Bees
 

Howdy y'all,
I have an upcoming presentation to give for English and it is about the plight of the honey bee (since I keep 'em,) here's where you lot come in (and I'm sure I'll regret it) is there anything you've ever wanted to know about bees? If so ask here and I'll answer, hopefully it'll give me some practice for the examination.

What is the average volume of a Bees beenis?

How many bees are eaten by injured spiders every month?

Where are they going?

I can answer you Disgruntled Intern, (and fuck you to the rest) the bees have been disappearing due to colony collapse disorder, there are many possibilities as to where CCD comes from but we speculate that the bees (which appear to simply vanish) migrate away from the hive and die, some people have even seen the bees literally walking out of the hive which is completely unusual because bees have a hive mentality meaning they shouldn't ever leave the queen (revolution is almost impossible.)

oh and Josh, a beenis is roughly 40-50 milligrams in weight a beegina of a worker is about 10-20 (so bigger than yours Max)

how long does a bee live for once its stung something? or does it die within seconds?

oh ho! he PWNED yo ass, Max!

Can bees from other colonies [I don't mean hives that are only two feet away from each other, I'm talking miles here] co-mingle, or are they like ants? I mean, will they go batshit and wage war if they catch a whiff of a stinky new bee that don't belong?

A bee from another hive gets pushed out because he has a diffent queen's pheremone, but he probably won't be hurt too badly if he doesn't resist.

Well that brings about another question:

Why would he even come around? If bees really are the little robots that they're made out to be, why go dicking around another colony at all?

My actual knowledge fades out at this point, but I'm guessing that if the invaded colony is recently established the smell of nectar and honey may be stronger than the smell of bees, meaning it just appears to the bee to be a big patch of flowers or whatever.

That's just a guess. More likely is that they get messed up in the head by infection or cold (bees really don't like cold) and they lose their navigation abilities. Or in the case of man-made hives, swapping places of hives may confuse them.

I should hope so, because otherwise it would imply I am a bee and have a vagina.

Nice try, Maxine.

I saw a documentary about this once.
A much larger species from a rival colony infiltrated the hive. I forgot how he managed to sneak in, something to do with mucking up the other bees' sensory chemicals. In any case, they found him out and executed him by swarming him and vibrating their bodies. By doing this they increased their body temperatures and basically "cooked" the bee that didn't belong.

Ok, I'm gonna answer you awalll!

@ Disgruntled Intern question 2 - Bees do get around, in the summer a bee will be let in if she has enough honey and the guard bees don't think she smells bad (pheromone)
Like a little bee bouncer at a beeight club -

"Alright hun are you getting here?"
"Plz, I haz gucci numba four on!"
"Ok then fine, only coz u smells nice and haz lots uf honnee,"
"Kthxbi"

Bees aren't little robots like people make out they are, they do sniff around and have regular breaks between work where they meet up (sort of) eat and have a good lick of the queens face! ;)

@ Mollucks Assisstant - depends, if your hard core like me and a bee stings you, you can let it dig its stinger out of your arm/face/lower areas, but if it pulls it's sting off then it will die in a few minutes since it's basically ripped it's lower torso off!

@ Sekto Springs - You may have watched asian bees killing hornets or bees killing wasps with this method, bees I think just sting other bees, its one of the few things they can survive.

They fled back to their home planet when they sensed that the Daleks were destroying reality.

I heard that There was some sort of colony collapse disorder in Beehives. Any update on that?

How many chromosomes does a bee have?

And it's supposed to be off the top of your head. So don't you google search it you naughty boy, you.

Yeah, if you're going doing that, tell us now we go asking all these questions.

But please yourself.

I saw what you did there, you.

Who the hell pronounces behave bee-hi-v.

Oh and why do i keep ending my post in you?

Asstroylyins.

i bet you spent ages doing that. aww.

If a bee was given a large supply of honey and isolated from other bees, would it continue to collect nectar?

What differences are there between a honey bee and a bumble bee besides their appearance?

How much honey does a bee consume in a lifetime?

