Friday, February 22, 2019

This bee is huge.

I've gotten stung by bees quite a bit in my life. My dad used to keep bees, because he was a farmer, and he liked the insects to be around to pollinate his crops. As a result we always had honey. Sometimes it was blue in color and tasted really exotic. The color of the honey is dependent on what flowers are used to make the honey (a lot of people don't know that).

The Wallace Bee is a rare bee I heard about on the way to work on Thursday. Scientists (at first) didn't know it actually existed, but they'd heard rumors. Well they tracked one specimen down in Indonesia and above is a picture that contrasts it with a regular honeybee.

The thing is huge. It's like the kaiju of bees, having somehow survived the prehistoric era to make it into our polluted, modern world. It's also apparently peaceful, having no stinger, and those jaws are basically like small salad tongs which it uses to carry stuff back to its nest.

It's nice to have some good news now and then, especially having just learned that we are only five generations from the apocalypse.

6 comments:

  1. That's a big bee. Indonesia? Doesn't surprise me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I didn't know that about bees and honey. I live in a country area and see all kinds of bees and wasps. One of the biggest is a carpenter bee. It looks like a big bumble bee. I use RAID on them.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Giant Killer Bees would be a good Syfy movie.

    ReplyDelete
  4. That thing is huge. Yikes. And that article is sobering.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I saw that bee on the news and figured I'd never want to see one in person. But I know bees are essential to the environment so I don't mind them. But wasps? Those nasty suckers ATTACK people just out of spite, or at least that's been my personal experience.

    ReplyDelete