Oh man I know I say this EVERY time but I love that userpic ;D
Also thanks (:
You know with all the other manly things Putin is always doing, you know, wrestling bears without a shirt on and such, I'm surprised there AREN'T any pictures of him going through a beehive, presumably shirtless and without smoking them first.
The killer bees we have in the southern edge of the US now are "Africanized bees" ... people ask me if they have them in Africa or assume they do, but I always point out that no, they do NOT have "Africanized" bees, they have "African" bees! That's actually an important distinction. Cross-breeding can sometimes yield some weird and unexpected results, and in this case, well, if you'll excuse me, I'll tell a story (:
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are not native to the Americas. They were brought here by the European colonists from Europe. So in Brazil around the 50s they were like "why are we trying to use temperate bees from Europe in the tropics!? let's get some tropical bees!" ... so they brought some bees from Southern Africa, which turned out to be Apis mellifera scutellata, the Savannah bee, and bred them with Apis mellifera mellifera from Europe and.... in a classic mad scientist tale the bees were not only incredibly bad tempered, they escaped! And the rest is history
( ... )
Ooh, that's really interesting! I didn't know that about the cross-breeding (though, to be fair, I did know that killer bees were an American product - I just always assumed it was a natural development because people are jerks and the bees went 'Screw you, you silly white men').
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Also thanks (:
You know with all the other manly things Putin is always doing, you know, wrestling bears without a shirt on and such, I'm surprised there AREN'T any pictures of him going through a beehive, presumably shirtless and without smoking them first.
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Great post
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Well, probably not technically. It looks quite warm.
But, very interesting!
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Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are not native to the Americas. They were brought here by the European colonists from Europe. So in Brazil around the 50s they were like "why are we trying to use temperate bees from Europe in the tropics!? let's get some tropical bees!" ... so they brought some bees from Southern Africa, which turned out to be Apis mellifera scutellata, the Savannah bee, and bred them with Apis mellifera mellifera from Europe and.... in a classic mad scientist tale the bees were not only incredibly bad tempered, they escaped! And the rest is history ( ... )
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I didn't know the one flower, one bunch thing about banana plants either. Thanks for sharing :)
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