this is the masked bee! she has no friends and hates everyone. Sometimes when she has kids she raises them alone and doesn’t let the father come for day trips. she loves pollen but does not like waiting for it so she chews flowers open which is essentially stealing. we love her anyway.
these bees are homalictus bees! they are the rainbow gay bees. Females tend to live together in one nest and guard the entrance. one time we found 160 gay girls bunking together. They’re so irridescent and small that they might look like flies but they are really just tiny lesbians.
and this is the blue banded bee! she may look like she’s wacked out, but really she is pretty chill. she just wants to live independently (or with some friends) in a nest or burrow and look after tomatoes.
this is a cuckoo bee! she is really cool! she goes into other bee’s houses and lays eggs there, and then when the baby hatches it eats the host bees’ pollen and lays waste to the hive, murdering and eating all the other bee babies! BUT ONLY if it’s mother bee didn’t kill them all first.
thank u dark bee tumblr
This is the most successful thing ever!
this is dawson’s burrowing bee! they are one of the largest bees in australia and they burrow into the ground to make nests. males are so aggressive that they will literally fight and kill each other to get a female! and if a particularly aggressive male does not get a female he will murder all of the other males out of rage! (and sometimes the females will be casualties of these brawls – here is a video of a bee brawl where a female get decapitated. these bees are very large and kind of look like half bee half cockroach. but the females’s fuzzy white heads are pretty cute! [photo credit]
and dark bee tumblr comes through for us again… we are so fortunate. thank u dark bee tumblr. thank u
I’m mad that they missed the opportunity to use “les-bee-ans”
This is a tree bumblebee- they’re pretty similar to honeybees in that they have big nests with a polyandrous queen. However, these guys love to be around humans and in gardens, and are super resilient- there are now large populations in Iceland. They have a more complex social hierarchy than most bees, with multiple worker castes. If a worker gets close with the queen she can mate with a drone and lay her own eggs in with the big pile, but eat the eggs of any workers beneath her that try to do so.
This is a valley carpenter bee- the only bee that can thermoregulate and had a circulatory system complete with aortic arch. Carpenter bees are good because they are too big to get into many flowers and have to be extra hairy to get pollen. They live in raw wood in small family units of all females (mothers and daughters or sisters) and are excellent cooks and workers. Males cruise around mating with multiple females and then leave.
These are green sweat bees- they burrow in the ground and live in apartment complexes, where they all use the same entrance but then have their own separate burrows rather than one large room. Some have kids, some don’t, so someone’s always around to keep out invaders. Unlike most bees the males actually do quite a bit of pollinating and go out in groups.
dark bee tumblr has graced us once again with even more forbidden and secret bees we are truly blessed
Coming at you with another Australian native bee; tetragonula carbonaria or the sugarbag bee. They are a stingless species instead using resin to trap and entomb invaders that get into their hive as shown below (which doesn’t happen often because these bees are tiny and the entrances to their hives are also just as tiny).
Like honey bees they are eusocial. Meaning they live in hives with a queen, drones and worker bees that create these complex hives that are completely different to honey bee hives. With honey and pollen pots built on the outside of the hive and the spiral structure in the middle made up of brood cells, where in the centre the queen sits.
do you dare pass through the sticky traps and enter the B E E S P I R A L
one of the more valuable things I’ve learned in life as a survivor of a mentally unstable parent is that it is likely that no one has thought through it as much as you have.
no, your friend probably has not noticed they cut you off four times in this conversation.
no, your brother didn’t realize his music was that loud while you were studying.
no, your bff or S.O. doesn’t remember that you’re on a tight deadline right now.
no, no one else is paying attention to the four power dynamics at play in your friend group right now.
a habit of abused kids, especially kids with unstable parents, is the tendency to notice every little detail. We magnify small nuances into major things, largely because small nuances quickly became breaking points for parents. Managing moods, reading the room, perceiving danger in the order of words, the shift of body weight….it’s all a natural outgrowth of trying to manage unstable parents from a young age.
Here’s the thing: most people don’t do that. I’m not saying everyone else is oblivious, I’m saying the over analysis of minor nuances is a habit of abuse.
I have a rule: I do not respond to subtext. This includes guilt tripping, silent treatments, passive aggressive behavior, etc. I see it. I notice it. I even sometimes have to analyze it and take a deep breath and CHOOSE not to respond. Because whether it’s really there or just me over-reading things that actually don’t mean anything, the habit of lending credence to the part of me that sees danger in the wrong shift of body weight…that’s toxic for me. And dangerous to my relationships.
The best thing I ever did for myself and my relationships was insist upon frank communication and a categorical denial of subtext. For some people this is a moral stance. For survivors of mentally unstable parents this is a requirement of recovery.
“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this,” Philip Alston, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told Connor Sheets of AL.com earlier this week as they toured a community in Butler County where raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.
The tour through Alabama’s rural communities is part of a two-week investigation by the U.N. on poverty and human rights abuses in the United States. So far, U.N. investigators have visited cities and towns in California and Alabama, and will soon travel to Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.
Of particular concern to Alston are specific poverty-related issues that have surfaced across the country in recent years, such as an outbreak of hookworm in Alabama in 2017—a disease typically found in nations with substandard sanitary conditions in South Asia and Subsaharan Africa.
The U.N. investigation aims to study the effects of systemic poverty in a prosperous nation like the United States.
