I really want people to focus on the “hours later” component. Conservatives and non-voters have been harping about Biden being a do-nothing president, but this is absolutely not the case.
Do not fall for the apathy, do not engage in purism, and do not surrender to despair.
Wild that folks keep saying beekeepers abuse bees as if bees are not both venomous flying animals and fully unionized
Hubris to think you COULD abuse bees
I think that if you see a balrog in an unlocked kitty kennel then you can assume that it wants to be there
Actually, beekeepers take many precautions to keep their bees from leaving.
many clip the wings of the queen, destroy new queen cells, cull queens they don’t like and use bee pheromones to prevent a hive from naturally swarming or absconding. They also try and prevent mating with the African honey bee, which makes them less docile among other things. During artificial insemination of queens, drones are crushed and „spare“ queens are killed.
and commercial beekeepers even cull their hives during winter, or when they are not producing well.
Coupled with the fact that there is evidence that insects do feel pain, this is not great.
(Not to mention that honeybees are an invasive species in most places, competing with native pollinators and spreading disease)
It is so fucking bold of you to link the exact same paywalled book thirteen times in your reblog to throw people off the fact that you’re using one source from 1859.
having gone to the linked source I’m actually very unsure even if you got behind the paywalled source it says what it’s claimed, as among the preview pages are:
“In all our operations with the bees we must use gentleness. All quick sudden jars and motions irritate them. So does breathing on them. Bees are always more gentle and less inclined to sting when they are gathering honey; and at such times hives can be opened with very little danger; whereas when a dearth of honey prevails the inmates of the same hive might show a great spirit of resentment. I have observed that colour exerts some influence on the temper of this insect. I have found that dark shades of clothing, particularly red, are more distasteful to them than white. Hence when working among them I always go in shirt sleeves pr in light coloured clothes.”
The broader page is about how being stung is unpleasant but not the end of the world, and you can easily minimize it…. By being thoughtful and careful and calm. I can’t find reference to clipping wings or culling; there is a mention of removing drone comb but only carefully, and it’s useful to remember that the hive itself literally drives the drones out to die once they’ve served their purpose. There’s no mention I could find of artificial insemination of queens, and I’m VERY sure that in 1859 they did not have reliable access to BEE PHEROMONES xD xD
There is mention of using smoke but dire warnings of oversmoking; and since the first record of Africanized honey bees is from THE NINETEEN FIFTIES, not the eighteen fifties, that poster is DEFINITELY lying about that citation, as unless the Victorian writer of that book was a fucking Time Lord, they can’t have known that cross breeding was a concern.
This is why it’s not enough to merely assume that because someone has REFERENCED a source, this means they have evidence. It is necessary to check that the source says what they claim. In this case that is in many cases literally impossible, and in all other cases unproven.
the other thing is that, like, the hive very much makes decisions in its own collective self-interest with little care for the dignity of individual bees, including the queen. Any framework which treats the individual bees as the primary units of ethical treatment is missing the entire concept of what a beehive is as a eusocial organism. Bees do not meaningfully exist outside of a hive any more than human cells exist outside a human. You need to be looking at what’s good for the hive, not what’s good for individual bees. You know the Borg? The aliens in Star Trek who completely disregard the needs of the individuals and act as a single mind? Yeah, they were very much inspired by bees.
But back on topic. doing things like re-queening a hive if the queen is unproductive or has bad genetics is, spoiler alert, something the hive will do to itself if necessary. like I cannot emphasize this enough, worker bees will kill an unproductive queen and crown a successor themselves. workers decide collectively when a new queen is pupated, not the prior queen. the queen’s job is simply to lay an egg in the appropriate cells as directed by workers. that is her ONLY purpose. she is the reproductive tract of the hive. if she is not doing her job, SHE WILL BE REPLACED - BY THE HIVE.
