Please tell me about the bees
Oh no you have activated my trap card
Honeybee facts:
Honeybees are native to Eurasia and are not naturally found in North America. There are stingless bees in south America and Mexico that produce honey but they are a different taxonomic class than honeybees
The way you check for varroa mites (a parasite common with honeybees) is absolutely hilarious to me. You take a half a cup of bees (scooped with a measuring cup, which is hilarious) and put them in a jar. Then dump a bunch of powdered sugar in the jar. Then you cover the jar with a screen. And then. You just. Shake the jar a bunch until the bees are covered in powdered sugar. Then you turn the jar upside down and shake out the powdered sugar and look for mites in it. If you have more than 5 you have and infestation. Bees. Shaken, not stirred. It doesn't hurt the bees and you just put them back in the hive and the other bees eat the sugar on them. They're fine. But the mental image of shaking a jar full of bees and powdered sugar is just so funny.
Importing honeybees into the US is illegal so a while back researchers at WSUs bee lab went overseas to collect bee semen so they can breed calmer more disease resistant honeybees. I desperately wish I could find the article I read about it because the photo in it of a tiny vial of bee semen was also hilarious
Honeybees can get jet lag. They ran an experiment where they flew European bees to north America and the bees woke up for the day on European time
Cursed honeybee facts
Bees have hair growing out of their eyes
When a male bee mates his testicles explode and he dies. He came and went
In preparation for winter the worker bees kick all the drones out of the hive and then seal up the hive with propolis and leave the drones to die in the cold
Bumblebee facts
You can teach bumblebees to do tricks. They did a study in the UK where they rewarded bees for pushing a ball into a hole and then tested to see if the bees could teach other bees and they could! (You can download videos of bees doing tricks from that link btw. You're welcome)
There are no bumblebees south of the Sahara or in Australia because it's too hot for them. The only bumblebees native to the southern hemisphere are in south America.
They think bumblebees evolved in the mountains of central Asia and that's where the biggest diversity of bumblebee species is
There was a bumblebee native to where I was born called Franklin's Bumblebee that is thought to be extinct, but people still go up into the mountains looking for them and they are my favorite bee and I have a tattoo of one because I think that says a lot about humanity's capacity for hope. And they COULD still be out there. We've found "extinct" bees out there living their best little bee lived before!! (Here's the tattoo)
Random other bee facts
There's a bee native to the southwestern US and northern Mexico called the sunflower chimney bee and they're called that because they feed off composite flowers like sunflowers and build little mud tunnels as entrances to their nests in the ground. No one knows why they do that! But I think they're neat!!!
There's bees native to the southwestern US desert that have evolved to have body temps of 103°F/39°C
Most bees do not live in social colonies like honeybees do. Most bees are solitary, meaning each female makes her own nest and lays her own eggs. Tho some solitary bees will nest very near each other
We are learning that bees native to north America like blue orchard bees and blueberry Mason bees are more effective crop pollinators than honeybees, especially for early spring crops when it's still too cold for honeybees to be out and about.
This has been bee info dump time with V. Tune in next time and I'll talk about blue bees!
