Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/17/beekeeper-uses-this-cool-bee-v.html
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Yep; Carpenter bee. I was looking them up for some reason today (synchronicity!). They are apparently even bigger than bumblebees, and don’t have furry bodies.
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Yeah, it was about as big as my thumb. It went dutifully from flower to flower.
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When it wasn’t drilling holes in nearly deadwood.
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Chick-et-tee-boo!
Yep. Carpenter bees missed the floofy boat.
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My dad kept about a half-dozen hives of honeybees as a hobby when I was a teen. Small towns being what they are, most everyone in town knew who to call when they had a swarm set up housekeeping. Dad would get a phone call, and we’d go capture the swarm – with a shop vacuum. We didn’t suck up every bee, but you don’t actually have to. As long as you capture the queen, the other bees will either disperse in search of another hive to join, or follow the queen if they can smell her.
Once we got the buzziest shop-vac in the world back to home, all we needed to do was prop the vacuum hose under the lid of an empty hive and leave the bees alone for a day or so. The queen would enter the hive, attracted by the beeswax in the frames (and usually a “full” frame of honey/wax/pupae). The honeybees would follow the queen, and presto, a new beehive.
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A couple of weeks ago, I came across this article about different types of bees (the Carpenter Bee in this article does have some fur/hair on the body though). I love that the Bumblebee genus is “Bombus”
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I remember this incident from a couple of years ago; it was believed that a queen somehow got trapped in a car (maybe a young queen in flight to set up a new hive?), and the hive followed.
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Came for Red Green reference. Leaving satisfied…
If I were a bee I would definitely miss the Rapture and get left behind.
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