Adam. wrote:

Nico Adie wrote:I have no idea what its correct name is. Their hovering abilities are incredible.

An impostor, the 'flower fly'. Not a real bee or wasp at all, probably gets beaten up at the annual stripy-insect convention...

Very cool.

Nope, it's not one of those. I know my insects. It's a bee, a bona fide bee, that hovers.

I've only ever seen them in my back garden.

The stinging insects are as cool as they are scarey (some of them). Honeybees in particular are wonderful to have around, and some of my neighbors still keep them. I have Cicada Killer wasps from time to time living in the yard. They make solo burrows. The wasps are just a bit smaller than your thumb...but not much. I once saw one grab a cicada in flight, take it to the ground, repeatedly jam an enormous stinger into the cicada, then fly away with the paralyzedd carcass. All in the space of about 90 seconds.

Whoa...

Yeah, the cicada killers, I have seen those. They are huge. They take the paralyzed cicadas down into their burrow and eat out a big hole in the thing, where they then deposit their larvae. They are the largest of the hornets, I believe. Fucking sick but cool.

Recently saw a bee documentary that showed what they said was a fairly common thing...An army of hornets attacked a honey bee hive and killed all the bees so they could eat the honey. They had cameras inside the hive somehow, and these hornets totally dwarfed the bees. Killed every fucking one of them. Honey is crack, or meth, to hornets.

i sprayed the crap out of the 2 nests last night with wasp/hornet killer. this morning things were looking pretty bleak for my winged friends.

nick 1
bees (yellowjackets) 0

fuck you yellowjackets.

oh man back in jr high school i was hanging out with a bunch of my friends during lunch hour and we were all just sitting outside and lying to each other about how many boobs we've seen when this fucking bee when zooming in towards scott and scott hit the bee with his hand and the bee just went flying through the air backwards and poked me in the forehead and then that fucking bee unloaded his venomous ass into my forehead and i thought i was going to goddamned die

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:I've always wanted to keep bees.

Seconded. Could you not imagine yourself standing there in some impermeable white garment, just watching them dance for hour after hour?

Or tending after a whole fleet of hives, each sited in a different field on your Tuscan estate, and with each giving a differently flavored honey? And then you would gaze out the window at the stooped, gnarled peasants working your land, with plates laid out before you on your table, each with its own brimming slab of comb, and you would write brief, captivating encomia to the wildflower essences conveyed to you by entire societies of thousands of insects. No?

No bees, no beekeeper joke.

Not crap.