[HN Gopher] Telling the Bees
___________________________________________________________________
Telling the Bees
Author : penguin_booze
Score : 158 points
Date : 2023-07-12 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Superstitious ignorance.
|
| How could they not know that they needed to twerk it to
| communicate these messages?
| mkmk wrote:
| Could simply be a tradition that helps make sure that nobody
| forgets to take care of the beehives when somebody dies or
| leaves the home.
| luuurker wrote:
| I think they're joking. The twerking part is a reference to
| this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance
| protoman3000 wrote:
| I know it's only tangential related to the topic, but reading
| this article just overflows me with this feeling I'm describing
| below. I didn't voice this out somewhere before, it somehow just
| started very recently and it's so difficult for me to let go of
| it.
|
| I can't get over the fact that we all must die. Everybody you
| ever knew and could be able to know will. You who are reading
| this message, I, all the other significant people in our lives,
| all the users on this platform. Everybody who is right now
| experiencing their consciousness in this universe. All the
| consciousnesses before - the person in the article who asked to
| tell the bees about their dead.
|
| It's as if whatever is and ever could be completely collapses
| once your consciousness is gone. Saying it doesn't make sense to
| try to make sense about it makes no sense because once it's over
| it's as if there never was and will be no sense to begin with.
|
| It's filling me with nothing but deep dread, tears, pain and
| suffering all over my body.
|
| Still, beautiful to see how others tried to cope with it by
| telling the bees.
| [deleted]
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is arguably bad advice if you're already sad, but in any
| case, coping for me is all about perspective. I read a book
| called _The Five Ages of the Universe_ a few weeks ago. It 's
| pretty fascinating to see a timeline of the entire universe
| like this and to realize that the Stelliferous Era, the only
| age in which stars will exist, is so short compared to
| everything else that ever has or ever will happen. The universe
| will eventually run out of hydrogen. Black holes will
| evaporate. If the grand-unified theory predicting proton decay
| is true, baryonic matter will eventually no longer exist. Even
| if that one isn't true, protons will still eventually decay
| because of quantum tunnelling, just on much longer timescales.
| The accelerating expansion of the universe will eventually
| permanently causally disconnect whatever is left when we no
| longer have galaxies from everything else.
|
| All the things people try to save, themselves, their cultures,
| their religion, their species, the earth, it is all not only
| temporary, but barely an infinitesimal slice of nothingness, a
| rounding error indistinguishable from zero on any global
| timeline. At the same time, it's a miracle we ever got to exist
| at all. Enjoy what you get and stop longing for the impossible.
| _Everything_ will die. Whoever or whatever you love, go love it
| while you still have the chance.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| FWIW, I am at risk of sudden cardiac death due to
| unpredictable, rapid-onset ventricular fibrillation. I've been
| defibrillated twice, the first time after an out-of-hospital VF
| episode, which has a 1-in-5 survival rate. The second time was
| by an implanted defibrillator. In that episode I had no more
| than five seconds from awareness that I was feeling faint to
| passing out.
|
| I now accept that it could happen again at essentially any
| time, and that the defibrillation might not work. And yet my
| life continues pretty much as normal (although I'm no longer
| able to drive). I still get up, do the chores, enjoy the other
| aspects of my life, get bored, etc etc.
|
| I've recognised that there is a difference between death itself
| (which doesn't now frighten me), and the process that causes
| it. I've now come to believe that VF is actually how I would
| like to die, when the time comes. It seems infinitely
| preferable to a slow painful process due to cancer, or
| Alzheimer's.
| [deleted]
| asielen wrote:
| This feeling is why I just don't get the petty quibbles and
| politics of humanity.
|
| This life is only one we have so why not make it the best for
| everyone.What else is the point of life but to live to the
| fullest and help everyone else live to their fullest
| (happiest). You can't take it with you, there is no prize for
| dying with the most money or power.
|
| The meaning of life is only what we want it to be.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Pema Chodron writes:
|
| > When we talk about hopelessness and death, we're talking
| about facing the facts. No escapism. We may still have
| addictions of all kinds, but we cease to believe in them as a
| gateway to happiness. So many times we've indulged the short-
| term pleasure of addiction. We've done it so many times that we
| know that grasping at this hope is a source of misery that
| makes a short-term pleasure a long-term hell.
