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Telling the Bees
- kdamica 3y agoIt’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia entry, but this is also present in Margaret Atwood’s excellent book series, Maddaddam.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoYou can edit the page and add that nice detail.
- mattlondon 3y agoYeah right! This is Wikipedia! Any edits will be reverted within minutes by bots or the self-appointed "owner" of the page.
- hackernewds 3y agois this hyperbole or actually true?
- CameronNemo 3y agoIME that is not gonna happen in a scenario like the described, assuming the claim is sourced.
- mminer237 3y agoIn my experience, it really depends on the page. Some pages will go years with no editors reviewing them, and some articles you will get reverted that same day for literally any change you make. Something like this is probably obscure enough that any change you make should be able to go under the radar.
- PhasmaFelis 3y agoHyperbole. There are certainly jerks on Wikipedia, and it's really frustrating if you run into one, but the vast majority of good faith edits will never encounter this problem. It's like when someone gets banned from a Reddit sub for a stupid reason and concludes that every one of Reddit's thousands and thousands of mods is an evil power-tripping egotist.
- Der_Einzige 3y agoDef true. I've tried on several occasions to fix small issues in the Max Stirner wikipedia page and had them reverted within minutes.
- InSteady 3y agoColor me not shocked that some philosophy major has carved out a fiefdom on wikipedia and jealously guards it against all would-be contributors.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoI have made a modest number of contributions to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. I would say the worst experience was going through a somewhat bureaucratic process to have a page updated to then be ghosted by the person who suggested the process. Eventually I just did a WP:BOLD and made the edits myself, which remain there to this day. The best experience is being 'thanked' (there is a button for it on a page's edit history) by a page's self-appointed 'owner'. From my perspective, if the edits are uncontroversial, it appears as though the response will be too. Editing Wikipedia is, socially, neither an overwhelmingly positive nor an overwhelmingly negative experience for me. I do it now and then as a purely altruistic endeavour.
- crazygringo 3y agoI have added lots of bullet points to the "In popular culture", "In film", "In TV" sections on Wikipedia. I have never once had any of them removed. Nor can I imagine why anyone would do that if it was factually correct and relevant. I do make sure to add a single source to a major news publication review of the show/film/etc. that mentions that the work is indeed about the thing or involves it as a major plot point.
- samwillis 3y agoLove this! It effectively a type of therapy or mindfulness for bee keepers, much like prayers and confession. I wander if as we all start to use chat based LLMs in our everyday lives similar "superstitions" and traditions may appear? People telling them the things that have happened in their lives...
- timeon 3y agoDepends if LLM is local or in Cloud.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoPeople are already using GPT for therapy. It's usually pretty compassionate so it's probably not the worst thing.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoMy intuition is that the AI thing will be a closer experience to journaling than to confession. It's a more convincing facsimile of a conversation, but a bee colony is a living thing in a certain way that an AI definitely isn't right now. This conception is an important part of the experience, in the same way that talking to a mute but living cat is a different kind of experience than talking to a furby. Though I sincerely practice prayer and confession which ironically probably makes me an unreliable witness to their mechanisms and value in this venue.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoYou would still be a more reliable witness than someone who has never done so. The ideal would surely be someone who used not to, and can remember how they felt both before and after starting to practice.
- hackernewds 3y agoAnd yes today was another great day of telling the beeeeezzz
- qrush 3y agoso glad to know someone else likes watching others save the beeeeezzz
- dang 3y agoRelated: Telling the Bees - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28667197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28667197 - Sept 2021 (59 comments)
- jakzurr 3y agoThe 2021 comments were some of my favorites.
- isoprophlex 3y agoIt's early morning, I'm looking at my family as things start to come to life in the household... I wasn't really mentally ready for that top comment, and the followup after a couple of weeks, from the guy whose wife died. But then I guess neither of them were particularly ready, too... Heavy stuff.
- renewiltord 3y agoA similar thing is done in Chekov's short story Misery. It is short enough that you can read it in about 10 min https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/misery.htm https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/misery.htm
- inglor_cz 3y agoYeah, that used to be done in Czech rural regions, but > 50 years ago. One distant relative was a beekeeper (indeed a teacher of beekeeping) and when he died around 1970, his wife (born 1922, my great-aunt) would tell the bees.
