A strange experiences with the bees

loreta said:
I am afraid of wasps. I think wasps are mean, aggressive. Maybe I am wrong!

I was also afraid of them as a kid, but I never had any problems with them. I think that they have the same behavior as bees. The only difference is that they love sweet things, like fruits, much more than bees, so they will come close to if you have something like that near you. But the bees will only go to flowers. So maybe that is why people think that wasps are more aggressive than bees.

What IS super aggressive is Horse-fly. These things live by the river and they love to byte people! The pain doesn't last for long, like when the bee bytes you, but it is still very painful and they chase you all the time. Most aggressive bug I've ever seen! Good thing it's not dangerous.
 
Sounds like you had a swarm the first time, and the weakened colony in your wall was attacked the second time. All normal behaviour for bees. I have 12 hives and have been a beekeeper for three years.
 
Persej said:
loreta said:
I am afraid of wasps. I think wasps are mean, aggressive. Maybe I am wrong!
I was also afraid of them as a kid, but I never had any problems with them. I think that they have the same behavior as bees. The only difference is that they love sweet things, like fruits, much more than bees, so they will come close to if you have something like that near you. But the bees will only go to flowers. So maybe that is why people think that wasps are more aggressive than bees.
I know there are many different types of wasps but when I was a kid, I've often seen them kill (assassinate?) bees in a very ugly way.
 
Persej said:
loreta said:
I am afraid of wasps. I think wasps are mean, aggressive. Maybe I am wrong!

I was also afraid of them as a kid, but I never had any problems with them. I think that they have the same behavior as bees. The only difference is that they love sweet things, like fruits, much more than bees, so they will come close to if you have something like that near you. But the bees will only go to flowers. So maybe that is why people think that wasps are more aggressive than bees.

What IS super aggressive is Horse-fly. These things live by the river and they love to byte people! The pain doesn't last for long, like when the bee bytes you, but it is still very painful and they chase you all the time. Most aggressive bug I've ever seen! Good thing it's not dangerous.

It is true what you say: wasps like sweet, and they are a little too present if you eat a fruit while in the country.

Horsefly are monstrous. I remember one summer with a friend we went to the beach where the movie Jaws was filmed. Oh, it was a very beautiful day. Then... horseflies came. We had to leave, simply as that. They were no nasty.
 
Persej said:
I was also afraid of them as a kid, but I never had any problems with them. I think that they have the same behavior as bees. The only difference is that they love sweet things, like fruits, much more than bees, so they will come close to if you have something like that near you. But the bees will only go to flowers. So maybe that is why people think that wasps are more aggressive than bees.

Well, wasps are predators and omnivores. They not only eat sweet fruits and honey, but also insects and even drink bee "blood" - the hemolymph. So in this sense they are much more adversarial than bees. They also don't lose their sting and die as bees.

But bees also have plenty of examples of a "naturally ruthless" behavior. For example, worker bees won't hesitate to kill their queen if she becomes old or slacking in egg production. And when they are in the process of breeding a new one, usually there are several of them, and the strongest that gets out first, first of all goes and kills her competition. Or drone/male bees are being ejected from the hive in autumn after they've done their job of fertilizing the queen. etc.
 
Just stumbled upon an article about a recently discovered wasp.

A “soul-sucking” wasp, the Ampulex Dementor, is among 139 new species that have been identified in the Greater Mekong Region, and the insect’s relationship with its prey is nothing short of terrifying.

The Dementor wasp is found in Thailand, and was named by a popular vote after creatures from the Harry Potter series, according to the Guardian. The wasp has a unique method of attacking its prey, which consists largely of cockroaches native to the region. As it attacks, the wasp injects a venom into the roach’s belly, which paralyzes it, seemingly stealing the unfortunate insect’s “free will.” Even though the roach is still capable of movement, it cannot direct its own body. The Dementor wasp is therefore able to drag its prey to a safe location before consuming it.
 
Thanks for info Keit. They are both very interesting creatures, just like their cousins ants. They can all be very aggressive when there is a need to keep the balance in nature.