|
| > Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to
| make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to
| return to the bare bones, no matter what's going on. Fear of
| death is the background of the whole thing. It's why we feel
| restless, why we panic, why there's anxiety. But if we totally
| experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives of
| the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our
| lives, an honest, direct relationship, one that no longer
| ignores the reality of impermanence and death.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Conversely: people are basically forgetting "John Wayne" (to
| name a larger-than-life character of recent memory).
|
| I made a reference a few years ago to "Let's put on the 'Theme
| Song from Rocky' and get this done!" (in reference to having
| figured out a bugfix or something for the project of the day),
| and I was met with blank stares by my (admittedly younger) co-
| workers. It really kindof broke me for a second that something
| that was _such_ a cultural phenomenon is currently
| "unimportant" or "irrelevant".
|
| If "The Theme Song from Rocky" can be forgotten, what chance do
| I have of making an indelible mark on life?
|
| Maybe John Wayne movies still come on every once in a while,
| but as a global community, we're losing a lot of "broadcast
| shared culture" in favor of "unicast, A/B-tested, divisive
| entertainment", and specifically "entertainment" rather than
| "culture".
|
| So don't focus on making an indelible mark on life-at-large, or
| being a larger-than-life character like John Wayne... but
| instead focus on making positive impacts to the people closest
| to you, and especially yourself.
|
| <3
| hosh wrote:
| Well, I can tell you even with beliefs that consciousness (or
| at least awareness) persists as pure awareness without form can
| still leave the body with deep, existential dread.
|
| With the bees, it's not necessarily a coping, but also
| recognizing how life moves beyond our own:
| https://youtu.be/OGXbOiiaI24
|
| (The front man for that band passed a few years ago:
| https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/nottingham-news/tributes...
| )
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Yours is a very individualistic view point. The individual
| can't survive forever, but if you think of humanity as a single
| living organism, kind of like a mold that has colonized this
| rock called Earth, then it is immortal. Thinking of it as a
| single organism allows you to see that, like all life, it keeps
| itself healthy by having older elements die off while new ones
| are regenerated. Each individual doesn't matter much.
|
| This point of view is good for thinking environmentally, "we"
| will live forever as long as we keep the planet habitable. But
| there's a range of other perspectives between the individual
| and planet-wide organism. For example, some like to focus on
| keeping their nation alive, or their race, or their culture, or
| just their own bloodline. If you elevate any of these it
| lessens the despair of the inevitable death of the individual.
| protoman3000 wrote:
| You are definitely right. I would like to add that what we
| need to make this happen is empathy for each other.
| axolotlgod wrote:
| First off, I think everyone deals with this at some point. I
| think, also, since you are always changing as a person, what
| helps you cope at one point of your life might not work as life
| goes on. Various things have all contributed, in some way or
| another, to helping me in the past and present. Most recently,
| I came across a VSauce video from a year ago:
|
| "Do Chairs Exist?" by VSauce [1].
|
| Now, the thrust of the video deals with mereology [2]. However,
| the final line from Michael at the end surprised me a lot, and
| in the days since watching it, has been an extremely strong
| comfort for me:
|
| "I am not a thing that dies and becomes scattered, I AM death
| and I AM the scattering."
|
| I think it is worth spending the 40 minutes to watch the whole
| thing, as makes this line make more sense and extremely
| impactful. Anyway, this helped me recently, maybe it can help
| someone else :)
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE [2]:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/sum2005/entries/mereolog...
| [deleted]
| samwillis wrote:
| Life and our eventual death is f-ing scary. Anything anyone
| wants to do to help cope with that, no matter how batshit crazy
| it is to other people, is fine by me (as long as it doesn't
| hurt anyone else).
| jksk61 wrote:
| death is scary because we decided to protray it in that way.
| What's scary in an endless sleep? From a sleep deprived
| person pov, it seems like a pretty good ending.
| Animatronio wrote:
| From a sleep you wake up, from death nobody's sure....
| jchw wrote:
| I think part of what makes death so weird is that we don't
| really experience it. We don't really know when it's coming,
| except for sometimes when it's imminent, and even then it's
| mostly just guessing. So, even though it's inevitable, most of
| the time we don't view life through the lens of death, simply
| because it's impossible to work backwards from.
|
| > Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of
| life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a
| certain number of times, and a very small number really. How
| many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your
| childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being
| that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps
| four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more
| times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it
| all seems limitless.
|
| -- Paul Bowles
| bashd4 wrote:
| Honestly for me, I almost take comfort in this thought.
