One time I stored a bag of maple leaves in a garbage bag which I used for feeding my compost. I didn't need it much over winter, and in spring when I went to use it, dozens of bumblebees came out. They'd hibernated in a bag of leaves. It was such a cold winter for our climate (it hit -15°C one night!) and somehow they were just fine.
When I was a kid I didn't think much about where they hibernate, how, or why. But they're definitely a species that continually yields fascinating revelations. Apart from their ability to sleep in leaves for 6 months or so, they're also able to learn to use door flaps and, apparently, survive flooding. They're resilient little creatures.
Every animal seems to have surprising abilities and behaviours if you're just lucky enough to see it.
Decomposing and decaying organic material often generates heat (compost piles sometimes spontaneously catch on fire due to this). The bees may have survived due to that or maybe they were attracted to that in the first place.
That's how endless insects, ones genetically design to survive our winters, do so. They crawl under leaves and dying grass, which insulates them from the cold a bit. Their bodies can freeze and thaw, and they'll be fine.
If you watch robins in the spring, after the snow melts but before the ground thaws, you'll see them turning over leaves to find and eat the insects. I see a lot of this, because I have a lot of trees (rural property, with forest around me). Often there are robins migrating, who stop and fill up thanks to my lawn and its plentiful ground leaf cover.
As a child, I was taught that robins "eat worms". Well, they surely do. But I see them eating anything and everything which moves. They're a lot like chickens, I guess.
At dusk, I often see them standing around and catching moths and things which take flight. Leaping into the air and snapping them up. Fun to watch.
Robins only eat bugs and worms as part of their raising an egg and feeding the chicks. Once the chicks can feed themselves they all switch to fruit and seeds.
That is absolutely not my experience here. My local robins eat bugs and worms all year, however, I do see them eating fruit (wild raspberries) here, when they are in season, and the fruit of some trees. I've never seen a robin eat a seed, only fruit. Robins also have multiple broods each year here. At least two, sometimes three rounds of chicks, so it's only the very end of summer that they aren't raising chicks (or having one following them around).
In many places the summer gets very dry often near end of year, and by then most of the insects are hunted out. That, along with fruit coming into season, may be one reason you're seeing this behaviour? I live beside a river and a wetland, though, so I have insects and worms all the time.
I wonder if we're talking about different robins. European ones aren't the same as North American ones, and I'm in Canada (currently in Quebec, but the same robins are in Ontario/etc too)
I'm uncomfortable with the methods used in this experiment. We don't even have a consensus on if or how insects feel pain, but we're raising them in labs for the purpose of drowning them. As far as I know freezing or crushing insects is a humane way for them to go, and I'm sure this research will be beneficial for insect conservation, but ultimately it's all in the interest of maintaining an ecosystem that humans rely on with little concern for the insects' well-being.
Friend, much of Science involves mass murder of complex life including mammals, for the express purpose of teasing apart how their individual bits work. If you live near an R1 university, there's very likely a facility nearby dedicated to the raising of lab animals. An ex worked at one that raised rodents and chickens for Michigan State University.
A scientist once confided in me that he became a scientist because as a child he really liked lizards, but as a scientist, he spends much of his time murdering lizards. :-/
Everyone involved has to confront this reality on their own, come to terms with it, and figure out the line where they're willing to meet it. All the researchers I've known have cared deeply about the welfare of the animals, despite sometimes doing terrible things to them for science. They worked to limit their suffering and dispatch them as humanely as possible. Many rationalize it by comparing to the food system, which raises and slaughters orders of magnitude more souls, and keeps people living, but does not discover or record as much new knowledge as science.
> All the researchers I've known have cared deeply about the welfare of the animals, despite sometimes doing terrible things to them for science.
As far as I know it’s one of the few fields with authorities that can block animal cruelty on ethical grounds through ethical review boards (mandatory Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees in the case of federally funded research).
Researchers must submit detailed protocols describing exactly what they plan to do, how many animals they’ll use, what procedures will be performed, how pain and distress will be managed, and why alternatives like cell cultures won’t work. There’s a whole framework called the 3Rs: replace animals where possible, reduce the number used, and refine procedures to minimize suffering.
Science is the wrong tree to go barking up, especially given the impact of the research overall, compared to clothing or food or other animals products.
I can mostly agree. I have encountered a diagnosed sociopath in the sciences, and the systems within Science often seemed engineered entirely to provide justifications to the non-science folks with the bank details, so it has the normal human failings. But most of the people involved could have made more money in industry, and were there because they cared about the subject matter. Even the sociopath to the extent that word means anything in their context.
Ethics rubrics for animal studies and institutional review boards for same are definitely an area academia is doing better than most other human endeavors. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. More to emphasize the intense moral introspection each of the researchers I've known who have done animal studies have had to do about it.
I agree with the necessity of it, but I also find the argument "We do it because we do it." to be weak.
We do it because we lack better methods. Cart before the horse, since those better methods are often derived from cruel research, but that's the reason.
