#hymenopterids

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

You probably wouldn't want to share a drink with a cocktail ant! The species in Crematogaster are colloquialy known as cocktail ants or acrobats due to their habit of raising their abdomens over their heads when threatened. This behaviour isn't just for show, either; cocktail ants will spray a frothy venom which paralyzes their targets just like a nerve gas.

(Image: Crematogaster scutellaris carrying a piece of food by Philippe Garcelon)

[blackwaxidol]

When I was very little I got stung on the palm by a wasp, and then again a few years later on that same palm, and it is something I am occasionally forced to be reminded of because there is a reoccurring pain in the joints of that hand ever since. I developed a habit of idly running or dragging the backs of my nails across that palm so it would briefly mask the stinging/burning/aching sensations between the phalanges.

[scalefeathers]

The full index (or what I assume to be the full index) can be found on Atlas Obscura, with a helpful infographic!

this from the guy who wrote the sting pain index, a scale he constructed after letting himself be stung by insects

[gamer-goo]

I LOVE WASPS AND OTHER HYMENOPTERIDS INCLUDING ANTS AND BEES

[woozywaspy]

I’m feeling the effects of not making a stimboard in a while (poison damage)

So that I don’t forget, here’s a list of boards I’m planning to make:

- boston terrier #1079 with a silly hat

- Ransack pt.2

- Crumplezone pt.2

- Jamack (Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts)

- Calcifer (mostly just because I want to make a fire stimboard)

- Transmasc Hawkfrost (inspired by the HAWKSTORM MAP)

- Caramel Coffee (the drink, I’m craving it)

- Hymenopterids

- Animated stims

- Requests (ask away, I need ideas)

[moa-sting]

a summary of my current WIPs/project ideas because I want to talk about them

Rise and Fall of the Glorious Qiao: a xianxia webnovel about starcrossed lovers, growing up in a loving community, and avenging said community when it falls. It’s around 20 chapters now and I have about 10 more finished but unpublished on Book 1.

I have almost the entire story plotted and it’s 300 years during the Tang Dynasty followed by a modern day time skip. The character list is like 5 pages long. The couple I’m most excited to write about don’t appear until Book 2 and start out hating each other (lol)

O Demon Star: space opera about alien ambassadors trying to mediate a civil war among an alien hymenopterid species where the primary reproductive member has decided on their entire species’ extinction. One of the ambassadors is living flesh from a planet where souls are derived from the binary suns. The other is a human whose brain was used as a computation terminal by their spaceship in order to navigate to the alien nexus, so that memories of her previous life are scrambled and lost (but she remembers that being a she was important to her).

Since the Stolen Sun: soft fantasy/sci-fi short story/novella inspired by Sousou no Frieren and Always Coming Home by Ursula le Guin. The Sun-eating tyrant has been defeated and the heroes who defeated him work to build society back up again. Leftist infighting, burnout, and going home to a place that has forgotten you.

Prosper Strand: a fictional mid-Atlantic town where a bunch of New Weird events happen. I just put my non-Qiao modern era stories here including:

Queer couple where one of them hides a dark secret (she’s a clown)

Anarchist Chinese grocery owner.

Tortured mad scientist and a dude who is completely unimpressed with their theatrics.

Horse mayor (mayor who’s a horse), also volunteers as a therapy horse. Only the postman finds this odd.

High school music teacher who falls in love with a sentient diving suit.

On the run government scientist who broke out an SCP and is being hunted by two agents, one of whom (diversity win) is non-binary. And also turns into a weird fleshbeast.

Thanks for reading on all these silly projects. You can read Rise and Fall of the Glorious Qiao here. All of the others just live on docs, but I’m happy to talk about them!

[savetheplanarians]

My best bees-in-the-wall story, back when I was an impoverished pathology resident:

I was living in the slums, because I was recovering from being a desperately broke veterinary student. Rent was $500/month for a one-bedroom apartment. Sometimes there were gunshots outside. There were so many cockroaches when I first moved in that I seriously considered purchasing a gecko to free-range in my kitchen and manage the population. When my refrigerator broke, in July, it took the landlord a month to replace it. A leaking pipe in my upstairs neighbor's bathroom went unattended until one day their entire bathroom floor / my entire bathroom ceiling rotted through and caved in. Fortunately, the leaking pipe then dripped straight into my toilet; unfortunately, I had to keep an umbrella in the bathroom so I could stay dry while I peed. You know the kind of place.

After living there for a little over a year, one morning in September I came home to discover a single yellowjacket slowly dying on my kitchen floor. I very bravely killed it with a shoe (I am phobic of hymenopterids of all flavors). Close inspection revealed that all windows were closed. How did it get in? A mystery. But it was autumn and bees were everywhere, so it was probably nothing to worry about. The next morning, I was brushing my teeth, and another yellowjacket appeared, attracted to the light in my otherwise-dark apartment. This, in my opinion, was two yellowjackets too many, but I still didn't know how they were getting in.

