#melonblogging

[legendofcora]

not she/her as in Cis Woman (TM), she/her as in

you know when fantasy characters like fairies or angels or whatever have no gender system, or such a vastly different idea of gender that we have no words to accurately describe who and what they are, so they’re like. ‘I am all things, I am incomprehensible, I am so much more than your little human words can describe or understand. But yeah for the sake of convenience “she/her” is fine ig’

[legendofcora]

Real interesting how radf*m ideology really just boils down to “trans women can’t be women because I don’t want to fuck them” like wow congrats on that super elevated and enlightened feminism guys, you did it

[legendofcora]

Actually no. I take it back. This is my hot take today. Responding positively to criticism should be noteworthy. We can either have cancel culture or we can have “you don’t get a cookie” culture but imo it’s extremely toxic to have both. You can’t go “do better” and then when people actually DO BETTER go “shut the fuck up you’re meeting bare minimum”

Like I GET being frustrated that things aren’t better than they are but like damn. If we want to encourage positive growth and change in our culture we have to actually encourage it. And that means celebrating people who do want to be better and make changes to make people feel heard, or feel safe, or apologize.

[legendofcora]

People talk about humanity like we are the downfall of nature. But we have such a deep need to connect with another being that we bond with other animals at an extremely high frequency. Some of us bond with animals more than we even bond with other humans. If there is a remote possibility of befriending a given species, some human somewhere has done it. Dolphins, monkeys, lions, skunks, ferrets, birds, lizards, turtles, bears. We care for them and nurture them. We grow gardens, we plant trees and flowers, we feed birds and deer, we create botanical spaces and preserves and national parks. Maybe corporations have a bigger weight in environmental damage than the individual does in environmental maintenance, and that needs to be addressed. But on an individual level, as a core personality trait of our species, we are caretakers of this earth. We love and bond with the world around us and we learn about it so we can help it grow. And I think that’s pretty fucking special.

[legendofcora]

Babe I was raised on far right conspiracy theories you’ve never even heard of….

[legendofcora]

I got my engagement photo look all ready to go, found another accessory for it last night

And then I realize

I’m gonna look like a fuckin frozen ass disney character

Specifically

[legendofcora]

so, it finally happened

ya girl is getting married

[legendofcora]

Friends, there is a ton of misinformation floating around this website about beekeeping, and about bees in general. I love that we’re taking a collective interest in this and I want to encourage that. But there’s also a huge encampment of people with extreme views, with how we view beekeeping morally, both with an overly positive viewpoint and an overly negative viewpoint. Truthfully, it’s as nuanced as everything else in life. Please consider the following.

Beekeeping Ethics

•Beekeeping is not inherently evil or exploitative, but neither is it inherently uwu magical and benign. Like anything humans do, it can be done ethically or not, depending on who’s doing it and what their practices are.

•Honey is not vegan. I am not a vegan and I am not taking a stance on the vegan worldview one way or another. Rather, this point is to dispute a misunderstanding of the word. The definition of vegan food is that which is not derived from animals. I’m not sure what y’all think bees are, exactly, for you to be out there claiming that their output is vegan. Because they are very much animals.

•It is false that beekeepers never take more honey than they need from their hives. There are absolutely bad beekeepers out there who prioritize production over the wellbeing of their hives. There are also new/uninformed beekeepers who take too much as a result of lack of knowledge.

•Honeybees will not always just “get up and leave” if they don’t like the conditions of their hive or if their beekeeper is not caring for them well. The bees spend the entirety of their lives building and maintaining their home; the situation has to be pretty dire and the conditions have to be correct for bees to leave and even be able to leave in the first place (referred to as “absconding”).

Bee Ecology

•Honeybees make up only eight out of twenty thousand bee species in the world. Honeybees are very distinct from other bee species. With minor exceptions, honeybees are the only types that live in colonies and produce honey. The vast majority of bee species are solitary and don’t produce honey.

