It’s amazing how little empathy people have towards animals and how little knowledge they have of animal behaviour.
There’s so many people with comments like “Oh i was sleeping and it stung me for no reason!” like no dude, it was trapped in your room got frightened and stung you in your sleep, or landed on you and you rolled over or touched it while sleeping causing it to sting you or a million other reasons.
Wasps don’t have the capability (that we know of) to go “I’m going to sting this person for zero reason cause I’m a wasp.” Animals don’t think or behave like that.
I’ve only been stung by a bee/wasp/etc once, and that was because I somehow got a bee in my shoe. Not shockingly, it didn’t like that. I’m actually not even sure it stung me on purpose- it was a honeybee, but there was no stinger in the sting. I think it might have scraped me with its stinger instead of actually stinging. Is it possible for that to raise a welt like a sting would?
I’ve gotten up close to plenty of hives and nests, and if you move kinda calmly, you can usually get moderately close. Plus, if you watch them, they warn you that you’re too close. They buzz louder and move faster and clearly display that you gotta go.
Stinging costs venom, energy, and risk. For a honeybee, it costs that worker’s life. They always, always have a reason to spend that energy, effort, and venom.
Finally, “evil” implies intentional malice. For something to be evil, it has to understand that it’s causing significant distress, and continue doing that, for no other reason than to cause distress. I can think of a very few animal species which are maybe, maybe intelligent enough to be capable of that, and most of them are things like cetaceans and elephants. Definitely not groundhogs or any sort of invertebrate. An animal can be needlessly aggressive if made to be by genetics or circumstance, but animals are incapable of evil.
what good is a piano full of Actual For Real Bees if they don’t even know how to play
Transcribed (paragraph breaks are where the video cuts):
“You know, life is normal, I just have to very cautiously move Brianna’s many swords, because there are bees coming out of the piano upon which she stores them!
Okay, the axes are my fault, so, I guess I have to take some of the blame here.
The longbow’s mine, but I’m not taking credit for this: [the camera pans to a staff topped with a carved wolf’s head]
You know, just the Piano Bees, so… Not a big deal. We’re just- we’re not worried about it, we’re just not worried abou-”
I’ve been stung by a carpenter bee. They’re usually pretty chill.
And dirt daubers are bros.
It’s true you can pet Bumblebees
you can pet any of them if ur not a coward!!
My rational mind knows that cicada killers aren’t a threat but when they appear they legit terrify me until I remember that.
They are a burrowing breed so they do tend to appear out of nowhere. They’re just curious when they fly towards you tho. You’re in their territory and they wanna make sure you’re not a wasp
At a place that I go a lot me and my friends have to hide from fucking yellow jackets because THEY WILL COME AFTER ALL FOOD!
Man you just gotta be chill about them (note: i love yellowjacks so this is slightly biased)
But like you leave em a nice little sugar offering off to the side and dont jump too much when they land on you, and you dont let yourself get scared, and they really dont just attack if they can avoid it
The worst time i ever had with one was the time i had candy goo on my hands and it bit me thinking I was food. Nothing worse ever happened to me.
Although bees can smell fear, and it apparently causes them to attack, so that might be my own little ability to get along with em right there: I’m usually tol fascinated to be scared.
If you see those lil heaps of mud tubes on a wall with holes sometimes in one end, those are mud dauber nests. They build the tubes of mud, stuff caterpillars inside, lay an egg, and leave. Grubs hatch from eggs, eat caterpillars, grow up, and tunnel out.
Paper wasps are the ones that build the paper-honeycomb nests where you can see all the tubes. The guy who invented paper got the idea from them. They’re pretty chill around humans as long as none of the humans nearby have done anything to them. If you see one starting to build a nest where you don’t want one, wait ‘till it leaves and remove the nest.
The hive I’m using for my experiment is in a flight cage meaning they can’t forage, so for the mean time we need to provide them with some sucrose solution and pollen. This is how the bees collect it, by rolling around in it before gathering it up onto the pollen baskets using their legs.