conversely, if the existing queen is perfectly fine at her job and she detects another queen in the hive, she will seek it out and kill it - often before it has even emerged. all queens have the innate drive to fight each other to the death, because there can only be one per hive. a new queen represents a threat to both her life individually and her hive collectively, because the presence of two queens is likely to cause a split, pulling half the bees away from the colony as they swarm to follow the new queen as she leaves, and in a small hive this could mean death if the remainder do not have the numbers to stay warm in winter. so the queen will attempt to kill new virgin queens for exactly the same reason beekeepers will cut out queen cups - to protect the hive and keep its population large and strong. not only that, if you’re still really insisting on being “humane” to individual bees over considering the health of the collective and the natural ecology of eusocial organisms, you should know that queen cups can be removed by the beekeeper before there is even a larva in them - the workers build the cups and then the queen lays an egg into them, in that order. A freshly-built cup can be pinched out before an egg is even laid in it if the beekeeper is checking the hive frequently enough. This is in contrast to the queen killing her daughter queens while they are pupas or freshly-emerged adults.
And yeah there are certain beekeeping practices that can be bad for the hive! “Bees-for-hire” schemes where bees are trucked around as mobile pollinators is one example; hives are stationary in nature and moving them can easily spread diseases that they are not equipped to deal with. I’ll be the first to say that’s an unsustainable practice - but if you want to avoid consuming products that result from that, you’ll need to give up almonds and a whole host of other fruits and tree nuts that are ostensibly vegan, because the pollination of orchards is the primary application of doing that - if you just want to produce honey, it’s cheaper to just leave the bees stationary since they tend to live longer and stay healthier like that, and healthy bees means more honey.
Yes, and, quick, minor note, when bees swarm, it’s the older queen that leaves, after laying eggs into queen cells, and whichever of those eggs hatch first kills the other unhatched queens, before becoming the new queen of the remaining old hive.
I only point this out bc I thought the young queens left to go get fertilized, returned maybe, and then left forever to start a new hive, and was surprised to find that the old queen leaves instead, and while the young queen does leave to get fertilized, she returns to her birth hive to continue growing the hive.
I fucking love bees.
I like how vegance frames “they try to prevent mating with African honey bees” as a bad thing. Like, yes a lot of the panic surrounding Africanized honey bees is sensationalism, but also they are genuinely dangerous and are invasive
It’s hilarious how they claim to be in favor of protecting the environment but also think it’s like, totally okay to drive species to extinction because *checks notes* humans created a hybrid in an attempt to make bees produce more honey and now they’re everywhere, but that’s okay because free will or something.
Like. They kill other bees, dude. Not just honeybees, although that’s the nice charismatic one people love to talk about saving and vegans go gaga for as some kind of clarion call of “slave labor.” No, I mean they’ll take on mason bees, carpenter bees, I’ve seen Africanized bees take on fucking hornets because the nest location was prime bee real estate. What do you suppose that’s doing to the rest of the ecosystem? We are a complex web, we’re all intertangled. Destroying those populations is a serious concern. Sure, maybe they’re not threatened now. But that’s what we said about local black ants when Argentinian black ants moved into the area, and guess what no longer lives here (and what’s taken over instead).
The NHL will not allow teams to wear “cause-based” jerseys next season, the league confirmed on Thursday.
The league’s Board of Governors agreed with Commissioner Gary Bettman’s view that the refusals overshadowed teams’ efforts in hosting Pride nights that in some cases included auctioning off the warmup jerseys. All 32 teams held Pride or Hockey is for Everyone night.
Teams will still celebrate Pride and other theme nights, including military appreciation and Hockey Fights Cancer. They’re also expected to still design and produce jerseys to be autographed and sold to raise money, even though players won’t skate around with them on during warmups.
Pride jerseys became a hot-button issue in the league last season after multiple players refused to wear them during warmups.
omg can we please stop catering to the whiny babies who refuse to wear a shirt with a fucking rainbow on it because someone might think they believed in equality for all persons.
im so fucking tired of organizations kowtowing to the bigots. suspend players who are dickweeds. tell the assholes they don’t belong. make hockey unsafe for prejudice.
ALT
