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Saw this on television:

Hornet scout goes out seeking honey;
finds honey;
returns to hornet scout friends.

30 hornets fly to nest with honey;
hornets bite off the heads of 30,000 honey bees;
every single bee is eradicated by 30 hornets;
hornets get drunk off of honey along with their little hornet layerlings (or those funny-looking eggs that the she-hornet lays).

2nd scenario:

Hornet scout finds honey nest of Japanese honeybee--dumb move;
Japanese honeybees surround scout hornet and madly beat their wings;
they beat their wings till it is exactly 117 degree Farenheit at which point the Scout hornet dies;
known only to Japanese honeybees till recently, one degree higher of wing beating (i.e., 118) and the honeybees would have died, but they're too smart for that.


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cool info! thanks wordwind!

bacteria are also sensitive to heat.. many die at 103 to 104 degrees.. (malairia is one) high fevers associated with many infecttions are your bodies way of killing the bacteri off.. most human brains begin to "cook' (ie, die) at 105.. so fevers higher than that are deadly.. even 104 is considered very dangerous.

cool that bees have found out how to kill of hornets by giving them a fever.


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Absolutely amazing! Makes me want to throw The Little Book of Bees out the window and go out and buy myself a big screen TV.
Thanks for the information WW, what great science by the Japanese bees!

These contributions to this AWAD compendium of bees are bland in comparison but they are in me, and must come out.

* The famous dance of the honeybees to tell co-workers the location of nectar fields is adjusted by the dancers to take into account almost infinitesimal daily shifts of the magnetic field of the Earth.

* Distances to food sources are communicated to hivemates by the speed of the dance. The faster the dance, the closer the food. The slower the dance the further the food. Some investigators believe that the distances to food sources are measured by the locating bee by self-counting the amount of energy expended by the bee in her direct flight home which is then translated into the speed of the dance - a neat little biological calculation.

* All honeybee languages are not the same. Though all dance, some races of honeybees speak in a "dialect" that is all but incomprehensible to other bees of their own species. The sophistication of information transfer is likely environmentally determined.

______________from The Little book of bees.


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neat stuff, guys. thanks!



formerly known as etaoin...
#130728 07/31/04 02:40 PM
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The naked mole rat lives in underground colonies of seventy to eighty individuals. Among these individuals only one exceptionally large female rat, and only a few males, are sexually active. The other naked rats are sterile and have dedicated their entire lives to the digging of tunnels and the rearing and feeding of the reproducing nude rat's brood. (If I were to be a naked mole rat I'd sooner be one of the Queen's consorts rather than a mole rat nanny nun. But maybe that's just me. )





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Yeah, I know my post above was about naked mole rats and not about bees, but my intent was to lead into an investigation of the communal systems of higher animals (especially mankind) and the social insects (especially bees), but I got called away for a night and a day.
So anyway, back to bees.

The incident of male genetic homosexuality in we Homo sapiens is only about one out of a hundred. In as much as this ratio has persisted for a lengthy time it is not hard to assume a worthwhile social function for this otherwise dead end trait. Honeybees, on the other hand, find that one male to two thousand females is a ratio that works.

And "work" is the working proposition, i.e. 99.9% of the bees in a beehive are workers and all workers are female. Only thirty or so males out of a hive population of sixty thousand are needed to insure the genetic diversity necessary for the health and continuance of the hive which, in a sense, can be said to be immortal.

Very clever is the hive, the female bees are pre-conditioned to perform a succession of specialized chores for the good of the commonweal throughout their interesting, but relatively short, life.

As follows from The Little Book of Bees...

"As soon as the worker leaves her cell, she is bound into the multifaceted work of the colony. She hardly has time to arrange herself before she begins a three-week-stint of internal service which begins with the cleaning of the empty brood cells, readying them for a new generation. After that she feeds older larvae pollen and honey.

Once she has consumed a lot of pollen herself and developed glands to produce liquid food, she provisions young larvae with the nutritious brood milk.
Meanwhile she also becomes part of the Queen's court and gets to clean up and groom the Queen and defend the hive against invaders.

About eight days after emerging from her cocoon, the young worker bee takes nectar from returning collecting bees and passes it on to other hive bees...after twenty-one days worker bees themselves become collectors. From then on their sole job is to import honey and pollen into the hive and carry in, if necessary, hive building resin and water."


What with universal communication and testube genetic engineering the way of the bees might be the comming wave of the future for mansounkind.

Goodnight.




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yes, but--specialization is for insects. bee's aren't found everywhere. they can't live --as humans do, north of the artic circle, and many bee's can't live in the tropics either (it get to hot) and bee's are wonderful for making honey. but that, and wax is all they make. they will never make an airplane.

humans are at their best being creative. artistic colonies have survived years, even religious ones fail in a short time. humans can live and work commually successfully, so long as creativity is part of the communal life. (even today what we remember most about the shakers is their simplistic (but artful) designs. not there sead industry or their orphanages.. but their artwork.



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