The Bee: Part I, what is the bee, bee colony and fun facts, ding.

these are honeybees the big one towards the center is the queen

Please welcome Noah, son of regular author Sarah, for his debut on this blog  .

     Hello I am a new author for this blog and for my first story story/post I will be talking about bees as a hive, individual and just in general the common bee that is kept in hives. The honeybee or Apis melllifera. So to begin bees are arthropods which are a group of animals that all have jointed body parts and a exoskeleton, some examples are spiders, bees, butterflies, crabs, scorpions etc. More precisely bees are insects which are arthropods with 6 legs. So bees, ants, butterflies etc. 

So enough with that now I bet you want to know some interesting things about bees. You may have heard that bees live in hives that are made of wax organized in hexagonal cell's. Ok where to start hhhhmm, well bees can't see red but

this is me the author who is the kid in usually green

they can see ultra-violet. Ooohhhh. Now some of you the people who are reading this might bee wondering, hahahah do you get that! No of course nobody does. Ok what is ultra-violet. simply put it is a color beyond what humans can see. Also you are probably wondering why do they kneed to be able to see ultra-violet, well because flowers have ultraviolet markings on them giving instructions on how to get nectar and pollen. 

Also some of you might be wondering, gee when is this kid going to tell us how to take care of  bees? Well for you just read and you will find out. For those who wonder "why should I trust this guy he is a kid for crying out loud?" Well I have been taught by my dad who sometimes has 50 colonies, I have gone to many a bee keeping meeting, have a certificate that states I am an apprentice level which is the same as my dad and I have been beekeeping for almost half my life. 

Ha so there! 

this what are family calls the bee tree which ha tons of different kinds of bees pollinating it

this is one of my dads bee colony sites

Another interesting thing is that all honey bee stings have barbs on them meaning that when they sting and the bee flies away the stinger stays, pulling out the bee's gut, killing the bee but meaning that the stinger pumps venom through the stinger until there is no venom left or the stinger is out. This brings up the question, how do you get a stinger out? Whatever you don't try to pull it out it will just pump more venom into you :(  .Bad idea. So what you should do is swipe the stinger out. 

Bees have 3 different types in the colony. The drone or male who does not have a stinger and is bigger than worker bees. His only purpose in life is to mate with other colony's queens and once he has mated he dies (look I don't know why he dies, I will ask my dad!). 

Then the most common the worker bee which is all girls. These have stingers do all the jobs except laying eggs. Finally and most important the queen who is the biggest and the fattest of them all. A queen starts as a regular larvae except she gets fed so much royal jelly. 

Right before she comes out 2 things happen. 1 - The old queen high tails out of there in a swarm which is when the hive is overpopulated so not all the workers get the queens pheromone meaning they make queens, so the queen leaves unless she wants to die. Because the workers make multiple queens at once so they know they got a good queen because, 2-When the new queens are ready to come out they beat their wings against their cell wall or the piping. So only one queen per colony which means one queen survives by being the last one standing. 

Now you are probably like this if you are new to bees, "but you said that bees' stingers have barbs that make it stay in their target." Well that was kind of incorrect, the queens stinger doesn't (because she is the queen), also bees stingers don't stick in other insects or in arthropods in general.

queen cell frame thing

Something my dad just told me is bees generate an electrical charge which makes the pollen attracted onto the bee. Also honey is basically partially solidified bee vomit.Gross huh. Now you are probably want to know what is a colony already!!!!!!!!!!! Basically a colony is a group of bee's that when healthy has 60 to 80 thousand bees in it. There that is what it is. Done. So now I  done.

CLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP.

Thank you thank you this is the end of my guest author debut

Feel free to post any comments or questions about bees or other topics including things you think we should write about or spelling or grammar issues

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Putting the duck in reproduction

Baby runner ducks

Warning: this blog post contains graphic information about the duck reproductive cycle, which is somewhat brutal. Read with caution.

Also, FYI, I don't want to mention body parts by name because I think weird searches would start coming by my blog. So I'm trying to be prudent, not prudish.

Our first two ducks were female runners, Celia and Rosalind.

They looked identical until this year when Rosalind grew a cape of white around her shoulders. 

Now we can tell them apart, but they still spend most of their time as a pair.

Rosalind

Celia

Then we added Daisy. Daisy was up for trade at a barter event. We were sure someone else would want her, but at the end of the evening she was still there. The family offered her to us in exchange for a jar of honey. They just wanted her to have a home.

Daisy in her element

Daisy, getting ready to initiate

Despite a stressful evening in a cage at a party, then in a car, Daisy fit in immediately. The next morning, Celia and Rosalind were following her around and accepting her as their leader.      


Daisy has much stronger drives than the other two hens. She is louder, eats more, and can be frankly quite randy.

She would entice the other girls into the pond, climb on top of them and have her way with them.

Everyone seemed fine with this arrangement but Daisy was clearly the initiator.

