Bees don’t die when they sting. They have a barbed stinger, human skin is elastic and that’s why they get stuck. Our first reaction is to swat or swipe on the site of stinging which rips their stinger off by force. If you leave the bee alone, it will wiggle and twirl around, trying to get itself unstuck and sometimes that is successful, sometimes they’re fucked. The bee didn’t really commit suicide when stinging, you killed it.
Also, did you know that the queen bee has almost full control over their offspring? It works like this: The queen bee only mates once in her life during the nuptial flight and stores the sperm in her spermatheca (like a sperm sac), the drone usually dies in the process because mating tears their endophallus off and the trauma kills him. After founding a colony the queen can now choose whether to fertilize her eggs or not and if she does, a female larva will hatch from the fertilized egg, else a drone larva will hatch through a process called haploid parthenogenesis.
The destiny of becoming a queen or a worker depends entirely on the diet the female larva is fed: all larvae are fed royal jelly (a special secretion from worker bees) for a few days and then worker bees are switched to what is called bee bread which is a mix of pollen and nectar while future queens stay on the royal jelly diet. The royal jelly lets the bees develop their ovaries, making them capable of laying eggs. Technically, all worker bees can lay eggs (which could only produce drones), but in a healthy colony, they will be switched off the royal jelly soon enough so that this rarely occurs.
So, in a way, worker bees can stage a mutiny if they are unhappy with their current queen by feeding a larva royal jelly, rearing a new queen.
Bees are awesome.
Thanks! That was an awesome little read!
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Royal jelly for queens is stored in special compartments that are constructed specifically to rear a new queen and they drop the larvae in there. Wikipedia has a pic.
My understanding is that while they can make a new queen under the radar, hypothetically, the slightly different scent of her eggs/haploid larva is seen as a hostile invasion and it’s quickly dispatched by loyalists, which is why non-main-queen offspring rarely happens.
Something like because they are all essentially genetically identical, they all have the same pheromones, but the next generation won’t.
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Is there anything that a bee would sting that it’s barbed stinger wouldn’t get stuck in? It seems like most anything would result in stinger detachment
Other insects mostly. Technically also birds, but birds are too quick and too strong so the fight is usually over before the bee can sting.
Other insects, thats the primary use of their stinger
The barb is mostly meant to aid in staying attached while injecting venom and is meant to still be able to release by twisting
Human skin is more elastic than bee’s typical adversaries and the singer becomes stuck when they try to release. It you wait a while and let them try to pull it out carefully without hurting themselves, they might end up going in circles until it works its way free
woah, bee society is more interesting than i thought. thank you for sharing!
Damn right I killed it, that sting still lives rent free in my brain 25 years later!
ime they simply don’t think
Never in my life have I had a situation with a bee. Wasps on the other hand…
As soon as I saw “carnival” and “wasps,” I understood the connection immediately.
We call them “fair bees”; they are drunk and aggressively non-violent about drinking your daiquiri, as well as rummaging through every trash can. Never been stung by one, but they can be aggravating sometimes cause they won’t leave me or my drink alone… like any obnoxious drunk, really
So I can see how you can get to thinking about wasps from “carnival”. The “fair bees” definitely remind me of wasps being assholes
Yeah, any outdoor environment with food involved immediately brings to mind yellowjacket/bee/wasp type insects not leaving sugary drinks alone.
Funny thing is, sometimes I’ll do this out of the blue days later and my wife picks up on it immediately.
This extends to being an expert in your field as well. We’ve done an experiment and the result is both incredible and obvious. To me.
The struggle is then to connect and explain these things I am seeing to other people who are themselves also extremely intelligent but don’t have the same exact brand of autism.
same exact
brand of autism.information set. You are describing knowledge, not process.
My wife regularly has rogue “brain trains” like this. Keeps things fun :)
My GF sometimes has to ask me what I’m talking about because I ask her a question with no context, but most of the time now she knows, not sure if she just knows me well enough or if she has found a way to join me on my “brain train”.
My wife likes including me in the middle of conversations that she started in her head.
