Bees don’t die when they sting. They have a barbed stinger, human skin is elastic and that’s why they get stuck. Our first reaction is to swat or swipe on the site of stinging which rips their stinger off by force. If you leave the bee alone, it will wiggle and twirl around, trying to get itself unstuck and sometimes that is successful, sometimes they’re fucked. The bee didn’t really commit suicide when stinging, you killed it.
Also, did you know that the queen bee has almost full control over their offspring? It works like this: The queen bee only mates once in her life during the nuptial flight and stores the sperm in her spermatheca (like a sperm sac), the drone usually dies in the process because mating tears their endophallus off and the trauma kills him. After founding a colony the queen can now choose whether to fertilize her eggs or not and if she does, a female larva will hatch from the fertilized egg, else a drone larva will hatch through a process called haploid parthenogenesis.
The destiny of becoming a queen or a worker depends entirely on the diet the female larva is fed: all larvae are fed royal jelly (a special secretion from worker bees) for a few days and then worker bees are switched to what is called bee bread which is a mix of pollen and nectar while future queens stay on the royal jelly diet. The royal jelly lets the bees develop their ovaries, making them capable of laying eggs. Technically, all worker bees can lay eggs (which could only produce drones), but in a healthy colony, they will be switched off the royal jelly soon enough so that this rarely occurs.
So, in a way, worker bees can stage a mutiny if they are unhappy with their current queen by feeding a larva royal jelly, rearing a new queen.
Bees are awesome.
Love it, thank you for this.
Do they isolate the queen larva to prevent other larva from eating its food? Or is it like a baby bird scenario where they’re just fed directly from bee to bee? Are mistakes sometimes made, and if so do they “correct” the mistake?
Royal jelly for queens is stored in special compartments that are constructed specifically to rear a new queen and they drop the larvae in there. Wikipedia has a pic.
Thanks! That was an awesome little read!
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My understanding is that while they can make a new queen under the radar, hypothetically, the slightly different scent of her eggs/haploid larva is seen as a hostile invasion and it’s quickly dispatched by loyalists, which is why non-main-queen offspring rarely happens.
Something like because they are all essentially genetically identical, they all have the same pheromones, but the next generation won’t.
woah, bee society is more interesting than i thought. thank you for sharing!
Is there anything that a bee would sting that it’s barbed stinger wouldn’t get stuck in? It seems like most anything would result in stinger detachment
Other insects mostly. Technically also birds, but birds are too quick and too strong so the fight is usually over before the bee can sting.
Other insects, thats the primary use of their stinger
The barb is mostly meant to aid in staying attached while injecting venom and is meant to still be able to release by twisting
Human skin is more elastic than bee’s typical adversaries and the singer becomes stuck when they try to release. It you wait a while and let them try to pull it out carefully without hurting themselves, they might end up going in circles until it works its way free
Damn right I killed it, that sting still lives rent free in my brain 25 years later!
It wasn’t a carnival, it was a candy themed amusement park, and one of the stands was “make your own lolipop”, and I wasn’t looking, and fuck - I got stung on my tongue by a wasp.
That’s probably the easiest connection for me to make if I had been part of that conversation.
It’s not a “hack” per se, but at least I got lots of free icecream following. Until my parents got to thinking that ice cubes are free…this has nothing to do with neurodivergence. it’s just how brains work. necessarily, in fact. your dad’s just an idiot.
by the way it’s not the same thing but one thing I enjoyed doing when i was younger and talked with my dad for long enough, we would stop at a point and think “wait how did we even get here?” and trace back the conversation to several topics ago.
we both have diverse interests, maybe that’s why things we talked about would keep chaining to random other things. now that i think of it, my dad used to buy lots of encyclopedias before the internet, and we’d just randomly browse them. even on our computer we had multiple versions of Encarta. and now we use wikipedia and it’s so easy to jump from one article to another.
so i guess what we did all those years ago wasn’t far off from wiki surfing verbally.
Not everyone’s brain works like that. My girlfriend, for one. She struggles to make those
arbitraryabstract jumpsArbitrary or abstract?