Now the people are bragging about this new, super fast, 5G networks. Who knows how will that effect the bees and other insects. We still don't know how the present technology is affecting them, and we are already implementing the new one!
 
MusicMan said:
Some years ago, a bloke named Grebbenikov was doing research on a type of wasp, and he discovered that they can detect cavities, and they actually build their nests in the shape of a certain cavity. One of the properties he discovered about these cavities is that they exhibit a form of [anti-gravity], and he worked out a way of harnessing this property.
See:
_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Grebennikov

and
_https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYJXE4FCm7Q

Amazing critters.

Cavities are also utilised in the home, in the microwave ovens you use every day.
They resonate at certain frequencies, and so can generate signals, the frequency of which depends on the size of the cavity.
The wasps and bees must have a kind of radar built in which can detect the cavity they can use for a nest.

MusicMan,

Thanks for the links. I had noticed Grebennikov before and this brings back interesting ideas. The insects are something we usually consider pests. I wonder if we seem to be pests to higher densities/civilizations.

Anyway, I found another video that has a little more surrounding energy/shape idea but includes the video in your link too towards the end: _https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYJXE4FCm7Q

Maybe we should say "float like a beetle and sting like a butterfly" instead of "sting like a bee and float like a butterfly". :P

And thanks Persej for bringing up an interesting phenomena.
 
Keit said:
Just stumbled upon an article about a recently discovered wasp.

A “soul-sucking” wasp, the Ampulex Dementor, is among 139 new species that have been identified in the Greater Mekong Region, and the insect’s relationship with its prey is nothing short of terrifying.

The Dementor wasp is found in Thailand, and was named by a popular vote after creatures from the Harry Potter series, according to the Guardian. The wasp has a unique method of attacking its prey, which consists largely of cockroaches native to the region. As it attacks, the wasp injects a venom into the roach’s belly, which paralyzes it, seemingly stealing the unfortunate insect’s “free will.” Even though the roach is still capable of movement, it cannot direct its own body. The Dementor wasp is therefore able to drag its prey to a safe location before consuming it.

This sounds very similar to the Taratula Hawk.

When I was living in Southern California, I had the chance to see one in action in the San Gabriel Mountains. My friend and I were being bombarded by, what we thought, was a kamakazee wasp. It seems it was (maybe) the mate of the one we found a bit further down the road that was dragging a tarantula. After we passed the wasp and her prey, the bombarding stopped.

On the way back, we noticed that the wasp and prey had gone in the opposite direction it had been going when we first saw it and was trying to pull the tarantula down a hole. It must have been misdirecting us to think it was going somewhere else so we wouldn't know where its lair was.

These predatory wasps really are a horror. The larvae eats all through the spider and stays away from its internal organs for as long as possible to keep the spider alive while it feasts. :shock:
 
Nienna said:
These predatory wasps really are a horror. The larvae eats all through the spider and stays away from its internal organs for as long as possible to keep the spider alive while it feasts. :shock:

I hate spiders, but those wasps do look scary. :/

As much as I would love to live in some warmer country, when I see all those dangerous insects that live there, I say to myself that I live in a warm enough place.
 
Found this on RT - can bees suffer from Alzheimer's disease:

The decline in the bee population could be caused by the insect’s high contamination of aluminum, a chemical element implicated as a factor in Alzheimer's disease in humans, a new study has found.

It's believed that a number of factors are likely to be involved in the decline of bees: from a lack of flowers to attacks by parasites. But biologists at Keele University and the University of Sussex in the UK decided to find out whether aluminum, the "most significant environmental contaminant of recent times," could prove to play the key role in the insect’s decline.

...

They found levels of the metal content in bee pupae that ranged from 13 to 193 ppm [parts per million.] In humans, brain aluminium content in excess of 3 ppm "might be considered as pathological with possible contributions towards neurodegenerative disease including Alzheimer’s disease," the study, published in the journal PLOS One, said.

...

“Aluminum is a known neurotoxin affecting behaviour in animal models of aluminum intoxication. Bees, of course, rely heavily on cognitive function in their everyday behaviour and these data raise the intriguing spectre that aluminium-induced cognitive dysfunction may play a role in their population decline – are we looking at bees with Alzheimer’s disease?” said Professor Chris Exley, a leading authority on human exposure to aluminium, from Keele University.

