Posted by lemonberry 1 day ago
>"Queens are developed from larvae selected by worker bees and specially fed in order to become sexually mature."
This has much horror potential.
It occurred to me that this could be how a savanna predator views a human hunter. Our hands wouldn't register as hands (forepaws) for them, they would be some sort of super-flexible grasping thing, like a tentacle. Standing upright we would seem impossibly tall and thin. The animal doesn't understand throwing, let alone guns, all it knows is that getting the attention of this creature is related to sudden pain and death at a distance. Endurance hunting is pure horror - you thought you had outrun it, but there it is again.
The Carpet People has characters that live in the fibers of a living room carpet and are subject to mysterious phenomena they don't understand (such as a vacuum cleaner).
The Bromeliad Trilogy is similar, although the characters are a few inches high and at least have a concept of full-sized humans. They have to move their tribe from a department store that's closing down to somewhere else, which means they have to learn about the outside world.
“When he was very small we used to rock him to bed … and tell him stories, and I’d make up a story about little people … they lived in the ventilator; and they’d go through these woods which had great big long tall blue things like trees, but without leaves and only one stalk, and they had to walk between them and so on; and he’d gradually catch on [that] that was the rug, the nap of the rug, the blue rug …”
Junjie itonhas a funny one about cats
"Same mama, different species" - "Iberian harvester ant queens clone males of a different species in a never-before-seen case of reproduction and domestication. "
https://www.404media.co/the-biological-rulebook-was-just-rew...
First example that pops to mind: If you read that completely enthralling and wonderful novel Watership Down by Richard Adams, its told entirely from the perspective of Rabbits, and beautifully so. There are several scenes, especially one featuring their first encounter with a colossal freight train and its engine, described completely from their perspective, with no knowledge of what these man-made machines are. It's right up the alley of the horror concept you mention.
To them it's stealing the life blood of the hive.
> more honey than a bee would ever see in its lifetime
Bees move around the hive. They see all the honey. They individually _produce_ very little of it, but the total extent of it is surely known to them in some way.
> an eldritch horror
That's unironically how I view small winged creatures that follow their own rules and then inject me with venom, without warning, for not following them.
What would any social creature do?
I mean, given how little study bee dance language has gotten, if there's another unknown word and was only performed once a year by a typical hive, no one would have ever seen it. And their vocabulary isn't taught, it's instinctive, so low frequency usage wouldn't be an impediment to transmission.
It's not just the finger pointing, it's the look on his face, and the smell of his sweat.
Pheromones. Some people claim to be able to smell those themselves, some of them at least.
Bees don't like small, dark indoor spaces. But a honey house can easily be large and well-lighted, and they might not notice that it's indoors.
Bees don't make more honey than they can use. They make what they can and have reserves for Winter and growing in the Spring. Do you pay your landlord everything you'd otherwise save?
I've never seen a bee colony "worry" about finding food. They'll travel within a one mile radius for foraging, and four to five miles for water. Colonies will also leave a hive, or swarm (split into 2 colonies) if there is not enough resources for them.
It's not a deal. They don't understand what's happening. If you're going to take their honey, at least don't make up some weird fantasy where they're happy about it.
The rest I can agree with.
The issue you talk about just dont exist. They are fine without us, we regulate their reproduction for our own benefit.
Fine, as long as you don't make up a fantasy that the bees are sentient enough to be sad about their life in an environment with significant stressors, predators or disease.
So what? Mutualism happens all the time in nature, even if neither party is consciously aware of it. The relationship between humans and bees is very similar to the relationship between coral polyps and algae; the algae make sugars for the polyps, and polyps provide protection for the algae.
In your comparison, neither the algae nor the polyps have the capacity to reason about or alter their arrangement.
In a fair deal, both parties must be able to reason about and/or withdraw from the arrangement.
If only one party is able to reason about and withdraw from an arrangement, the other party is being used.
In this case, bees are tools being used. I'm not willing to say that it's a great moral evil for that reason, but bees not only don't have the capacity to understand the arrangement, they will die trying to kill to defend their honey.
So my only appeal in this case is not to pretend that they choose.
This is our relationship with all other life on earth. We use plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals to survive. We've invaded every continent on the planet (including Antarctica) and like some kind of mega-beavers we've radically reshaped environments to suit ourselves, destroying habitats for some and creating new ones for others (squirrels and many species of birds seem to thrive like crazy where I live in the city, with few predators to endanger them).