All summer, there had been occasional skittering, crunching noises coming from the wall under my large bay window. I had assumed that these were caused by (optimistically) squirrels or (realistically) rats, but since they weren't chewing through any wiring I had adopted a live-and-let-live policy. By the time September rolled around, the noise was pretty much a constant presence, but was very quiet. I assumed the rats were raising a family. The Saturday following my Week of Yellowjackets, I decided to hang a picture, which necessitated hammering a nail into the wall next to my bay window. After about three solid hammer blows, someone started throwing rocks at my window, which, given the neighborhood I lived in, was terrifying and caused me to jump off my stool and hide on the floor. I peeked up at the bay window. It was not rocks. It was hundreds of enraged yellowjackets, emerging from their home in my wall via their exterior entrance through a hole in the siding of the building and then flinging themselves at my window, trying to murder the person who was hammering a nail into the side of their house. My window held up to the onslaught of yellowjacket exoskeletons, but this did explain the scuttling noises. The yellowjackets had been chewing a nest into the entire exterior wall of my apartment all summer, and now there were a LOT of them.

On Monday, I am lamenting to my resident-mates about my bee-infested apartment wall. The department secretary and an emeritus pathology professor overhear this. The emeritus professor, whom we shall call Dr. W, is in his seventies, bikes to school every day so he can shout at the residents in his aggressive East Coast accent for being stupid in rounds, which is his one true passion, and is a world-renowed bone pathologist. The department secretary is my age, sleeps about 20 hours a day due to chronic illness, and is possibly the second-smartest person I know. Dr. W is a man of action. He demanded that we drive to my apartment immediately to address the situation. I was like, "but in the middle of the work day...?" He said, "What are they going to do, fire you? They need your cheap labor more than you need them," and boy was that a formative experience in and of itself.

Off we trundle across town in my dilapidated Hyundai Elantra, because as previously mentioned Dr. W only bikes to school, and the Genius Secretary only walks. Once we get to my apartment, this tiny, wiry, seventy-plus-year-old world-renowed bone pathologist puts on his high-vis windbreaker and gloves, cinches the hood around his face, and just goes to town on the yellowjacket entrance with a can of bee spray. The yellowjackets are again enraged; he is dancing around cackling; Genius Secretary is shouting encouragement; I am cowering on the other side of the street in relative safety. I hollered at Dr. W, "Hey, you're not allergic to bees, are you?" to which he replied, "I'm not sure!" very cheerfully.

Once Dr. W has completely depleted the can of bee spray, he concludes that this war will only be won by a professional exterminator, and forces me to call my landlord by shouting at me for being a wimp in his aforementioned aggressive East Coast accent. The landlord assures me that something will definitely be done. I assume that nothing will be done, because we have sung this song and danced this dance before with the cockroaches and the leaking pipes. A week goes by. Bees continue to meander into my apartment one at a time. I find a dead one in the freezer, which seems vaguely ominous.

Then. One day. I return home after dark, because I am a resident and therefore in the autumn pretty much always return home after dark. I turn on the lights. My big bay window is black, and it is moving. And then it starts moving toward me. Or, rather, toward the light that I have turned on. There are hundreds and hundreds of yellowjackets inside my apartment. I turn off the light, walk out the door, and drive to the library, because it seems like a safe place to have a massive freak-out.

As it turns out, the cut-rate exterminator's solution to the yellowjacket problem was to spray some kind of pesticide into the hole on the outside of the building and then permanently seal the hole, thus causing every single yellowjacket to immediately evacuate through the only available exit which was, based on my crime scene reconstruction efforts, an electrical outlet in my living room. Pretty much the entire population of the yellowjacket nest relocated itself to inside the building, and then just hung out on the window trying to escape towards the light.

Dr. W and the Genius Secretary were not here. It was just me and the yellowjackets. I drove to Walmart, feeling grownup and desperate, bought two cans of bee spray, ignored every single warning about using them indoors, and then went back to my apartment and, with all the lights off, covered my entire window and most of the wall with bee spray foam. The yellowjackets were enraged for the last time, but couldn't find me in the dark, and also I ran out the back door like a coward. It took me two days to kill the majority of them, and stragglers remained for about a week. I would sit in my living room with a can of bee spray, and shoot a jet of foam at the window when a yellowjacket made an appearance. Man, that was a wretched time.

bees?

[foulserpent]

this is just lore for like. basic stuff about the world + most elf lore + first section of archin lore so far. 5 species to go. a whole section on world history to go.  i have absolutely no excuse to not make a comic in this setting.

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

The fairyfly is an incredibly dangerous wasp...if you happen to be a miniscule barklouse egg. This species is a kind of parasitoid wasp, and male fairyflies spend their entire lives inside their host egg. Since their home is so small, they themselves are the smallest known insect in the world at only 0.127 mm (0.005 inches) long!

(Image: A fairyfly (Dicopomorpha echmepterygis) by John Huber)

If you like what I do, consider buying me a ko-fi!