If we had a ray-gun to zap a bug with that gave us a perfect accurate reading of lactate levels within it we wouldn't resort to freezing the thing and then grinding it to dust.
This is definitely a nuanced issue. I'm sure there's worse going on than what's in this experiment, and the food industry is certainly far worse. I just wish we'd say the quiet part out loud and put more effort into discovering where that line should be. The ethics section of this paper in its entirety is:
> This work did not require ethical approval. We minimized the number of animals used in the experiment and kept manipulations to a minimum.
Your misguided empathy is dangerous to humanity. So much of the vast genetic magic is hidden purely because we tie our hands behind our backs. Each day these secrets are withheld is another day tens of thousands of humans die from potentially trivial diseases and conditions. Further millions suffer in their broken minds for decades with no solace, all because we chose to extend our empathy in instantly gratified, short sighted ways. I say we go further, withdraw our empathy towards the worst among us; those that have hurt their fellow man, and make their bodies available for study and experimentation, both dead and alive.
(I keep noticing this, more and more websites are including unnecessarily huge images on top. This one has a 24 MP (6000×4000) header. At least it's a JPEG with "just" 5.83 MB, not a PNG.)
the holy patron saints of the internet gave us javascript and hyperlinks so that we could have both a gargantuan picture of a bee and a fast, responsive, small web transfer for discovering that gargantuan pictures' availability.
people forget these blessings, and we are now forced to eat 6MB of bee.
praise be the conscientious and adaptive-delivery-aware web engineer, amen.
> A bee sting is the wound and pain caused by the stinger of a female bee puncturing skin. Bee stings differ from insect bites, with the venom of stinging insects having considerable chemical variation. (..) Bumblebee venom appears to be chemically and antigenically related to honeybee venom.
Wasps both sting and bite (welt size is a good indicator)
They are pretty docile so won't be as aggressive towards stinging, but certainly can sting. You might be thinking of honey bees - which also can and do sting, but which die if they sting, so they're heavily disincentivized to sting.
One time I stored a bag of maple leaves in a garbage bag which I used for feeding my compost. I didn't need it much over winter, and in spring when I went to use it, dozens of bumblebees came out. They'd hibernated in a bag of leaves. It was such a cold winter for our climate (it hit -15°C one night!) and somehow they were just fine.
When I was a kid I didn't think much about where they hibernate, how, or why. But they're definitely a species that continually yields fascinating revelations. Apart from their ability to sleep in leaves for 6 months or so, they're also able to learn to use door flaps and, apparently, survive flooding. They're resilient little creatures.
Every animal seems to have surprising abilities and behaviours if you're just lucky enough to see it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9Cr_M5osI
Decomposing and decaying organic material often generates heat (compost piles sometimes spontaneously catch on fire due to this). The bees may have survived due to that or maybe they were attracted to that in the first place.
That's how endless insects, ones genetically design to survive our winters, do so. They crawl under leaves and dying grass, which insulates them from the cold a bit. Their bodies can freeze and thaw, and they'll be fine.
If you watch robins in the spring, after the snow melts but before the ground thaws, you'll see them turning over leaves to find and eat the insects. I see a lot of this, because I have a lot of trees (rural property, with forest around me). Often there are robins migrating, who stop and fill up thanks to my lawn and its plentiful ground leaf cover.
As a child, I was taught that robins "eat worms". Well, they surely do. But I see them eating anything and everything which moves. They're a lot like chickens, I guess.
At dusk, I often see them standing around and catching moths and things which take flight. Leaping into the air and snapping them up. Fun to watch.
Robins only eat bugs and worms as part of their raising an egg and feeding the chicks. Once the chicks can feed themselves they all switch to fruit and seeds.
That is absolutely not my experience here. My local robins eat bugs and worms all year, however, I do see them eating fruit (wild raspberries) here, when they are in season, and the fruit of some trees. I've never seen a robin eat a seed, only fruit. Robins also have multiple broods each year here. At least two, sometimes three rounds of chicks, so it's only the very end of summer that they aren't raising chicks (or having one following them around).
In many places the summer gets very dry often near end of year, and by then most of the insects are hunted out. That, along with fruit coming into season, may be one reason you're seeing this behaviour? I live beside a river and a wetland, though, so I have insects and worms all the time.
I wonder if we're talking about different robins. European ones aren't the same as North American ones, and I'm in Canada (currently in Quebec, but the same robins are in Ontario/etc too)
Source paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2066/202...
It is "to survive floods" not to "survive drowning."
I'm uncomfortable with the methods used in this experiment. We don't even have a consensus on if or how insects feel pain, but we're raising them in labs for the purpose of drowning them. As far as I know freezing or crushing insects is a humane way for them to go, and I'm sure this research will be beneficial for insect conservation, but ultimately it's all in the interest of maintaining an ecosystem that humans rely on with little concern for the insects' well-being.