Article here: http://rt.com/news/265600-bees-alzheimer-aluminium-pollution/
 
My sisters bees are trying to get inside again. Only this time there is only a couple of them.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2tfGgUM4CNBX0pCcUxJMkxPRFE/view?usp=sharing
 
Something just came to my mind. In recent years in my city we had the problem with some strange smells that nobody could point from where they came from or what they are. I mentioned them here and here and here.

And now I'm thinking that maybe these two things are connected. Maybe the bees here are dying because the Earth is releasing some gases which are poisonous to bees.
 
Today and yesterday the bees again came to my apartment. And it was the same kind of event as before. They look lost and many of them died. I was trying to figure out why was this happening and then I remembered that two days ago the truck which sprays against mosquitoes passed through my street. I see that there are also other reported cases of this:

S.C. County Sprays For Mosquitoes But Accidentally Takes Out Millions Of Bees

It wasn't meant for the bees.

The pesticide raining down from the sky in Dorchester County, S.C., was meant to kill mosquitoes — for the sake of safety, the county says. Mosquitoes, after all, can carry West Nile and Zika, and four cases of Zika were recently confirmed in the county.

But on Sunday morning, from 6:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., as the county conducted aerial spraying, the bees fell by the millions.

"By Sunday afternoon," The Post and Courier newspaper reports, "thousands of bee carcasses dotted Andrew Macke's Spring House Lane property." The amateur beekeeper — also the fire captain of the town of Summerville — was at work when his wife called.

Beekeepers in Dorchester County sound downright apocalyptic when they talk about the impact of the spraying.

"We have a mass killing," Macke's wife told him.

"My bee yard looks like it's been nuked," Juanita Stanley, co-owner of Flowertown Bee Farm and Supply, told the Post and Courier.

Flowertown lost more than 2 million bees, Stanley says.

On Facebook, Flowertown posted photo after photo of piles of dead bees. The bee farm also posted images and videos of the burning of apiaries — which have to be destroyed now that they've been contaminated, the owners say.

Dorchester County says it provided sufficient notice to local beekeepers, with announcements sent to the local media on Friday morning and Saturday night.

But in a petition on Change.org seeking to call off the spraying, Dorchester County residents say the notices released Friday didn't provide any details on the type of pesticide to be used, and that requests for more information from the county weren't answered.

"This is both disturbing and frightening to many that live in the area that is to be covered," the petition reads. "There are live and privately owned beehives that are in this area and to the best of our knowledge, the chemicals to be used are toxic to honeybees."

Indeed, CNN reports that the county used a product containing naled, which is "highly toxic to bees," according to the manufacturer of the pesticide used.

The product is not supposed to be used "more than two hours after sunrise or two hours before sunset," a recommendation that Dorchester County Administrator Jason Ward says the county followed.

The county normally sprays for mosquito control by truck, not from airplanes. And it generally notifies beekeepers by phone or email — something the county says it also did in this case, CNN reports, although beekeeper Juanita Stanley says she didn't get such a message.

Here's CNN:

" 'That's true when they sprayed by trucks; they told me in advance, and we talked about it so I could protect my bees,' Stanley said. 'But nobody called me about the aerial spraying; nobody told me at all.'​
"Stanley said she 'would have been screaming and pleading on their doorstep if they had.'​
" ' "Do it at night when bees are done foraging," I would have told them,' she added, breaking into tears. 'But they sprayed at 8 a.m. Sunday, and all of my bees were out, doing their work by then.' "​

Dorchester County has apologized, the Post and Courier reports.

The county says on its website that no more aerial spraying is scheduled — and that if officials do spray again, they will send out notifications three to five days in advance and contact registered beekeepers by phone or email.

 
Yesterday I heard an airplane that sprays against mosquitoes. And guess what - the bees came again this morning. That's a third day in a row, sixth overall. And for some reason, they prefer the rooms where I'm sleeping. I'm starting to feel like Mila Kunis in Jupiter Ascending. :-/
 
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