- protoman3000 3y agoI know it’s only tangential related to the topic, but reading this article just overflows me with this feeling I’m describing below. I didn’t voice this out somewhere before, it somehow just started very recently and it’s so difficult for me to let go of it. I can’t get over the fact that we all must die. Everybody you ever knew and could be able to know will. You who are reading this message, I, all the other significant people in our lives, all the users on this platform. Everybody who is right now experiencing their consciousness in this universe. All the consciousnesses before - the person in the article who asked to tell the bees about their dead. It’s as if whatever is and ever could be completely collapses once your consciousness is gone. Saying it doesn’t make sense to try to make sense about it makes no sense because once it’s over it’s as if there never was and will be no sense to begin with. It’s filling me with nothing but deep dread, tears, pain and suffering all over my body. Still, beautiful to see how others tried to cope with it by telling the bees.
- oxmane 3y agoThank you for sharing this. I too have experienced this existential dread, and sometimes still do. Your post triggered a multitude of responses from different people experiencing the same, each with their own set of beliefs and coping mechanisms. I found it fascinating - thank you. It always surprises me that we are in a minority - most people go through life without experiencing this, or wondering about this. When trying to discuss this with one of them, they are usually baffled, and truly cannot understand you. It is almost as if we're speaking different languages. As a side note - I am wondering if there is something in common in all those who experience this dread.
- samwillis 3y agoLife and our eventual death is f-ing scary. Anything anyone wants to do to help cope with that, no matter how batshit crazy it is to other people, is fine by me (as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else).
- jksk61 3y agodeath is scary because we decided to protray it in that way. What's scary in an endless sleep? From a sleep deprived person pov, it seems like a pretty good ending.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoSuperstitious ignorance. How could they not know that they needed to twerk it to communicate these messages?
- mkmk 3y agoCould simply be a tradition that helps make sure that nobody forgets to take care of the beehives when somebody dies or leaves the home.
- luuurker 3y agoI think they're joking. The twerking part is a reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoEvoked masterfully by Terry Pratchett in the Tiffany Aching stories.
- hot_gril 3y agoReminds me of https://aleteia.org/slideshow/the-mystery-of-icon-preserving-bees-3350/2/ https://aleteia.org/slideshow/the-mystery-of-icon-preserving...
- bbtfan 3y agoA song from my favorite band, Big Big Train: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adbrWWnyMKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adbrWWnyMKg
- theiz 3y agoThis does need the context that you would communicate much more with your hive then just death and weddings. You need to build a relation with them. Ask permission to enter the hive, take good care of them, all that. And yes, there are people (like me) that still do it that way. And yes, I do think our bees / colonies recognise me and my wife as their keepers.
- vintagedave 3y agoCould you share more about why you think that, or your relationship with your bees please? How do they recognize you and behave to you? Do they have a group intelligence or do individuals know you? I ask because I’d love to keep bees myself someday and the relationships people have with bees are something I don’t know well, or don’t understand, but am fascinated by. (The tradition linked for this thread is one I’m familiar with, for example — but what I don’t know is what makes people believe it. What is the experience of beekeeping that leads people to believe bees understand?) It’s one primary reason I’m keen to become a beekeeper, to experience and to learn. I’d love to hear whatever you have to say.
- hotpotamus 3y agoI keep bees and I like them, but there's a reason you wear a protective suit to work on them; they aren't all that keen to be friends. Tame bees will pretty much just ignore you, and that's probably the best you can hope for. But you do get to see what they're up to and watch them work which is pretty impressive. It's not particularly hard to get started keeping them if you want to give it a shot.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI think this is a good approach and the right attitude. I think that people tend to discount insects because they are small, simplistic, and ephemeral. Yet, social insects such as bees are part of a larger organism: the colony/hive. And collectively, that hive carries a lot of sentience, memory, and agency. We didn't coin the term hive mind for no reason! So while this custom seems perhaps superstitious and frivolous, it carries actual layers of meaning and importance, because animal husbandry, even insect husbandry, is steeped richly in tradition and knowledge handed down across generations, for millennia, more than we can even comprehend.
