Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea. They are currently considered a clade, called Anthophila. There are over 20,000 known species of bees in seven recognized biological families. Some species – including honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees – live socially in colonies while most species (>90%) – including mason bees, carpenter bees, leafcutter bees, and sweat bees – are solitary.
Bees are found on every continent except Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants. The most common bees in the Northern Hemisphere are the Halictidae, or sweat bees, but they are small and often mistaken for wasps or flies. Bees range in size from tiny stingless bee species, whose workers are less than 2 millimetres (0.08 in) long, to the leafcutter bee Megachile pluto, the largest species of bee, whose females can attain a length of 39 millimetres (1.54 in).
Bees feed on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used as food for their larvae. Vertebrate predators of bees include primates and birds such as bee-eaters; insect predators include beewolves and dragonflies.
Bee pollination is important both ecologically and commercially, and the decline in wild bees has increased the value of pollination by commercially managed hives of honey bees. The analysis of 353 wild bee and hoverfly species across Britain from 1980 to 2013 found the insects have been lost from a quarter of the places they inhabited in 1980.
Human beekeeping or apiculture (meliponiculture for stingless bees) has been practised for millennia, since at least the times of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Bees have appeared in mythology and folklore, through all phases of art and literature from ancient times to the present day, although primarily focused in the Northern Hemisphere where beekeeping is far more common. In Mesoamerica, the Mayans have practiced large-scale intensive meliponiculture since pre-Columbian times
Bees may be solitary or may live in various types of communities. Eusociality appears to have originated from at least three independent origins in halictid bees. The most advanced of these are species with eusocial colonies; these are characterised by cooperative brood care and a division of labour into reproductive and non-reproductive adults, plus overlapping generations. This division of labour creates specialized groups within eusocial societies which are called castes. In some species, groups of cohabiting females may be sisters, and if there is a division of labour within the group, they are considered semisocial. The group is called eusocial if, in addition, the group consists of a mother (the queen) and her daughters (workers). When the castes are purely behavioural alternatives, with no morphological differentiation other than size, the system is considered primitively eusocial, as in many paper wasps; when the castes are morphologically discrete, the system is considered highly eusocial.
True honey bees (genus Apis, of which eight species are currently recognized) are highly eusocial, and are among the best known insects. Their colonies are established by swarms, consisting of a queen and several thousand workers. Africanized bees are a hybrid strain of A. mellifera that escaped from experiments involving crossing European and African subspecies; they are extremely defensive.
Many bumblebees are eusocial, similar to the eusocial Vespidae such as hornets in that the queen initiates a nest on her own rather than by swarming.
Most other bees, including familiar insects such as carpenter bees, leafcutter bees and mason bees are solitary in the sense that every female is fertile, and typically inhabits a nest she constructs herself. There is no division of labor so these nests lack queens and worker bees for these species. Solitary bees typically produce neither honey nor beeswax. Bees collect pollen to feed their young, and have the necessary adaptations to do this. Solitary bees are important pollinators; they gather pollen to provision their nests with food for their brood. Often it is mixed with nectar to form a paste-like consistency.
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🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here nerd
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No current struggle session discussion here on the new general megathread, i will ban you from the comm and remove your comment, have a good day/night :meow-coffee:
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Diane Abbott’s description of dating Jez is amazing, he’s one of us:
In the summer of 1979 we went on a camping holiday in the south of France. We travelled by motorbike and, Jeremy being Jeremy, it was a socialist motorbike, an East German model. It broke down regularly on our trip south, which I found rather irritating, but lovingly repairing his motorbike by the side of the road was Jeremy’s happy place. When we reached the campsite I perked up. As well as enjoying the French countryside, I was looking forward to some delicious Gallic cuisine. I was horrified when Jeremy unpacked his motorbike saddlebags to reveal a week’s supply of instant macaroni and other processed foods.
…
Around that time I began to realise that, realistically, ours was not a match made in heaven. We were too different. I had a range of interests and enjoyed reading and the theatre, but Jeremy was 99% absorbed in party politics. The only other thing I remember him spending time on was growing vegetables in his back garden. Once, after I lamented our lack of social activity as a couple, he pondered it for a few days and told me we were going out. Feeling excited, I dressed up nicely and we bundled into the car. I had no idea where we were going – perhaps a nice wine bar? It turned out Jeremy’s idea of a social outing was to drive me to Highgate cemetery and proudly show me the tomb of Karl Marx.