•Honeybees are a non-native, and sometimes invasive species in North America. They were brought by humans from Europe, where they are native. There is concern regarding displacement of native pollinators due to the introduction of honeybees into the ecosystem.

•Bees are not the only pollinators in nature, let alone honeybees. There are upwards of 200,000 pollinating creatures on this planet. In fact, a lot of “pests” that we spend a lot of effort trying to kill off are important pollinators, including many fly and wasp species.

Honeybee Biology

•The “queen” is really a misnomer. She is not in charge of the hive. Nobody is, comrades. The queen exists to reproduce. That is it. Once she is thoroughly mated, she comes home and pops out babies til she dies.

•In fact, the queen doesn’t fully get to decide what she lays. Her 1 basic function in her own life is not up to her, much less does she dictate orders to the rest of the colony. For the most part, her workers will tell her whether to lay male or female offspring (called brood), and the workers determine whether to create queens out of any female brood.

•Baby queens do duke it out to the death when multiple hatch at once. Very baby metal of them. Workers and drones do not take part in the process.

•There are anecdotal cases of multiple queens in a hive. We don’t know how common this is, largely because during hive inspections, once you find the queen, you automatically stop looking for more. If there was a second one in there, you’d be unlikely to see it at that point.

•The drones (all male honeybees) do not carry out any basic hive functions. They do not smother bad queens or help make decisions or anything else you might have read on this website. Drones are the foil to the queen: their sole purpose is to fuck off and die. In fact, once a drone successfully mates, his bee penis stays hooked inside the queen he mated with, and his guts explode in a very violent death. He goes out to find a queen from some other colony with the sole intention of spreading his colony’s genes elsewhere. If resources in his home hive dwindle, workers will start killing them; they are freeloaders as far as the colony is concerned.

•Worker bees technically cannot become a new queen if the original one dies without a suitable replacement already in the works. They can become fertile - the term is a “laying worker.” The difference is honestly a little bit complicated to try to explain in a tumblr post, but the long and short of it is that a laying worker can only lay drones. Again, drones do nothing but pump and dump. A laying worker only emerges when the death of the colony is inevitable; the goal here is just to propagate their genes out in the environment until the colony dies. She doesn’t replace the queen, and at this point the colony cannot survive without intervention from a beekeeper.

How to support bees & other pollinators

•Many of you good folk are here on this topic because you have an interest in saving the bees, which is great! You absolutely do not need to keep bees to help them. In fact, two of the best things you can do are extremely simple:

•Put out water for them. I use a flat terracotta dish set inside a hanging planter, and hang it halfway down a chain link fence so that it’s level with the bushes and flowers that I have. You want to make sure to fill it with rocks, sticks, or some other organic filler before putting water into it. Bees drown very easily so just make sure they have a place to sit while they sip :)

•Plant wildflowers/ any flowers that are native to your area. Flowers are friends and food.

•Be nicer to wasps. Please. Not only are they important pollinators as we talked about, but they are a great natural form of pest control for things that truly are a nuisance.

•Bird feeders and birdbaths are also great ways to help pollinators. Remember that pollination is a massive ecological effort across a huge variety of birds, mammals and insects. It’s great to help the bees, but don’t forget about everyone else in the picture too.

•You can try to set up a bee hotel. It’s a small wooden box with rows of narrow holes. The idea with a hotel is to create a space for solitary bees to nest in. Frankly, I have not had any luck with this, and to my understanding most people do not. I’ve used it as a temporary shelter for a couple errant bees in my yard who were tired / freezing / in shock for unknown reasons so that they could rest. Ymmv.

•Finally, be educated. Bees are absolutely fascinating and the ecology of pollination is extremely intricate. You definitely do not have to know everything there is to know on the subject. Just understand that things are always more complicated than a 60 character tweet can ever express, and if you walk away with an overly emphatic response to something, know that you are almost guaranteed to be missing some information.