“Bees are the smallest of birds. They are born from the bodies of oxen, or from the decaying flesh of slaughtered calves; worms form in the flesh and then turn into bees. Bees live in community, choose the most noble among them as king, have wars, and make honey. Their laws are based on custom, but the king does not enforce the law; rather the lawbreakers punish themselves by stinging themselves to death. Bees are afraid of smoke and are excited by noise. Each has its own duty: guarding the food supply, watching for rain, collecting dew to make honey, and making wax from flowers.”
So today started out dumb, but this afternoon was AWESOME.
I’m on the porch attempting to construct a railing for the stairs when I notice a weird noise. Like, a kind of droning or buzzing? And it’s getting loud. So I investigate. It’s coming from the neighbor’s yard.
It is a metric fuckton of bees. I have never seen so many bees in my life. It is a fucking swarm of bees, and I have been reading about bees because I got a wild hair a few weeks back about wanting a hive of my own, but haven’t yet convinced Husbandthing, and there is suddenly a SWARMING HERD OF WILD HONEYBEES IN THE NEIGHBOR’S YARD.
I see postings on the neighborhood page all the time for feral swarm collection, but I also know the guy in the house across the alley just set up a hive. “Hey I think your hive escaped,” I text him.
He calls me back about three minutes later. Turns out, the swarm he was supposed to get never came; the company went out of business and his order got cancelled, and he’d found out HALF AN HOUR AGO. And he says he’s got a friend who is a professional beekeeper, and he’s going to go pick her up and would it be okay if they came and got this swarm please please please?
So Bee Neighbor and Professional Beekeeper show up and immediately don bee suits. Apparently there is fierce competition for feral swarms, and the swarm in the neighbor’s tree is HUGE, and also twenty feet off the ground, and Bee Neighbor wants them very badly.
The tree the bees are in is in a yard belonging to neither of us, so we go knock on the door, but there’s no answer. I knock on the house adjacent to it, but that guy’s not home either. Finally, I text the neighbor on the other side of me to see if he’s got contact info for the property owner, who is incredibly shy and in three years has never made eye contact. No luck.
So…we trespass. We get my extension ladder, and Bee Neighbor climbs the tree while Professional Beekeeper stands on the ladder and walks him through the swarm collection. Turns out, you just shake the swarm into a box, and as long as the queen makes it into the box, the rest of the swarm will eventually follow. Bee Neighbor has never collected a swarm before (this is, in fact, his very first swarm of bees ever) and it takes the two of them the better part of an hour in the tree trying to shake the swarm into the box.
Bees eventually get into the box. Bee Neighbor gets out of the tree without dying, and Professional Beekeeper examines the swarm and makes pleased noises. At this point, the box is the neighbor’s driveway, and about two thirds of the swarm is still milling around the box all confused. Since the neighbor isn’t home and we can’t contact him, he risks coming and parking right in the middle of a huge cloud of bees. Professional Beekeeper doesn’t want to move the box too far away, because we risk the milling bees losing the queen’s scent and never going into the box. An equidistant point between the current location and Bee Neighbor’s yard is the top of my recycling bin.
So they put the box of bees on my recycling bin, and I text Husbandthing.
Now I have a box of bees that I am babysitting. They’re being all lazy and dopey and bumbling around. I think I might be in love. Bee Neighbor will pick the box up later tonight and put them in his hive, and then the bees will be MY neighbors too!!
THIS HAS BEEN THE BEST DAY EVER
#beekeeping #also we left a note on the absent neighbor’s door #hi sorry we trespassed #but as you can see from your security cam footage #there was a giant cloud of bees #and we came and got them #we figured you did not want a yard full of bees #and we will love them #yours very sincerely #the friendly neighborhood bee team [Tags by @sacrificethemtothesquid]
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