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Swarm of bees follow car for over 24 hours (2016)
- creaghpatr 8y agoOk I'll say it...this is like that Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation
- Shorel 8y agoNo, real bees must be saved. Black Mirror used robotic artificial bees.
- zoidb 8y agoMisleading headline: > "One theory was that the queen was trapped in my car and the swarm were following,” Carol said. > "But they couldn't find the queen anywhere so I've no idea if that was right.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JadeNB 8y agoYeah, and the article mentions that they just came back the next day, but doesn't follow up on that … is this woman like DNA's Rain God, but for bees?
- andai 8y agoSure, but the bees didn't know that.
- JdeBP 8y agoNot being able to find the queen does not mean that she is not there. They are quite difficult to locate, sometimes. Plus, this isn't a quotation from an actual beekeeper. It's a quotation from the driver of the car.
- dang 8y agoOk, we'll depose the queen.
- Circuits 8y agoI would have murdered every single one of those little devils. Bee murder, it's the only way to fly.
- lizardskull 8y agoNo jokes allowed
- ergothus 8y agoSwarming bees are unusual creatures. I've seen a tree that had three large (~8in/20cm) balls of bees hanging off of branches. My grandfather (a beekeeper) said the queen had likely stopped at each spot to consider it for a hive (leaving pheromones), then moved on, and the swarm landed at each place. He was greatly entertained at the idea that the bees on the outside were trying to get to the queen (who wasn't there) and the bees on the inside had figured that out but couldn't leave because of the bees on the outside. That said, my grandfather was a beekeeper and a father is a beekeeper and I'm a little uncertain about how much of their hobby is built on communal agreement, anecdotes, and personal experience as opposed to scientific data. (The same can be said about our profession though - what was the last good study on code readability you read vs the opinions on code readability you have?)
- aidos 8y agoI have a wonderful video from a festival we were at a few years ago where the bees were in a ball under a table. A bee keeper arrived, put a cardboard box underneath and gave the table a thud. The queen fell into the box and the rest followed. They were standing on the box doing a funny little pointy thing of the direction to fly in. He said that it was the hive splitting by producing a second queen. Apparently they set up a temporary home for a couple of days while scouting for a good place to establish themselves. It was insane how much of a wax honeycomb nest they had already created.
- lostlogin 8y agoIt’s excellent to watch. A big swarm has enough honey onboard to fill 2-3 full depth boxes. I’ve caught some big ones, but a full box in a week is my record. It’s good to let them and not to help or give them frames. Getting them to make wax gets all the honey out of them as this honey can contain American Foulbrood spores. Locking it up in wax is lower risk than having them feed it to young larvae.
- idoubtit 8y agoI've always been told that these large clusters of bees are a way to keep a warm center. Wikipedia has the same explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee#Winter_survival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee#Winter_survival
- Communitivity 8y agoShades of the movie Jupiter Ascending. I wonder if the woman is related to Jupiter Jones. In seriousness, someone should have made an inventory of the products in her car and on it, because if that's something that's going to happen again it could put even more strain on a a fragile bee ecosystem. It could also lead to more effective bee repellents, and/or tools for beekeepers.
- ryanmarsh 8y ago"One theory was that the queen was trapped in my car and the swarm were following,” Carol said. "But they couldn't find the queen anywhere so I've no idea if that was right. Soo... can we please change the title on this one to something not clickbait bs?
- jasonlfunk 8y agoIs this article format normal for the telegraph? It seems strange to just have so many consecutive quotations in a row.
- mattnewport 8y agoAnd so much repetition, the editing is really rather poor on this article.
- cududa 8y agoYes
- th0ma5 8y agoReminds me of The Savage Bees (1976) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Savage_Bees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Savage_Bees
- rdiddly 8y agoAnd of course the much bigger/better-funded (but apparently less-original) "The Swarm" (1978): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(film)
- DonHopkins 8y agoWax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_or_the_Discovery_of_Television_Among_the_Bees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_or_the_Discovery_of_Televi... >As the first film streamed across the Internet in 1993, the New York Times declaring Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees an “historic event.” >Blair performs in the film, which additionally features a cameo by William Burroughs. As an anti-war statement, Wax provided an early critique of the Gulf War and current-day drone warfare. A combination of innovative digital animation, found footage, and live action, Wax’s visual form is a unique representation of the technologies and politics that it critiques, which still reverberate today. http://www.waxweb.org/ http://www.waxweb.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl3eEzuLwPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl3eEzuLwPk Wax or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees [85:00, 1991] [English version]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6mXatS-4ns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6mXatS-4ns
- th0ma5 8y agoOf course NYT would call it "an historic" rather than "a historic" due to the east coast H dropping. I'll show myself out :P
- natalyarostova 8y agoA little bit of a tangent to the main topic but... >I'm a little uncertain about how much of their hobby is built on communal agreement, anecdotes, and personal experience as opposed to scientific data. Scientific data, which we interpret to mean a more thoughtful hypothesis and data gathering mechanism, is not always more correct than anecdote and personal experience. For example, it turns out we'd have been better off taking nutrition advice from our great-grandmas in the old country, rather than the mid 20th century scientific analysis (gathering data and running regressions) on the optimal way to eat macro-nutrients. In some cases when knowledge is generated by a complex non-linear system, the default human approach of building anecdotes and personal experience is stronger. Similarly, I'd sooner trust the sage wisdom on code readability from some 50 year old open source hackers, then a team of PhDs in their 20s or 30s, who studied a bunch of teams and summarized their results.
- scarejunba 8y agoHuh, interesting. Well, that's a flaw in the epistemological process, right? What is the problem?
- hammock 8y agoNo, it's a flaw in the scientific process.
- afiori 8y agoIt is not really a flaw in the scientific progress, but in the distribution of trust. The scientific method essentially offer eventual correctness, that is that every mistake made now will be eventually corrected. How we decide when it is enough is a separate hard problem we still do not know how to handle. This is also the reason why science as arbiter of truth is at best sketchy (out of very specific instances e.g. black holes).
- hammock 8y ago>eventual correctness, that is that every mistake made now will be eventually corrected. That is not a feature unique to the scientific method, though. The same could be said of narrative tradition, or the heat death of the universe for that matter.
- Causality1 8y agoThe article explicitly states there was no queen and they don't know why the bees swarmed her car.
- rdiddly 8y agoMaybe God finally saved the queen?
- newscracker 8y agoMods, this needs a (2016) in the title.
- dang 8y agoAdded. Thanks!
- ceedan 8y agoInteresting that she drove a Mitsubeeshi
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- john-radio 8y agoTo the tune of...
- john-radio 8y ago"Tank!" from Cowboy Bebop
- zelpo 8y agoIn other breaking news, some ants built an ant pile somewhere
- lostlogin 8y agoThe person who was worried someone would kill them was not silly. I have been called to remove 2 swarms this year after the homeowner had already doused them in flyspray. The last one was a bit bigger than a basketball. Depressing.
- exabrial 8y agoSo to give the script writers of Tommy Boy credit, this isn't impossible....
- tptacek 8y agoAt like, minute #31, I'm going to a car wash.
- anonu 8y agoBees are some of the most fascinating creatures around. I feel like we know close to nothing about how they live and communicate.