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.
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.
Anaerobic decomposition, like what you find in a septic tank, doesn't produce any heat.
"Beekeeper trains a bumblebee queen to use a protective cap in less than 24 hours. This protects the colony from hornets and similar threats."
This is definitely really interesting from a biological perspective but also immensely terrifying as soon as I visualize it. I might literally scream if I saw a swarm of what would appear to my panicked brain to be zombie bumblebees in my garage, and I'd certainly run and hide.
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 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.
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.
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 work did not require ethical approval. We minimized the number of animals used in the experiment and kept manipulations to a minimum.
edit: formatting
Add to this that people in the western world eat way more than they need. You only have to think of that all-you-can-eat restaurant.
https://xerces.org/pollinator-conservation/pollinator-friend...
Make a few beds and allow them to be "wild" based on your region. All sorts of pollenating insects will show up, eventually.
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.
> 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)
> 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. :)
Genteel bees.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071230082748/http://www.straig...
This was the most grotesque part of the research, that sacrificed 20 bees right here:
> They froze five bees at each stage of the experimental process: before submersion, after four days underwater, after eight days underwater and after one week of post-submersion recovery. The researchers then ground up the frozen queens and measured the concentration of lactate in the resulting mush.
This could have been done without needing to kill the Queen bees. One such method has been known since 2017, that draws their blood through their antennae:
2) its very easy/straightforward to take a honeybee larve and raise it to be a queen (i.e. let it feed on royal jelly).
If you find animal research to be problematic, none of this changes anything. However, this did nothing to hurt honeybee colonies in north america.