| Everything is temporary. Enjoy it as you can. Nothing will
| matter soon - so who cares if you make mistakes, nobody can
| possibly judge you. There is no objective other than what you
| decide to aim for, so just go and live life :)
| jcul wrote:
| Me too, I used the wecroak app to send me reminders
| throughout the day that I am going to die.
|
| It helps bring me back to the present moment.
| jterrys wrote:
| I went through a similar existential conclusion and tried to
| impart the sentiment to some of my friends. Reactions ranged
| from mixed to negative. Some people exist and thrive in
| structure. It made me a little sad. It takes a certain
| optimistic mindset to carry this idea forward, otherwise it
| seems entirely nihilistic.
| f_allwein wrote:
| Well, the fact that we know we are going to die can also make
| us appreciate life more, and make conscious decisions how we
| are going to spend our limited time on earth.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| For me, there's no existential dread because there's so much
| life after death. In the limit, it's all life, viewable as one.
| Focusing on who has it when is just petty detail. :P
| specproc wrote:
| What's beautiful about the tradition is an acknowledgement of a
| fundamental connectedness of all things.
|
| Some may scoff, but as a young man I had a nice little mushroom
| trip, topped off with a little baby woodrose in the hills above
| an English town.
|
| It cumulated in my lying, sinking into the ground. I felt quite
| profoundly certain that this would be the experience of death.
| A return to the wholeness from whence I came.
|
| I think back to that experience whenever I'm troubled by
| mortality.
| osullivj wrote:
| The Malvern Hills?
| anothertimethen wrote:
| [flagged]
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| What you've described is the human condition--our
| reconciliation of a relatively short, finite existence with the
| unceasing passage of time. Time doesn't really exist, it just
| affects us, so effectively it does exist.
|
| What you're feeling has lead to civilization, essentially. I
| think the finite nature of a human life isn't an inherent
| property of the concept of humanity, but I think a lot of the
| ideals thats we use to define humanity are born from this
| finite nature (respect for life, respect for each other etc.,
| the idea of "respect"). Separately, I think the term "respect"
| has been taken over by game theroretic ways of thinking, which
| I find disappointing. Such is life, I suppose.
| cuttothechase wrote:
| Isn't it like between a rock and a hard place. Can you think of
| an existence where one is never able to die? Or even worse in
| that your consciousness is never able to stop existing?
| Somehow, it feels ceasing to exist is a kinder option than
| existing forever.
| mkaic wrote:
| I've always felt like the happy compromise would be a system
| where everyone lives in healthy, youthful bodies for as long
| as they like, and then dies whenever they decide to.
|
| I am very afraid of death. But I also don't want to live for
| eternity. I feel like I'd quite enjoy a 200 or even 500 year
| life though if my body could be made to stay fully functional
| for that long.
| cuttothechase wrote:
| I just feel any finite time that we get to live would feel
| the same way. Even if we were to enjoy a longer youth with
| perfect health, we would have lifestyles, actions and
| culture adjusted for that finite amount of time, robbing us
| of the intended benefits that we purportedly could enjoy.
| In a way I tend to think, death is what defines a life.
| With the finality of death removed there is no such thing
| as life.
| efsavage wrote:
| While there are plenty of historical thoughts on this, a recent
| and profound take on it is Everything Everywhere All at Once.
| If you haven't seen it, check it out.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Your only data point is being sucked into existence and having
| no knowledge if you existed before. You will die, but you are
| not you.
|
| Have you considered taking magic mushrooms in a clinical
| setting where it's legal? Simple drugs can let you dissociate
| to understand that you are not a single conscious being; you
| just operate like one.
| postmortembees wrote:
| It's a realization we all have at one point. We all come to
| different conclusions about it.
|
| For me, I heard someone say something to the effect of "Plant
| trees you will never rest in the shade of" and like, that hit a
| weak spot for me. Right through the armor. I changed a lot of
| my life to go out and restore ecosystems, restore healthy
| forests, and plant trees.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| That reminded me of another saying: it would have been best
| to have planted a tree ten years ago, but the next best time
| is now.