The only other thing I remember him spending time on was growing vegetables in his back garden
just like me fr fr
he sounds adorable but also like someone i absolutely would also not enjoy dating lmao
Wow really a real one.
A vehicle that does run reliably but can be reliably repaired with the minimal stock of tools you can carry on a motorbike trip does have some appeal.
Bees are one of the only animals we observed to understand the concept of 0. They can do algebra. They can communicate complex ideas to each other, like the relative position of the sun accounting for the passage of time.
And for silly facts, carpenter bees don’t have stingers. They live in procreating pairs. The males usually defend the nest. But without stingers, what can they do? Well they fly around their nest and “bump” their heads into threats. Over and over. Until the threat leaves, feeling threatened by the little bee.
If you’ve never gotten a little bumblebee headbutt, you feel really special. Like “wow little guy, thanks for saying I’m big and scary”.
Bees are cool. Some might say they are the bees knees even!
Yeah but when I do this shit I only get a 70 on the math quiz. You think a bee could pass Mrs. B's Geometry class wiseguy?
they fly around their nest and “bump” their heads into threats
Again, If I did this shit I would be accused of assault. But when Bees do it it's oh so funny. We see your hypocrisy science and we won't stand for it.
Buddy if you’re small and fuzzy you can do whatever you want and people will love you. That’s just one of the laws of physics or some nerd bs
Okay, listen, I’m new here so could you kindly explain why it is the person you’re replying to the only one talking about bees here?
its because it the general megathread of the site (hexbear) where you can talk about whatever you want, i think other places also refer them as free talk, i just normally just add info about an event, thing or person just to make them a bit more informative or just they arent empty posts with only links
Thank you kindly. I figured it was something like that but I was confused because it was in the earth comm. Is it always here?
Nah, it changes from comm to comm randomly, its on earth because thats our animal comm
The mega gets hosted in a different comm every time. People volunteer to host it by picking a topic and doing a write up about the subject. This is kind of Hexbear's lounge where people talk about their lives or a current interest or whatever.
Because Bees suck, simple as. They don't do anything I can't do and they're also yellow like cowards.
ok this is all absolutely adorable but wasps and yellowjackets can still both rot in hell
any1 fw a straight-w/-bi-vibes white boy w/ a gentle spirit and a slightly spooky and haunted aesthetic? who feels loss quite acutely & has a bit of venom & righteous anger mixed up w/ the delicate nature of their soul?
anybody...?
oh god someone come quick it's an emergency soylentsnake is acting pathetic in the mega again!!! oh god oh fuck please we need to-
straight-w/-bi-vibes white boy w/ a gentle spirit
Ymmv, of course, but it was the same for me until it turned out I'm just Pan, lmao
Internalized homophobia and being raised by a family that would ridicule me any time I expressed anything outside the cishet norm kept me thinking I was just broken
i think it would be sick nasty to be bi/pan but i thought about it a lot a lot when i was younger and men really just do not do it for me the way women do. it might be more of a 90/10 attraction thing than a 100% thing and i wouldn't run from it if that shifted but i just fw women too heavy. bi flag got the sickest color scheme too it'd be cool to rep that but alas women just r Too Beautiful to me.
That's fair, like I said ymmv. I've always been most attracted to more androgynous people regardless of gender, though I lean towards liking women more than men as well. Just wanted to say that I had a similar experience, then a realization about myself much later.
The reason progressivism never took root in the gaming community is because gamers see themselves not as exploited nerds, but as temporarily embarrassed jocks.
This is a real historical transition and i was there when it happened in the early 00s. The release of the X-box and Halo rapidly changed gaming from a slightly embarassing hobby to a very bro-y frat boy popular social thing. It was a dramatic sea change. It accompanied the shift of "nerd stuff", sci fi, comics, fantasy, being aggressively mainstreamed.
It was deeply weird watching nerd shit rapidly change from being slightly stigmatized to extremely mainstream in the course of a few years.
Actually kind of interesting to know, my dumb zoomer ass typed this up as a joke.
Yeah back in the day computer hardware and software was an absolute PITA so you had to have a certain amount of understanding of how it all worked and a fair amount of patience to get games to work. There were PC games that only worked on one brand of graphics card or audio card or whatever. Installing games was a process that you had to do semi-manually and you could fuck it up. Software updates, if they happened at all, required wandering through the early internet which was not very user friendly.
