016 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology showed it is more deadly in people of color. African American patients were most likely to be diagnosed with melanoma in its later stages than any other group in the study, and they also had the worst prognosis and the lowest overall survival rate.”
Sorry about the link, I’m on mobile. But this is from August 2016, which I know isn’t the most recent but it’s still SUPER IMPORTANT. Y’all please wear sunscreen. With Google it’s even easy to find smaller, Black-owned brands.
If you don’t want to use sunscreen, shea butter works as one.
Only if you want something with low spf. If you want something with a higher spf(like 30+) then you need sunscreen.
I’m a sunscreen junkie. The Japanese ones are the best. You can get them off Amazon…most have no white cast. And they are SPF 50. You have to do a little homework but there are plenty of inexpensive choices. Please don’t rely on an oil or shea butter. You’re playing yourself. If you Google skin cancer you won’t find any pictures of Black skin. Most dermatologists have no idea how to spot it because they aren’t trained. So do yourself a favor and wear it every day! Don’t let this lie about out magical melanin let you get caught out there without protection. I read that darker skin can have a natural SPF of 13 but that obviously isn’t sufficient enough since you need at least 30 to offer real protection. And the Japanese ones have UVB (protects against burning) and UVA (protects against premature aging) and are regulated better than the U.S. ones. And they are cosmetically better feeling.
Please don’t use coconut oil or shea butter for sunscreen if you really care about your skin.
Find a good sunscreen. They even have organic ones if you’re afraid of chemicals.
Guys… putting oil on your skin before going out in the sun basically cooks your epidermis. Even if you don’t have the ozone hole over you. How the fuck do you think pasty bitches get a tan at 40*S? Oil+UV radiation. USE FUCKIN SUNSCREEN BECAUSE MELANOMA DOESN’T FUCK AROUND AND NEITHER SHOULD YOU
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