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/12/29/plant-tree/ (the
| page also mentions the one you did)
|
| From an ecological perspective, I think it is quite
| extraordinary that pine trees grow so quickly. Just planting
| conifers exclusively is not going to reverse all the
| environmental instability that we have caused, but it's a
| stopgap method of reducing carbon in the atmosphere that we
| could implement almost immediately.
| openasocket wrote:
| I feel similarly from time to time. I refer to it as
| "existential dread." I'm a Christian, but I'm not free of
| doubt. And when I have these moments of existential dread my
| beliefs feel so absurd. It usually starts with immense fear at
| the thought of death, and of nothing being beyond that, like
| you describe. But then it spirals into the absurdity of
| everything. The fact that I'm a sentient ape on a spinning ball
| just feels ... nonsensical. In these moments the only thing
| that makes sense is for nothing to exist at all.
|
| I try to take comfort in the fact that, as crazy as it seems, I
| really am a sentient ape on a spinning ball. My experiences
| right here, right now, prove that there is something instead of
| nothing. And things don't have to make sense to me for things
| to be real. In fact, whatever the absolute truth of the
| universe is, it's probably too complex for us to comprehend,
| let alone for us to figure out. Even as a Christian, I accept
| that large parts of my beliefs are completely wrong, or at best
| simplifications. Because the absolute truth is something beyond
| understanding.
|
| I don't know, saying it out loud doesn't feel very comforting.
| I had a bit of an attack of existential dread typing this out.
| But I felt the need to share my experience with you
| skilled wrote:
| I can't give you the very specifics of my own experiences but I
| would like to remind you that there have been 14 Dalai Lamas on
| this planet.
|
| Life is very short if you live it the traditional way. By the
| time you realize what is what (or, what you came here to learn
| in this life) it feels like there is little time left to enjoy
| it.
|
| But a lot of this comes down to self-awareness and whether or
| not it interests you. There are many actively religious places
| on this Earth (India, Nepal, Bali(!)) who will happily laugh at
| you for saying we live only once.
|
| And as for me. I distinctly remember when I was five years old,
| I used to think we could only have one life and my parents used
| to think that way too. And then you wake up to the reality and
| you realize that life isn't finite. But imagine if it was? How
| different would the experience be on this planet?
| protoman3000 wrote:
| But how do you know the idea that soothes these worries about
| the end are just hallucinations of this cognition of ours
| hallucinating in order to keep us going, surviving,
| multiplying and preventing us from jumping over the next
| bridge? Just like the bees are just a way to cope and deal
| with this grave grave pain.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Here's a song I quite like that touches on that perspective:
| Yard Act ft. Elton John - 100% Endurance
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3HSa4CLO8k)
| enw wrote:
| Life is absurd. Why anything exists at all is absurd. So absurd
| in fact I find it unconvincing that life is nothing but a large
| deterministic automaton without initial cause. Maybe religions
| are a coping mechanism for deluded people, but I hope they
| point to some deeper truths that we may never fully grasp.
|
| In any case, pain and other conscious beings are as real as it
| gets, so no matter how brief one lifetime is, you can have a
| real impact by making it better for those around you.
| perons wrote:
| I know this feeling, so hopefully this is going to be as
| helpful to you as it was for me.
|
| There is a budhist parable called the Parable of the Poisoned
| Arrow, from a Theravada sutta. You should read a good
| translation on the "accesstoinsight" website, but it goes
| somewhat like this: Malunkyaputta, one of Gautama Buddha
| disciples, asks him to answer the metaphysical questions that
| were afflicting him (questions about the Universe, life after
| death and such) - and if Gautama failed to answer him, he would
| renounce His teachings. To which Gautama Buddha basically
| responded that he never promised to answer those questions, and
| the reason is:
|
| "Imagine as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared
| with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives
| would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, 'I
| won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who
| wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a
| worker.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I
| know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me...
| until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short... [lots of
| "until I know" later].. He would say, 'I won't have this arrow
| removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded
| was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-
| toothed, or an oleander arrow.' The man would die and those
| things would still remain unknown to him."
|
| So those questions were, in fact, useless. No matter the
| answer, the arrow was still there inflicting pain. And Gautama
| follows that by saying that his Teachings were the way of
| removing the arrow and treating the arrow wound, and not a way
| of answering those questions.
|
| I'm not budhist, but I read this passage in a moment of my life
| I actually spent nights awaken because thinking about death was
| simply too dreadful (it's a very personal background, but I was
| VERY christian until the very night I noticed after my prayers,
| at 20 yo, that it was not that I believed in christianism, but
| I was just afraid of not believing in anything at all), so I
| was looking into anything I could support myself with. This
| story made me understand a couple of things:
|
| 1. Someone around two millenia ago also had trouble sleeping
| because of those questions. That's weirdly comforting, knowing
| that this is something part of our human condition, and
| something we've been trying to figure out how to deal with for
| as long as we became self aware.
