Dear god, she’s the Secretary of Homeland Security? » « First they came for the libraries

Today is World Bee Day!

Get out there and celebrate bees! I’d like to. I tried. But right now we’re drowning in near constant rain and drizzle and cool temperatures, so all our bees are hiding. We’ve planted lots of bee-friendly flowers in our yard, but they haven’t blossomed yet.

I guess I’ll have to settle for this poor photo I took last year.

My excuse is that I’m usually looking for spiders, and it’s pure chance that I might click the shutter when a bee wanders by. Still, I appreciate them, especially since they can be a good source of spider food.

Dear god, she’s the Secretary of Homeland Security? » « First they came for the libraries

Comments

  2. robro says

    Because my partner the gardener (a friend calls her “Chance”) is laid up after knee surgery, I’ve been doing the watering. I’ve never seen so many types of bees. They are having a wonderful time and they seem completely uninterested in and unperturbed by me.

  3. Hemidactylus says

    I have sand wasps around my yard instead. They’re kinda cool. I don’t inquire what corpses they are stuffing into the holes they dig in my yard and they pretty much leave me alone. Paper wasps on the other hand, I have a can of spray for them and a particular set of skills in aiming it.

    If we are on the Bs, it is also Busta Rhymes b-day today. He and Mos Def collaborated on one of the best hiphop tracks. Look it up. Mad skills.

  5. JimB says

    birgerjohansson @1
    The bees made it to the states in 1990. Have killed very few people though, but quite a few animals.

    They are in southern New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. Maybe in Arkansa or Louisiana by now. In California they are all thru the central valley almost to Sacramento.

    The movie was “The Swarm”. I even saw it in a movie theatre. Wasn’t very good, but my wife at the time was a huge Richard Chamberlain fan.

  6. says

    We usually don’t see honey bees here but we do see a lot of “bumbly bees”, as I like to call them. Industrious and at times plentiful, swarming over our flowers. Definitely not aggressive. To us, they’re another welcome sign of spring.

    It would be welcome if they decided to supplement their diet with black flies and deer flies, though.

  7. says

    Forgot to mention that the bumblies have been out here for a while as the vinca is in full bloom, and the blueberries have started to blossom. Also, some of the fruit trees (service berry). Crazy cold this week, though (low 50F).

  8. Militant Agnostic says

    Bumble Bees have smooth (no barbs) stingers, so they can sting more than once like a wasp or hornet. Fortunately they are not aggressive. One morning is observed a commotion in the lawn which was fight between a bumblebee and a yellow jacket. The bumblebee flew away leaving the yellow jacket twitching on the ground.

  10. Silentbob says

    But can a bee be said to be
    Or not to be an entire bee
    When half the bee is not a bee
    Due to some ancient injury?

  11. StevoR says

    Possibly useful webite here :

    https://www.bumblebeewatch.org/

    Albeit specifically on Bumblebees and seems to be USAican.

    For Aussies we have this page :

    https://www.aussiebee.com.au/

    With stacks of info and phots of our local native ones.

    More broadly heard on a doco seen last night “..it’s estimated that we are losing around 9% of the world’s insects every decade.”

    Source : Australia’s Wild Odyssey epsidoe 2. @ the 33 mins mark :

    https://iview.abc.net.au/video/DO2104H002S00

  12. John Morales says

    More broadly heard on a doco seen last night “..it’s estimated that we are losing around 9% of the world’s insects every decade.”

    So the amount of insects (A) exhibits this curve: A_n = A_0 \times (0.91)^n

    (That’s nice, it will never quite get to zero)

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