90% of the poorest areas in America are in Republican Red zones.
B-b-b-b-b-b-but poverty in the Red States isn’t all that bad, right?
Right?
Errrrr
Jesus christ, and to think how many billionaires we have in the US while this is happening
How is anyone surprised by this though?
Do people not look around?
Or is this really not prevalent anywhere but the South? It’s damn near everywhere you look in the South. I had friends in the high school with houses that when you flushed the toilet it went from a pipe in the trailer out to a ravine out back. I remember burning our trash. And it wasn’t unusual. I mean I’m in my thirties and it’s not uncommon for me to meet people in my generation who are the first in their family to have indoor plumbing.
The republicans aren’t blind. They aren’t naive. They’re just greedy. You can’t amass that kind of wealth by giving it away to the less fortunate. And don’t be tricked into thinking the wealthy Democrats are any better. Politicians will say whatever it takes to get voted into a position, and then they’ll vote however they need to in order to keep the money rolling in.
1. When eurasian nomads first started making pants in the first millenium BC, they didn’t cut the cloth to shape, they wove the shapes they needed on the loom. Mostly rectangles, but still interesting.
2. Pants were a very elaborate garment at the time! When humans first started weaving and wearing cloth, clothes were pretty much “giant rectangle that you wrap around your body and sometimes a belt”. Then, people started making tunics and tunic derivatives, which is basically another rectangle, but this time with a hole for your head and sometimes sewn up the side. Now you have TWO pieces of clothes: the rectangle with a hole, and the bigger wrappy rectangle. This covers like 90% of ancient clothes, including the Roman toga and tunica. So pants, which covered your legs individually, were very ???? to ancient mediterranean people.
3. Otzi, an austrian guy who lived ~3300 BC, was found frozen in the Alps, wearing “pants”, consisting of two individual leg-sleeves made of animal skins with the fur inwards, and a loincloth. The legs of the “pants” tied on to a belt.
4. This is a similar setup to European medieval hose, except that hose didn’t have fur, and also had footies. Also, the whole separate-legged pants things is why our modern word ‘pants’ is plural, even though today it’s one garment.
5. Pants enabled a big leap in military technology- chariots to cavalry. Pants means you can ride a horse and still have your genitals intact afterwards. Turns out, sticking people on top of horses is much more effective than having the horses drag the people around behind them.
6. In like ~300 BC, the Chinese were having massive amounts of trouble with the pants-wearing, cavalry-having Eurasian nomads. Then, some guy had the brilliant idea of making everyone wear pants instead of robes, and proceeded to drive back the nomads and unite China.
7. The Romans and Greeks considered pants to be barbaric and feminine. But having muscular legs was very masculine. Some men were known for wearing ridiculously short tunics to show off their thighs. Marc Antony once mooned everyone by accident because he was wearing a miniskirt and no pants. Very manly.
8. Peter the Great decided that Russia had to be more like the rest of Europe, so he implemented some really strict policies, including a beard tax and mandatory pants. Yes, you could be punished if you didn’t wear pants.
9. The fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent was a major factor in making it acceptable for women to wear pants in public, which wasn’t really a culturally accepted thing until almost the end of the 60′s. In 1966, he debuted on the runway the first women’s tuxedo, which was met with a very ‘meh’ critical reception at the time, but is now considered one of fashion’s most influential works.
10. In the UK, ‘pants’ specifically refers to underpants.
bonus fact: it’s really not that hard to put pockets on pants, but so many designers seem incapable of figuring it out.
10. In the UK, ‘pants’ specifically refers to underpants.
Writer Note: The outer garments are “trousers” or “jeans”, less commonly “slacks”, “twills” or “flannels” (white cricketing trousers are sometimes called that).
Another underwear-as-outerwear word: US “knickers” (short for “knickerbockers”, knee-breeches or plus-fours) are usually worn for golf…
…but were once everyday stylish (and despite protests, unisex) street attire.
However “knickers” in the UK means specifically “ladies’ underpants”, so they’re not unisex
(at least not widely admitted as such), and they’re definitely not street wear except in unusual circumstances.
That said, a lot of modern men’s “shorts” (a word which in the US often means “underwear” even without the prefix “boxer”) are so long that a way to close the hems over a pair of high socks would turn them into knickerbockers – or even their larger cousin “plus-fours”, which extended “plus-four inches” past the knee and were baggy with it.
Names for early-mid 20th century trousers also included “bags” (AFAIK the word’s still used) derived from “Oxford Bags”, extravagantly loose trousers worn by the same Uni students and young men-about-town who wore plus-fours.
These are extreme even for bags, but there was a reason:
These more sensibly proportioned bags are worn by my Dad in about 1939 (the car is a 1938 Morris 8 series II). About 6 months later he was in a fireman’s uniform for the duration…
This is very interesting! One thing, though: I’ve lived in the US my entire life and have never heard anyone use “shorts” to refer to underwear, with “boxer shorts” being the one exception. (Though I hear just “boxers” more often.) So this is either a highly regional thing or a twentieth century thing that hasn’t passed on to modern day.
Some of the bigger Endler Boys doing what they do best: chasing each other around, and just generally acting like nuts.
The male fry have been getting separated out into that tank as I spot them, to join their uncles. (The original two males from one LFS.) There are maybe 10 in there so far, with the others lurking back in the plants somewhere.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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