That changed a lot through the 90s as computers became faster, more reliable, more common in day to day society, and much more user friendly. Gaming used to be a fairly niche hobby akin to RC planes (I guess FPV drones now), model train building, or bird watching. There were consoles aimed at families but PC gaming was a very different beast. If you were a "Gamer" you were a PC enthusiast with considerably more skill and knowledge than most people who invested some amount of time and money in the hobby. That really started to change with Half Life, Quake, Unreal, and similar very popular games in the 90s. But the release of the X-Box and Halo: CE are when everything really, really changed. Console games were for kids, PC games were for nerds, arcade games were for teenagers out on dates. Buy then we get the X-Box, which has really good big-kid graphics, and we get Halo which is an extremely well crafted game with a strong narrative experience, gorgeous visuals, and a wonderful soundtrack, and now frat bros are playing video games in their living rooms yelling and hollering with the kind of excitement you'd only see people display towards TV football prior to that. Games and nerd culture shit was being discussed on TV and the radio. TV advertising started trying to sell nerd shit to normal people. It was an intensely bizarre moment in history. Looking back I wonder if it wasn't an important step towards the adoption of smart phones - Many people's first experience using a "computer" for anything was an X-box or similar console sometime after 2001 and I wonder if the increasing cultural penetration of using game consoles might have helped people learn the skills to use smart phones.
Not that anyone actually knew how to use smart phones. Before app ecosystems were well developed they were sort of a solution in search of a problem. Very expensive toys with no clear purpose or user-base when compared to PDAs (personal digital assistant, like a smart phone that doesn't phone or have tiktok) or business and productivity focused proto-smartphones like whatever Blackberry had at the time. You couldn't really doomscroll in 2007 and the internet wasn't the series of strictly controlled walled gardens that it is now.
be me
proletarian dictatorship supervisor
in charge of making sure the proletarian dictatorship is, in fact, proletarian
occasionally have to go down there and check if the proletarian dictatorship is still proletarian
one day i go down there and the proletarian dictatorship is no longer proletarian
the dictatorship of the proletarian dictatorship is now just a regular dictatorship
distress.jpg
ask my boss what to do
he says “just make it proletarian again”
i say “how”
he says “i don’t know, you’re the supervisor”
rage.jpg
quit my job
become a regular dictatorship supervisor
first day on the job, go to the new dictatorship
its proletarian
The Kamala campaign seems to be revealing something troubling about the belief that party leadership has: Biden was too far to the left. I feel like their shared shitty stance on Gaza has detracted from the fact that she's seemingly to the right of Biden on everything. I guess he's the next FDR not in policy but in the sense that he's handing off the torch to a reactionary turn of his party.
Someone or something took all of my dopamine and ran away with it. Please come back I need this stuff
Normalize saying 'this is what Actually Existing Socialism looks like' before sending nudes
i think it benefits communists to get into Monster Trucks. Dont ask me how it'll work, I just know it.
I have once again touched grass, please clap
Had a nice walk in the woods, saw an eagle but couldn't get a pic before it flew off
Show
alcohol cessation, drugs/legal herbal supplements, mental health
Been real agitated and antsy lately and think I might have a hypomanic episode
Been sober for a month about and feel like I've turned a corner in staying dry for the foreseeable future, something clicked mentally and even when I get the urge to drink, the feeling of disgust of contempt with myself strongly outweighs wanting to get fucked up
Have some shitty family stuff going on and have been really stressed and frustrated about it and really irritable and needed something to mellow me out a bit and don't react well to weed, so I gave kratom a shot again for the first time in years
Had an iffy experience with it in the past of it just making me kind of nauseous and a little loopy, but the blend I got today is really nice
Got a nice body high and relaxed mood and feel like a good amount of the ambient muscle tension I have and back pain are dulled and relaxed and I still feel mentally like I'm completely on top of my faculties instead of anxious or fuzzy headed, this might be how NT people feel normally?
Idk I know kratom can be addictive for some people and you can develop a tolerance, but considering how bad my drinking could get I feel like this is a massive improvement, this shit kinda rocks rn
Cut my work coffee consumption in half and found a way to keep eating at work even if it's too busy to blast a quick meal. Instead of coffee I'm drinking fucking SOUP. Gonna bring a big mug in tomorrow and fill er up, keep it under a heat lamp and be the cook who is eating soup all shift
To continue my theory grind, I love how Lenin absolutely hates Kautsky, and brings him up all the time to shit on him. Lenin is such a petty debatelord, it's great
Actually really fascinating to me (and makes me even more of a godless commie) how a lot of the athletes today are just the children of athletes who thrived, became extremely wealthy and were able to get their children the best training possible
Generational wealth is a scourge on the planet.
