• Someone found a ton of bees who living in a hole in the wall of an apartment building.

• Should this happen to you, it turns out you can call people to take away your bees. There are people who will happily come and collect your stray bees.

There were thousands of them swarming around outside and it was scary shit. The buzzing was so loud and creepy, and hearing them tip-tap on the window was so awful. When the beekeeper came out, he lost his shit about how many bees there were but he was so fucking happy to take them all. I have literally never seen someone so excited to take home so many bees, or just… be around that many bees in general. I normally don’t mind insects but that was a lot of fuckin’ bees.

• There is a subreddit called (/r/beekeeping), of course there is. It’s neat to see reddit’s long tail start to fill in.
• Some guy (I couldn’t find stats but let’s face it) is having a hard time ‘cos his hive keeps up and killing the replacement queens he buys for them.
• Novice apiculture enthusiasts should always start with three hives, because failure rate is high and you can always shift resources between hives. A user named “just_temporary” comments that his hip replacement is keeping him from being active with his bees, but once he gets better he wants to get up to fifteen hives. He sadly notes his 22 year old son, who’d been helping him since he was 10, no longer wants to be actively involved.
• This is the oldest thing I have read on reddit.
• Apparently, if there no queens are around sometimes workers can develop ovaries and start laying unfertilized eggs on their own. These laying workers are aggressive, and can kill queens introduced later. They don’t know how to do it right and so they will lay eggs clumsily and haphazardly, as their abdomens are not long enough.

• Unfertilized bee eggs develop into drones. Drones are male bees. Bees only need sexual reproduction to create female bees. This system of sex determination is called Haplodiploidy, and mostly only bees and ants do this.
• This is by far the best science name I have seen in a while. Which, anyways, is to say, male bees have half the chromosomes female bees have.
• This blew my mind. I had no idea
• Drones are almost useless. They don’t collect pollen, they don’t have a stinger. Their sole purpose is to go out and contribute to the gene pool of another colony.
• Drones are hatched in the spring and they go and hang out in special, well defined “congregation areas” 10 meters off the ground; they will ignore queens just a few meters outside of the boundaries.
• These congregation areas are roughly in the same spot year over year, yet drones typically die off in the fall. Since they can’t be shown the way, there must exist environmental cues but they remain as of yet a MYSTERY TO SCIENCE.
• Drones just spend their time flyin’ around from area to area, cruisin’ for virgin queens to mate with.

• Mating rips their body apart. They literally ejaculate and die. It is impossible to not mention this when talking about bees.

The process of ejaculation is explosive—semen is blasted through the queen’s sting chamber and into the oviduct. The process is sometimes audible to the human ear, akin to a “popping” sound. The ejaculation is so powerful that it ruptures the endophallus, disconnecting the drone from the queen.

• It’s kind of juvenile, and I’m sorry, tho mostly because bugs so fundamentally alien to how we perceive sentience. Eusocial sentient organisms are super fucking cool. They build stunningly complex structures, they learn and they adapt but on a fundamental level they’re impossible to empathize with.
• The word ‘drone’, in the 16th century, came to be associated with “idler” or “lazy worker”. Today I feel it means “mindless”, but I wonder if that won’t change with time as well.
• I was once stung by twelve bees all at once. It is not an experience I recommend.