Friend, much of Science involves mass murder of complex life including mammals, for the express purpose of teasing apart how their individual bits work. If you live near an R1 university, there's very likely a facility nearby dedicated to the raising of lab animals. An ex worked at one that raised rodents and chickens for Michigan State University.
A scientist once confided in me that he became a scientist because as a child he really liked lizards, but as a scientist, he spends much of his time murdering lizards. :-/
Everyone involved has to confront this reality on their own, come to terms with it, and figure out the line where they're willing to meet it. All the researchers I've known have cared deeply about the welfare of the animals, despite sometimes doing terrible things to them for science. They worked to limit their suffering and dispatch them as humanely as possible. Many rationalize it by comparing to the food system, which raises and slaughters orders of magnitude more souls, and keeps people living, but does not discover or record as much new knowledge as science.
> All the researchers I've known have cared deeply about the welfare of the animals, despite sometimes doing terrible things to them for science.
As far as I know it’s one of the few fields with authorities that can block animal cruelty on ethical grounds through ethical review boards (mandatory Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees in the case of federally funded research).
Researchers must submit detailed protocols describing exactly what they plan to do, how many animals they’ll use, what procedures will be performed, how pain and distress will be managed, and why alternatives like cell cultures won’t work. There’s a whole framework called the 3Rs: replace animals where possible, reduce the number used, and refine procedures to minimize suffering.
Science is the wrong tree to go barking up, especially given the impact of the research overall, compared to clothing or food or other animals products.
I can mostly agree. I have encountered a diagnosed sociopath in the sciences, and the systems within Science often seemed engineered entirely to provide justifications to the non-science folks with the bank details, so it has the normal human failings. But most of the people involved could have made more money in industry, and were there because they cared about the subject matter. Even the sociopath to the extent that word means anything in their context.
Ethics rubrics for animal studies and institutional review boards for same are definitely an area academia is doing better than most other human endeavors. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. More to emphasize the intense moral introspection each of the researchers I've known who have done animal studies have had to do about it.
I agree with the necessity of it, but I also find the argument "We do it because we do it." to be weak.
We do it because we lack better methods. Cart before the horse, since those better methods are often derived from cruel research, but that's the reason.
If we had a ray-gun to zap a bug with that gave us a perfect accurate reading of lactate levels within it we wouldn't resort to freezing the thing and then grinding it to dust.
This is definitely a nuanced issue. I'm sure there's worse going on than what's in this experiment, and the food industry is certainly far worse. I just wish we'd say the quiet part out loud and put more effort into discovering where that line should be. The ethics section of this paper in its entirety is:
> This work did not require ethical approval. We minimized the number of animals used in the experiment and kept manipulations to a minimum.
edit: formatting
Your misguided empathy is dangerous to humanity. So much of the vast genetic magic is hidden purely because we tie our hands behind our backs. Each day these secrets are withheld is another day tens of thousands of humans die from potentially trivial diseases and conditions. Further millions suffer in their broken minds for decades with no solace, all because we chose to extend our empathy in instantly gratified, short sighted ways. I say we go further, withdraw our empathy towards the worst among us; those that have hurt their fellow man, and make their bodies available for study and experimentation, both dead and alive.
How noble. I nominate you to be first for the drowning experiment.
> Published in Proceedings of the Royal Society Bee
It’s so interesting that we’re only now finding this out
(I keep noticing this, more and more websites are including unnecessarily huge images on top. This one has a 24 MP (6000×4000) header. At least it's a JPEG with "just" 5.83 MB, not a PNG.)
idk a nice high quality image of a Bumblebee queen seems suitable here
the holy patron saints of the internet gave us javascript and hyperlinks so that we could have both a gargantuan picture of a bee and a fast, responsive, small web transfer for discovering that gargantuan pictures' availability.
people forget these blessings, and we are now forced to eat 6MB of bee.
praise be the conscientious and adaptive-delivery-aware web engineer, amen.
amen
Edit: I’m wrong - ignore this please.
Bumblebees don’t sting, but they can bite, as I discovered after many years of picking them up when I saw them on the ground in a vulnerable spot.
They certainly do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_sting
> A bee sting is the wound and pain caused by the stinger of a female bee puncturing skin. Bee stings differ from insect bites, with the venom of stinging insects having considerable chemical variation. (..) Bumblebee venom appears to be chemically and antigenically related to honeybee venom.
Wasps both sting and bite (welt size is a good indicator)
Huh. I also have grown up thinking bumblebees don’t sting, but:
> Female bumblebees can sting repeatedly, but generally ignore humans and other animals. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee
So they can sting, they just don’t want to. Further proof, if any were needed, that bumblebees are Best Bees. :)
They are pretty docile so won't be as aggressive towards stinging, but certainly can sting. You might be thinking of honey bees - which also can and do sting, but which die if they sting, so they're heavily disincentivized to sting.
TIL that bumblebees actually can sting. Not only can they sting, they can sting repeatedly (unlike the honey bee). They just choose not to.
Genteel bees.