If the other person can’t follow your train of thought, it can feel as though the emotional and cognitive connection/trust that was built in the conversation was abandoned along with the previous context. This can happen when there is a non-trivial jump in context between ideas.
Steering the conversation can be done by introducing intermediary steps that are connected to the previous topic in a self-evident way. This maintains that cognitive and emotional connection/trust because you are showing that you value the other person’s understanding and participation.
Figuring out what “non-trivial” or “self-evident” means is probably the hard part but you’d probably want to consider each step in, for example:
Grass, meadow, forest, tree, timber, log truck, mill, paper, exports, shipping dock, ocean, ice caps, ice bergs, titantic, James Cameron, Michael bay, transformers.
You could probably go from each one to the next trivially, steering the conversation from grass to meadow and so on through the list. But to go from grass to transformers without intermediate ideas truly makes absolutely no sense.
This extends to being an expert in your field as well. We’ve done an experiment and the result is both incredible and obvious. To me.
The struggle is then to connect and explain these things I am seeing to other people who are themselves also extremely intelligent but don’t have the same exact brand of autism.
same exact
brand of autism.information set. You are describing knowledge, not process.
Never in my life have I had a situation with a bee. Wasps on the other hand…
Neurotypicals don’t have “trains of thought” they have “teleporters of thought”
My wife regularly has rogue “brain trains” like this. Keeps things fun :)
My GF sometimes has to ask me what I’m talking about because I ask her a question with no context, but most of the time now she knows, not sure if she just knows me well enough or if she has found a way to join me on my “brain train”.
My wife likes including me in the middle of conversations that she started in her head.
I have to occasionally remind her that I need a little context.
As soon as I saw “carnival” and “wasps,” I understood the connection immediately.
We call them “fair bees”; they are drunk and aggressively non-violent about drinking your daiquiri, as well as rummaging through every trash can. Never been stung by one, but they can be aggravating sometimes cause they won’t leave me or my drink alone… like any obnoxious drunk, really
So I can see how you can get to thinking about wasps from “carnival”. The “fair bees” definitely remind me of wasps being assholes
Yeah, any outdoor environment with food involved immediately brings to mind yellowjacket/bee/wasp type insects not leaving sugary drinks alone.
ime they simply don’t think
I’ve always found calling people NPCs pretty degrading, but what do you call someone who has no internal dialogue? They’re just… husks?
Building off this, im fully capable of having 2 entirely different conversations at once.
Ive been talking to one person at work, stop mid sentence to correct the other crew, and go back to what I was saying with a small reminder.
I’ve had two conversations with the same person at the same time.
Really common with text chatting, since they reply to conversation 1 while I’m replying to conversation 2, then we switch.
Yeah my gf sometimes does this but uses one app for one conversation and another for a different one.
At like 3 or 4 simultaneous conversations in different languages things go wrong and I accidentally use the wrong language in one of them.
Everything is fine until you say the wrong strawberry?
It’s more like one person suddenly hears a weird mumble they don’t understand.
That’s just how brains work, nothing to do with neurodivergent.
I always assumed that most people do this just much slower. Hence why they would switch fewer topics.
I have written several proposals for my employer based on this kind of thinking. We have some kind of issue, I push it to the back of my mind, weeks later the issue still exists and I’m listening to a totally unrelated podcast and something the host or guest says triggers a series of seemingly unrelated thoughts and suddenly I have a solution to the issue.
My department head once asked me how I come up with these solutions, I smiled and said I have ADHD and listen to podcasts. He just looked at me with a blank stare then said that doesn’t make sense. I just laughed a little and said, I know but it’s hard to explain how things connect in my mind, the podcasts just help me brainstorm. He just smiled, shook his head, and said well what ever works I guess.
Wow, this also helps me with thinking! Just hearing people talk helps me think. Music is focus too much on it and can’t work.
Yeah it’s weird, you would think it would distract you but it doesn’t. On the music thing, I’ve found that classical music helps me focus but other types don’t. To be specific piano and violin music seems to work best for me. But that’s really only when I’m writing, when I’m working on a problem podcasts, audiobooks, and music I’ve heard a million times already work just fine, new music will distract me though, it has to be stuff I already know.