These are all questions I just thought of and decided I would like to know the answer to. It's not really important, but it's interesting to know.

How independant is a bee outside of the hive?

What is the pheremone scent of a female bee?

Do you like your beehive like you like your coffee?

Do you like your beehive like you like your martinis?

Only honey bees have serrated stings, and only the workers at that. Serrated stings stick in the skin of birds and mammals and are thus torn out, so they are only stung when the nest as a whole is threatened. Queen bees have smooth stings like wasps, so can sting many times. The serrations are thought to enhance the sting's ability to pierce insect exoskeletons, useful for bee-to-bee combat.

Solitary bees can sting as many times as they like. If they have a sting, that is. Many do not.

The way that bees typically deal with violent intruders (such as wasps) is to surround them with dozens of bees, encasing the intruder in a ball. They will then begin to furiously vibrate their wings, eventually raising the body temperature of the intruder to a deadly level.

I think that's pretty darn cool.

Cool and scary.

Holy shit ok here goes!

@ Strike Witch: CCD is caused by disruptions in the bees sense, notably in American areas like California, probably because the Americans force the bees to eat only one type of plant and move em around to the next crop (apples to nectarines to oranges to hazelnuts etc) Bees don't like to be strapped to a car on top of a truck and three hundred other hives then moved about forty miles.

@ MoxCo - No idea on workers (I forget) but drones have 16 so workers probably have 32 because a queen gives birth to boys n girls by choice. and fertilisation (males are unfertilised so 16 ((no sperm))

@ Oddey Q1 - A bee would keep collecting honey from the flower it was on then when it realised there where no more bees or it was lost, it would fly around by itself till it died of the cold at night.
Q2 - A honey bee is highly eusocial, and lives in colonies of up to 60,000, a bumble bee lives in vastly smaller colonies and live in holes in the ground, a bee hive will live in a tree naturally.
Q3 - Quite a bit, they collect 300 milligrams a journey, roughly 40 journeys a day, life of four weeks 12,000x28=336,000 milligrams so they would probably eat a few grams a day?

@Ridg3 A bee lives under the rule of the colony, not the queen so their independence is limited to what they know, just like North Koreans.
A female bee (worker) pheromone if I am correct in what I think you mean, smells like well, not a lot, we have no where near enough sensitive nosels!

@OANST - It only works in isolated cases where bees have evolved with these predators, most bees will simply sting intruders because they have no fear of death. Like the banzai!

'Nosel' is a much cooler word than 'nose'. I propose we try and change the dictionary to match Scrabtrapman's accidental but fortunate spelling mistake.

I was gonna ask a question but then my internet died and it didn't post, and then i forgot, and the someone else asked the question instead. But are you saying CCD is caused solely by hive disruption? What causes this other than Americans, and can we do anything to help? Also, can you make us a graph showing exactly how dead the human race would become if bees were to go extinct?

twasn't an accident Splat ;)

Ok, not solely, no one is entirely sure what causes CCD, but this may be one reason.

And on point 2, we wouldn't be that dead, we have wind dispersed cereal crops but many would die of starvation.

(u did ask me to make the graph therefore, it's shit!) :fuzblink:

|------------- bees die here
|...................--------------------
|...............................................-------------------- : VERDICT: A bit dead
|________________________________________________

graph in relation to availability of food after bee extinction.

Some parts of China there are NO bees what so ever so they hand pollinate crops

So what you're saying is... If bees went extinct, America would crumble and China would be left as the most powerful nation on Earth?

And basically everything everywhere was manufactured in China, giving them bountiful opportunities to plant cunningly disguised evil bee traps in every country of the world?

I think we need the old James Bond back... :dodgy:



A Jar of Dead Fish Productions wishes to apologise for the appalling racism in the above post; Chine megalomaniacal super-villains are people, too.

err,

Do different types of bees produce different kinds of honey?

Honest, serious question.

Mexican bees would produce spicy honey if they weren't so lazy.

Polish bees are the only species recorded to practise stealing the jobs of worker bees from other hives.

African bees make honey from chickens.