- GloomyBoots 3y agoLikely relevant: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180319-are-lithuanians-obsessed-with-bees https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180319-are-lithuanians-...
- dools 3y agoI do this with my servers
- whytai 3y agoI always thought bee communication through "dancing" was visual. On reading more, it seems the bees build up electric charge which interacts with the antennae on other bees. Excerpt [1]: > Honeybees accumulate an electric charge during flying. Bees emit constant and modulated electric fields during the waggle dance. Both low- and high-frequency components emitted by dancing bees induce passive antennal movements in stationary bees. The electrically charged flagella of mechanoreceptor cells are moved by electric fields and more strongly so if sound and electric fields interact. Recordings from axons of the Johnston's organ indicate its sensitivity to electric fields. Therefore, it has been suggested that electric fields emanating from the surface charge of bees stimulate mechanoreceptors and may play a role in social communication during the waggle dance. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance#Mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance#Mechanism
- pulpfictional 3y agoThis is amazing.
- jrochkind1 3y agoAlso a framing device in Laline Paull's novel _The Bees_, which otherwise mostly features bee characters, and is pretty accurate to what we know of bee's lives and social organization. It's one of my favorite novels! (Yes, bees don't have much individuality, perhaps she gives them more than they really have to make a book, but it's also part of the fun to see how she succesfully makes a story from characters mostly without much personality or individuality). https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18652002 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18652002
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoCan you imagine the scandal if the Royal Beekeeper failed to do his duty, and the bees became angry, and swarmed and stung the Royal Family during the Coronation; how frightful. How do you explain that to the kids.
- jjwiseman 3y agoThe Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles has a nice exhibit on this, "Tell the Bees... Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition" https://www.mjt.org/exhibits/bees/bees.htm https://www.mjt.org/exhibits/bees/bees.htm
- ronnykylin 3y agoSo the bees will punish people for not telling them about death in the family by their OWN death. This is so gentle.
- travisgriggs 3y agoFascinating. Wonder if this is why Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax keeps and communes with bees.
- lynguist 3y agoI recently watched a video where someone visits the Hadza, a Tanzanian hunter-gatherer people, and asks them about life and goes on a hunt with them. They say the important things in life are to have meat from hunting and to have honey from the bees, and that’s it. Meat and honey is the meaning of life. The videos are: 1: https://youtu.be/TAGjuRwx_Y8 https://youtu.be/TAGjuRwx_Y8 Asking questions to some Hadza 2: https://youtu.be/Ny4bHOnSg0o https://youtu.be/Ny4bHOnSg0o Going hunting with the Hadza
- helpfulmandrill 3y agoI love how they just resolutely refuse to give philosophical answers. "What happens when you die?" "Well, we bury you in the ground and then we move somewhere else" "What is your greatest fear?" "Lions" The guy is desperately trying to get some "ancient tribal wisdom" from them and they're like "yeah, Lions are pretty scary".
- bigbluedots 3y agoThey're probably too busy trying to survive to spend much time navel-gazing
- helpfulmandrill 3y agoProbably. They don't seem super-stressed though.
- iamnotsure 3y agoWisdom.
- Scarblac 3y agoOne of the reasons why Terry Pratchett's _Discworld_ books are so beloved by its fans is that he was very widely read, and put lots of things in his books where you go "ha, nice world building, gives his fantasy world a good fantasy like feel" and then later find out he just took something real and copied it. This practice is in _Carpe Jugulum_, IIRC.
- rex_lupi 3y agoSo I just learned about this custom from this post, and after an hour, I've started watching the Midsomer Murders, and a reference to this tradition pops up. You know, like you learn a new word, and suddenly the word starts popping up everywhere
- r1chard007 3y agoSometimes called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- MichaelMoser123 3y agoReminds me of a book by Stanislav Lem, 'the Invincible'. The alien in the book was a swarm of very small robot, maybe the people who tell the bees are thinking of them as some collective swarm intelligence, or something like that...