When Pikachu joined them, he was stressed. His mate had been killed by a raccoon. His owners were moving and he had to go. He didn't seem to want to mingle with the other ducks.

But Daisy promptly staked him out as her mate. Ducks pair bond in the fall and winter, then mate with their partner in the spring, so they spend a fair amount of time courting.

She followed him around, head bobbing, steering him away from the other girls. He appeared more frightened than attracted by this, but over time he relaxed, got to know all the ducks, and became part of the group.




As duck mating season begins, Daisy and Pikachu appear to be a pair, and Rosalind and Celia are another.

Daisy and Pikachu spend a fair amount of time head bobbing and mating, mostly in the water. They are both heavy ducks and water is probably the most comfortable place for them. Daisy likes to know where Pikachu is all the time.

The two girls don't head bob or mate, but they escort each other around and like to be together to lay eggs.

But I also see Pikachu following each of the other girls around in the yard, usually while Daisy is swimming or laying an egg. Then when she gets back out into the yard, Daisy will come running at them, break it up, and the whole flock will go scuttling around at top speed for a few minutes before settling down to other activities.

Two pairs of ducks, with drama

I would sometimes see Daisy and Pikachu getting together but always in the water. But today he successfully caught up with one of the other ducks on land, and I saw and was flabbergasted.

The drake has a very long, very strange male part - in some species though possibly not mallards 40cm long - and twisty. Imagine a round yellow shoe lace twisted until it starts to form kinks, suddenly bursting out of the lower part of an otherwise tidy looking duck. I did not get a picture of it but you can probably figure out how  to google such an image. I also didn't try or even think of measuring and I don't apologize and won't go back and do it!

When Pikachu and Daisy were mating I didn't know this. I had seen other birds mate. Chickens, crows, etc. often join together at Several Garden's Farm and sometimes I happen to be there. Most male birds lack an external organ and join their vent to the vent of the female during fertilization. So I was doubly unprepared for what I saw.

It was pretty hard to miss this long, trailing yellow thing slashing out of his underside, snaking around the hen duck and into her vent. In a matter of seconds, the act was done. It then took a half minute or so to go back inside of him. Meanwhile he was waddling around, dragging it on the ground. The whole process - well  - it was disturbing.

In the wild, there are more male than female ducks, as females are much more likely to be on land where they are easy targets for predators. When the males outnumber the females too much, their behavior becomes quite aggressive. Groups of males that didn't find mates will chase down and forcibly copulate with females, often injuring and occasionally drowning them. Female ducks try to stay near their mates and avoid unfamiliar males.

What Pikachu was doing with the duck seemed to be somewhere between the consensual pair mating he does with Daisy and the forced copulation of unpaired wild mallard males.

The hen duck neither tried to prevent him, nor did she do any of the joyous courtship Daisy does.

It was like this: "Oh, there's Pikachu. I wonder if he's ..." And by that time it was all over and both parties are running to the pond to wash off.





If two females ducks are a pair, they guard each other, nest, and raise eggs together. But they need to go outside the pair to get the eggs fertilized. Pikachu should be happy to do this.

It gives him more ducks raising his babies. The hen ducks seem less enthusiastic. They would probably prefer a choice of males, and they need to go through a courtship to be in any way interested.





Being pair bonded appears to be a prerequisite for a female duck to respond favorably to a male. Studies have show that a female duck can deflect the fertilization process if she is unwillingly mated by a drake. She has a long, crooked reproductive tract that can contract and prevent fertilization. So all the head bobbing courtship benefits the male by priming his mate to accept his offering.

What can we learn from the ducks about how to conduct human affairs? Um - nothing.

I don't think we can look to ducks for role models. They are animals following instinct and maximizing their odds of a successful outcome.

I sometimes hear people pointing to one aspect of an animal's behavior: "Ducks form monogamous male/female pair bonds" and acting as though this means - "people should model themselves on ducks". This is not a great idea. First, because as we see, ducks really have much more room for behaviors than that.


Second, because you can find almost any behavior in the animal kingdom, so using animal models will lead you into some contradictory behaviors. And third because unlike ducks, we have deep cultural and ethical elements superimposed on our instincts.

Well - perhaps we can learn from ducks that a lot of impulses exist. We have to comb through and decide when to embrace nature and when not to, but it's hard to say that something is not natural if ducks do it.

We need to ask people-questions:

Is someone getting hurt? Is someone being exploited? Is everyone participating freely?

So, do we model ducks in:

• opposite sex pair bond (why  not? every one's happy) 
• same sex pair bond (why not? every one's happy) 
• stepping outside the bond to mate (in this case some one's unhappy - iffy in human relations) 
• mating rampantly for a few weeks and then taking the rest of the year off (clearly not every one's thing but not my business) 
• male coercion of females (bad bad bad). 

duck print in the mud

Are ducks a great role model?

No.

Sorry, we'll have to keep thinking for ourselves.

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