About the same ! Classical kind of works. But yeah can’t listen to anything new either or I focus on it
I’d recommend reading Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. I’m not sure that all the claims hold up to scrutiny, but it’s nice to see a book that notes the way I like to think has real world application.
Somethings I suspect you’re doing are:
- Analogical Thinking of Deep Structures to create an Outside View (Chapter 5)
- Spacing which gives time away from a problem and asks part of the mind to re-collect the issue so you know those deeper structures well. This is presented in the chapter on learning, but I suspect it’s relevant here (Chapter 4)
Oddly enough, if your boss wants to foster creative problem solving for novel problems, this book might convince him to give you more latitude and resources to do your thing.
So I just got done reading up on this book and ordered a copy. Thanks, I might also grab the audiobook since I sometimes have problems focusing on reading, and listening to a book is the only way I can finish it.
Funnily enough the boss is extremely open to new ideas and recognizes that I’m ready to move on. He’s already told me that he’s petitioning for extra budget now that we have surplus money company wide so that he can move me and two others up into low level management in project management roles. As he said the project management title will be fluid since each of you will be doing wildly different things based on your strengths.
I’m down for it since the majority of the things he says he wants to assign me are things I want to do. Sure there’s a few things I’m not crazy about, but they aren’t anywhere near deal breakers.
Awesome. I’ve been feeding the ebook into a text to speech reader. It’s been working for me.
I’m glad to hear you have a boss that’s open to your mode of thinking. Good luck and I wish you well!
Text to speech is a good idea but it would have to be natural sounding, I find the typical ones are robotic sounding and distracting, for me at least.
Yeah he’s a good guy, we actually graduated together but were just casual acquaintances at that time. A few years back I was covering a holiday and it was just the two of us, nothing going on so we sat at my desk and started talking about highschool, after a while we got to talking about what we saw as the future of the department (he had just been promoted to head the department) and we found out we shared a bunch of ideas. He’s never said anything but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s had to slow roll my promotion because of the highschool ties.
Check out elevenlabs. They used to do a reader I liked, Omnivore. It’s pretty natural sounding. As of now, it’s free, but I like it.
Glad you two clicked. It’s nice knowing someone out there has similar ideas and a different way of solving problems.
I tried to get an ADHD diagnosis a year ago. The practitioner basically said no but it was hard for her because I was so on the line. But when I hear the litany of behaviors by a subset of people with ADHD, it can bring me to tears because it’s nice to see I’m not the only one.
PM work can be fun for sure.
I actually recently checked out elevenlabs, the free tier seemed so limited it didn’t seem like it would work, maybe I’ll have to check them out again and dig a little deeper. Thanks for the suggestion.
Yeah I lucked out with him for sure. The guy he replaced was good, but still operated with an old school corporate mindset.
I got lucky with my diagnosis, my doctor also had ADHD and even though I still had to do the testing to be sure he basically diagnosed me on our first visit. He was also able to teach me how to manage my impulses and channel the energy into projects I can get passionate about. If you are right on the edge I’d seek a second opinion, I’m not knocking the previous doctor but a different one might pick up on something that would put you over the threshold.
If nothing else research coping strategies on your own. Check out this ADHD life, I connected with him years ago through comedy podcast we both listened to and he’s got some great resources.
Believe it or not, that was my first impression as well. I really didn’t use it because it seemed like it would end up costing me money. But about a month ago, they sent out a survey asking why I wasn’t using it. I suspect we werent the only ones not giving it a shake. I didn’t do the survey, but it reminded me to give it a try. Throwing this book in there has been great and the free AI voices have a nice flow for the most part.
Much more than the diagnosis, I’ve been more interested in the coping techniques. I don’t think my manifestation is so bad that I need medication, though I was sincerely curious if it would change things for the better. I might try for a second opinion. The practitioner even gave a reference for someone who died more comprehensive testing, but she doesn’t take insurance. So I’m waffling a bit.
I’ll check out this ADHD life. I feel like it’s been mentioned in other communities, but honestly can’t remember.
Cheers!
Funny thing is, sometimes I’ll do this out of the blue days later and my wife picks up on it immediately.