I have to occasionally remind her that I need a little context.
this has nothing to do with neurodivergence. it’s just how brains work. necessarily, in fact. your dad’s just an idiot.
by the way it’s not the same thing but one thing I enjoyed doing when i was younger and talked with my dad for long enough, we would stop at a point and think “wait how did we even get here?” and trace back the conversation to several topics ago.
we both have diverse interests, maybe that’s why things we talked about would keep chaining to random other things. now that i think of it, my dad used to buy lots of encyclopedias before the internet, and we’d just randomly browse them. even on our computer we had multiple versions of Encarta. and now we use wikipedia and it’s so easy to jump from one article to another.
so i guess what we did all those years ago wasn’t far off from wiki surfing verbally.
Not everyone’s brain works like that. My girlfriend, for one. She struggles to make those
arbitraryabstract jumpsArbitrary or abstract?
If the other person can’t follow your train of thought, it can feel as though the emotional and cognitive connection/trust that was built in the conversation was abandoned along with the previous context. This can happen when there is a non-trivial jump in context between ideas.
Steering the conversation can be done by introducing intermediary steps that are connected to the previous topic in a self-evident way. This maintains that cognitive and emotional connection/trust because you are showing that you value the other person’s understanding and participation.
Figuring out what “non-trivial” or “self-evident” means is probably the hard part but you’d probably want to consider each step in, for example:
Grass, meadow, forest, tree, timber, log truck, mill, paper, exports, shipping dock, ocean, ice caps, ice bergs, titantic, James Cameron, Michael bay, transformers.
You could probably go from each one to the next trivially, steering the conversation from grass to meadow and so on through the list. But to go from grass to transformers without intermediate ideas truly makes absolutely no sense.
Neurotypicals don’t have “trains of thought” they have “teleporters of thought”
It wasn’t a carnival, it was a candy themed amusement park, and one of the stands was “make your own lolipop”, and I wasn’t looking, and fuck - I got stung on my tongue by a wasp.
That’s probably the easiest connection for me to make if I had been part of that conversation.
It’s not a “hack” per se, but at least I got lots of free icecream following. Until my parents got to thinking that ice cubes are free…I followed that like a train tracks.
I think most people don’t think about what they think about.
Therefore they aren’t.
And it shows.
I was told “still waters run deep” but sometimes still waters are just… still.
Imagine being an NT person and just bumping into one topic after another like a moth, I’d much rather know how I got to wherever I ended up. 😅
I’m NT, and “thinking about thinking” is how my brain works. A lot of “normal” brains do, but there’s a HUGE spectrum of how introspective people are.
First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those.
Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those.
Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.
TIL that I am a witch.
J/k… I’ve known that for a long time. 😹
RIP Terry Pratchett ❤️
Even without attribution or ever reading this quote before, I just knew it had to be Sir Terry Pratchett and I was right.
That man was unmatchable in his wit and wisdom and how he packaged life lessons on simply being good people into entertaining stories. The world is lesser without him.
i think the world is brighter for having had him. i don’t want to mourn him, i want to celebrate what he’s given us
GNU Terry Pratchett
Never knew what this meant, just looked it up. I should read Going Postal.
You absolutely should, assuming that you are a nerd it’s IMO his best book. I have a lovely hard cover edition.
I’ve heard good things about the whole industrialization arc. I’ll binge it eventually like I did with the city watch, Rincewind, Death, and witches arcs.
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Just that first part … most people don’t think
Then what do they do?
Life must be so boring to them.
On the contrary, I imagine them being constantly slightly surprised by things, like they’re along for the ride. Sounds relaxing.
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I always assumed that most people do this just much slower. Hence why they would switch fewer topics.
Building off this, im fully capable of having 2 entirely different conversations at once.
Ive been talking to one person at work, stop mid sentence to correct the other crew, and go back to what I was saying with a small reminder.
I’ve had two conversations with the same person at the same time.
Really common with text chatting, since they reply to conversation 1 while I’m replying to conversation 2, then we switch.
At like 3 or 4 simultaneous conversations in different languages things go wrong and I accidentally use the wrong language in one of them.
Everything is fine until you say the wrong strawberry?
It’s more like one person suddenly hears a weird mumble they don’t understand.
Yeah my gf sometimes does this but uses one app for one conversation and another for a different one.
