[click image]Just think of all those thousands of unregistered ant farms across America! Think of the revenue being denied the states! No wonder we're in such steep decline!
08 August 2009
astounding
[click image]Just think of all those thousands of unregistered ant farms across America! Think of the revenue being denied the states! No wonder we're in such steep decline!
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With Colony Collapse Disorder threatening the world's food supply, beekeeping should be encouraged, even subsidized.
ReplyDeleteExactly!
ReplyDeleteAt my parent's home the brick chimney formed one side of the recessed entry to the front door. Where was a vine which covered the whole chimney and was covered with tiny flowers most of the summer. The bees loved it and all day long you could hear a constant buzzing from the hundreds. perhaps thousands, of bees visiting our vine.
ReplyDeleteNo one was ever stung by these bees. The lawns were full of clovers and fields abundant with wildflowers also were swarming with bees.
The only times I have ever been stung by a honey bee was when I stepped on one running barefoot outside.
I've helped friends extract honey from their hives and the only time we even wore protective coverings, beyond a hat and face screen, was the last honey harvest in the fall when the bees were more protective of their stash.
When my asthma kicked in while in high school I was given a bee sting kit to carry with me in case I had a reaction. After a couple of stings without a reaction I stopped carrying it, figuring I wouldn't need it.
Honey bees die when they sting you, so they only do it in cases of dire threat.
ReplyDeleteI was stung by 200 of them at once at age seven when my five-year-old sister threw a stick at a swarm of them on an oak tree branch. I was clear across the street and screaming for her not to do it and she was right under it. 200 got me and ONE got her. I got to stay out of school for two weeks.
I was stung on the tongue once when a bee had landed on the hunk of cake in my hand and I didn't notice before trying to take another bite.
One got himself up my pants leg and freaked out and stung me.
A bear had come and raided an old bee box that had been taken over by wild bees, and evidently nailed the queen. I had no idea until I was watering the rose garden about a hundred feet away and suddenly a swarm of bees came to attack me. Luckily the hose was very high powered and I had to turn it on my head to keep them off me and then finally they dispersed enough that I could run to the house for safety. I wrapped a towel around my dripping head and started to settle down from my pumping adrenalin, when suddenly there was a buzzing inside the towel. A bee had become tangled in my hair and stung me on the crown of my head. Both eyelids swelled up so badly again, just like when I was seven, that I looked like a space alien for a few days.
Not to mention when my horse got stung and corkscrewed about fifteen feet into the air. That was a thrill a minute.
Still, even though they make me nervous -- viscerally, without any help from my brain by now -- when they take too much of an interest in me... they go for perfume... there is just NO reason humans and bees can't live together peacefully . I know they are deadly to a few, but so are walnuts and you don't have to register your walnut trees! Humans are so fucked up.
It's okay to draw the line inside your house or even in your garden, where you live and work and critters can harm you with germs and stings and bites or ruin your plants, just as any of them do when we breach their home ground, but we are the scourge of the earth with all our ninny, vicious ninny, murderating ways. No two ways about it.
Well, I meant to point out, for anyone who doesn't know, that when a hive loses its queen, the rest of the bees turn into outright sociopaths. They kamikaze anyone within 500 yards. Scary as hell. They get mad and suicidal, and they do not stop until they're all dead or another queen gets introduced. That's what we had to do with the maniacs near the rose garden. We called some bee keepers to bring a queen and take away the whole busted up mess of suddenly placid psycho killers.
ReplyDeleteThe bear, of course, was the happiest camper in Mendo World. Total bliss. A sugar rush that compensated for any amount of glop stuck to him. That damn bear was just like a kid in a candy store every summer. Berries, honey, apples... all the best... but a total candy ass. I'd catch him sauntering through my yard sometimes, between my cabin and the pond, and go out to talk to him, and every single time, he acted as though I'd tried to shoot him with a gun, bolted directly up for the safety of the forest behind the pond, splashing through it at an incredible clip and cowering behind a huckleberry bush until that big bad woman went away. It was so stupid because you could see him back there, eyes glinting in the light from my cabin, big as heck, and if I'd wanted to shoot him, he would definitely easily have become dead meat. It just made me laugh and laugh.
Still, you wouldn't believe the number of people who freaked about the presence of bears there, no matter how many stories of their complete chickentude I told them. No dice. Bears, bad. Mountain Lions, horrors. Fucking hell. Idiots. The upside was that putting a "MOUNTAIN LION CROSSING" sign up on my two-mile long driveway kept the yuppies from riding their mountain bikes out to my place... where "NO TRESPASSING" signs hadn't worked at all.
-=[ phil ]=-
ReplyDeleteHeh 99, Oh my...
When I was 9 I got one in my foot while running across the grass.
In 7th grade, during PE, (I think we were doing soccer) A swarm from 2' off the ground to about 20' hundreds and hundreds of feet wide in the air came and BLACKENED THE SKY. We were scared shitless. I never found out if anyone got stung, I think they were simply moving...
The WORST though are the yellow jackets.
ReplyDeleteI had a hole in my room where they were in the wall, Had to hire a beekeeper to get them out. They were almost into my room, and according to the beekeeper enough of them to KILL someone were in there.
-=[ phil ]=-