[firelord-frowny]

Lmao soooooo

I’ve been focusing on wasps in my lil layman’s Backyard Bug Enthusiast studies/documentation, and I took some shots of this wasp last summer.

You can see that I got, uh, pretty close.

Most hymenopterids are pretty non-aggressive as long as you don’t attack them. The obvious exceptions include pretty much the entire hornet family, which includes yellowjackets.

It so happens that some paper wasps, which aren’t aggressive, look A LOT like yellowjackets. So much so that I literally thought until very recently that they were interchangeable terms for the same species. But, as it turns out, they’re VERY different lmaooo.

So, I’m getting all these up close shots of this “paper wasp” with the intention of trying to figure out what its exact species is. I’m googling, I’m looking at state resources for identification of common hymenopterids. The only wasps I can find with this color scheme are two species of paper wasps: the eastern paper wasp and the european paper wasp, and two species of yellow jackets: the european yellowjacket, and the eastern yellowjacket.

However, NONE of those species feature the striping seen on this specimen’s thorax (the thorax is the body segment between the head and the abdomen). Instead, they have a more plain, black pattern with few yellow markings.

So, I dunno WHY exactly, but I assumed that it must be a less common paper wasp species, and I continued my research to that effect.

I came up empty.

So I finally decided, mostly just out of curiosity and not because I thought I’d find a match, to look up some of the lesser known YELLOWJACKET species in the region.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

It’s a southern yellowjacket, y’all.

DO YOU REAALIIIIIZZEEEEE HOW CLOSE I HAVE BEEN GETTING TO THESE THINGS????? Oh my god!!! Ive been gambling with my fucking life!! Ok not my life but i’ve been gambling with my physical comfort!

Omgggg. They build nests around the yard and on the house/deck and my mom always destroys them and I’m always like, moooooooom, leave them alooooone, they’re just friendly little paper waspsssss!!!

For once i am GLAD my mom ignores my Bug Advice omggggg! I’m a hack!! A charlatan! A fraud! Shame!!!

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

OK but counterpoint: you can issue royal dictates to the effect that being trans is based and being a TERF is punishable by exile to the Orkneys and everyone will just have to accept it because most Brits are actually an uplifted form of one kind of hymenopterid or another

[kaninchenzero]

dear like fucken everybody everywhere in the english speaking world

it is pronounced BEE-wulf like the fuzzy hymenopterids

not BAY-OH-wulf like the descriptor for white people

there have been some pretty dramatic vowel shifts in the language since this story/poem was written and if you say it like it was modern english it fucks up the scansion

thanks

some cranky old bitch on the internet who can be safely ignored

[science-fiction-is-real]

"Bees are good and pure and wasps are evil.”

All

Hymenopterids

are

good

and

awesome

you

uncultured

fucks

[minstrel75itg]

Nature Files for Thursday - animal kingdom: #invertebrates> #bees #wasps and #ants #ants🐜 There are approximately 198,000 species of Hymenopterids. https://www.instagram.com/p/B794tmbluMy/?igshid=q9vimsr58s7g

[fineartforbodies]

It is beyond High time I gave these folks over at @gentlehive and @queenbeehenna a shout out!! My second family, home away from home on the rainy side of the island, Gentle Hive is a no-kill #bee rescue, removal service, shelter, honey farm (shipping internationally,) connesssuer of fine sweeteners, (they've got like different flavors!) And #hymenopterid rights advocate. It is nothing short of awesome what they do. @gentlehive is beyond passionate, and extremely talented, I might add. Understands bees like sisters. I've been there during a rescue, (fully, mortally allergic to bees btw with, no equipment.) Bees so thick in the air you could just scoop your hand and grab a handful, and never felt safer. (*insert common sense disclaimer here: that was NOT common sense. But shh.) It was a divine and transcendant experience - it was like standing with a #natural #god. I definitely felt a Very healthy respect and adoration for #nature... but somehow not fear. If you ever get a chance to go to #Hawaii and can make it to #Hilo, consider this a hidden treasure of an attraction- worth going just for that I'd even say. I'll let you go to www.gentlehive.com for more info on what they do, by just wanted to share my experience. #fineartforbodies #luxlife #travel #lifestyle #advennture #experience #divine #transcendant #nexttogodlibess #rescue #keepbeesalive #beeremoval #humane #nokill #savethebees (at Fine Art For Bodies: Premium Custom Tattoos)

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

The phrase 'busy as a bee' is no joke! It takes about 550 bees visiting over 2 million flowers to make 0.4 kg (1 lb) of honey! In turn, each pound of beeswax needs 7.7-9 kg (17-20 lbs) of honey. On average, each worker only produces 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey (0.5 g) in her lifetime, meaning that thousands of bees must work around the clock to provide enough food and building materials for their hive.

(Image: A Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) collecting nectar by Ross Eatman)

If you like what I do, consider buying me a ko-fi!