What survives and what doesn't survive is largely our choice. No other animal on the planet has this capacity for choice. Whether we favour one species over another or vice versa, it's our choice in either case. Many people do try to frame this as a moral choice but neglect the human side of it. Making real change to help wildlife requires scaling back human society, reducing food production, reducing housing and other infrastructure.
If they don't have the capacity for considering themselves wronged, and won't get it, can you really wrong them? Are there really even two parties here?
Now it may still be wrong for other reasons to keep bees, like destroying nature by wiping out native pollinators etc.
But I do think that comment up thread trying to frame it as some service to them or "sweet deal" is ridiculous. It reminds me when management/politicians make chances strictly for own benefit and puts out manipulative memo trying to make the situation sound as anything but that.
It is ok to use bees for honey. We dont do it for bees and they are not getting all that much value from that.
>It's not a deal.
We will spend fortunes and invent new science to prevent their extinction. Whether they understand it or not, they grabbed a real bargain.
Foraged resources are generally sufficient. We are taking away honey before winter and that is why they lack foos in winter and have to be supplemented.
I mean, big threst to bees are pesticides and other human generated threats. They only reason extinction could be an issue ... are humans.
- feeding themselves during the summer dearth
- feeding themselves during the winter
- to feed themselves in an emergency (think forest fires)
- to feed a large portion of them who will leave the hive due to lack of space and/or to reproduce the hive (swarming)
- to feed the whole hive ahead of abandoning it due to lack of space (absconding)
Honeybees have two stomachs, one that is basically a bag in which they can carry nectar (and honey) which they can deliver into comb cells and to feed larvae and the queen (who is too busy to feed herself), and one that they digest in and which they can't vomit up from. When they swarm/abscond they gorge themselves, filling both stomachs, and fly off with the queen to a new place, then they use all that stored up honey to make new comb in which to start making honey and new bees.
Feral honeybees need every drop of honey they make.
Domesticated honeybees -which are the same as feral honeybees, just in captivity- overproduce only because the beekeeper will manage their desire for space and reproduction so as to make them need much less of the honey they make, and therefore they have a large surplus that the beekeeper takes.
(Well, not all beekeepers produce honey. Some of them also or instead produce queens, nucs, hives, and/or propolis.)
Or a cold or dry patch. A weekend of torrential rain can put a dent in the honey stores.
Beekeepers typically replace it with sugar syrup which obviously lacks the nutrients they are evolved for. So you can buy sugar with additives.
A bad take. Do you get from your employer as much as the value you produce? And if you want to anthropomorphize further, how do bees pay the “rent” for the convenient hive accommodation or the access to plentiful food sources?
Domestic bees are bred and encouraged in every way to produce more than they need. From being offered the necessary accommodation in a convenient way including when a hive is split, to being placed next to fields of man cultivated crops. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship for both man and bee.
Unlike other man-animal relationships, the one we have with bees is on the humane, non-abusive side of the spectrum. As far as animal treatment goes, bees are almost on par with pets.
It’s not a deal but if it were, it’s as good as it gets. Bees get as much as they can get, and give as much as they can give (never more). Any beekeeper knows this. There’s no gain from abusing a hive.
When in captivity. In the wild they make what they'll need to abscond or swarm when the time comes, and they do really take all of it with them in those cases.
(There are lots of escaped, unmanaged honeybee colonies in North America, but it's unclear how many true feral colonies there are --- true feral colonies overwinter and reproduce).
Dad joke: It would be more apt if instead of a-piary, it was "b-piary".
(Although maybe you’re right colloquially)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarming_(honey_bee)
A load of bees engaged in robbing behaves entirely differently from a swarm, which is a magical thing to interact with.
Just like specialists probably differ from the general population on how many legs / arms an octopus has.
My mind is thoroughly in the gutter now.
Similar to how when they added sherds (opposed to shards) for broken archaeological finds.
It sorta reminds me of "Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees."
in the adult horror version you are the shopkeeper being attacked by thousands of bees.
in the kids version you are a bee-general leading your bee-army on a heist.
and then dad comes out of his room: "damn! that bee stung me right on my nose"
at the same time the kid comes out of the kids room: "yay, i stung that shop keeper right on the nose!"
they both look at each other: "wait! what?"