|
| 2. The story aknowledges that what we are feeling, this
| existential dread, is pain. Is real pain, even if a mental and
| emotional one. That means that we can and should find a
| treatment to it, philosophically or not.
|
| 3. Most important of all, looking for answers of the kind "Is
| there life after death?" Is independent of not fearing death
| anymore. Someone two millenia ago noticed that we can live a
| happy life and not suffer from the existencial dread NO MATTER
| your own personal answer for those questions.
|
| Again, I'm not buddhist, and by no means I no longer fear
| death. I still have my existential crysis now and then, still
| have some trouble sleeping sometimes. But it's a process of
| facing this feeling and understanding that it is possible to
| face our little time alive with human dignity and without
| feeling overwhelmed by death. We still can treat this pain and
| live happy with ourselves and our loved ones. Everyone deserves
| this.
|
| Anyway, hope this helped, even if a little bit. No matter what
| you believe, knowing someone faced this same problem before and
| actually discovered a way to live happily is something that
| soothed me in my worst nights, hopefully it can start something
| good to you too.
| alangou wrote:
| I understand the feeling. I felt it often as a child and would
| run to my parents crying about it in the middle of the night.
| It's the dread of utter dark--like every light in the world
| going out at once.
|
| It turns out this question--how do we contend with the question
| of death?--is one of the most, if not the most, studied
| questions in human history, second perhaps only to why we came
| to exist. The collective answer by each of the world's cultures
| is encoded in myth, poetry, and spiritual and religious
| traditions. I would recommend the Bhagavad Gita, translated and
| commentated by Eknath Easwaran
| (https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-2nd-Eknath-
| Easwaran/dp/...). It's not necessary to practice or believe in
| any particular religion to gain something valuable from these
| books, nor is it incompatible with science to delve
| spiritually.
| protoman3000 wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation, I will check it out.
|
| I'm already reading the Dhammapada (Gautama Buddha's take on
| these and many other things) by Eknath Easwaran and can
| greatly recommend it to everybody as well.
| bbtfan wrote:
| A song from my favorite band, Big Big Train:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adbrWWnyMKg
| dools wrote:
| I do this with my servers
| kdamica wrote:
| It's not mentioned in the Wikipedia entry, but this is also
| present in Margaret Atwood's excellent book series, Maddaddam.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| You can edit the page and add that nice detail.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Yeah right! This is Wikipedia! Any edits will be reverted
| within minutes by bots or the self-appointed "owner" of the
| page.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I have added lots of bullet points to the "In popular
| culture", "In film", "In TV" sections on Wikipedia.
|
| I have never once had any of them removed. Nor can I
| imagine why anyone would do that if it was factually
| correct and relevant.
|
| I _do_ make sure to add a single source to a major news
| publication review of the show /film/etc. that mentions
| that the work is indeed about the thing or involves it as a
| major plot point.
| hackernewds wrote:
| is this hyperbole or actually true?
| CameronNemo wrote:
| IME that is not gonna happen in a scenario like the
| described, assuming the claim is sourced.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I have made a modest number of contributions to Wikipedia
| and Wikimedia Commons. I would say the worst experience
| was going through a somewhat bureaucratic process to have
| a page updated to then be ghosted by the person who
| suggested the process. Eventually I just did a WP:BOLD
| and made the edits myself, which remain there to this
| day. The best experience is being 'thanked' (there is a
| button for it on a page's edit history) by a page's self-
| appointed 'owner'.
|
| From my perspective, if the edits are uncontroversial, it
| appears as though the response will be too. Editing
| Wikipedia is, socially, neither an overwhelmingly
| positive nor an overwhelmingly negative experience for
| me. I do it now and then as a purely altruistic
| endeavour.
| mminer237 wrote:
| In my experience, it really depends on the page. Some
| pages will go years with no editors reviewing them, and
| some articles you will get reverted that same day for
| literally any change you make. Something like this is
| probably obscure enough that any change you make should
| be able to go under the radar.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Hyperbole. There are certainly jerks on Wikipedia, and
| it's really frustrating if you run into one, but the vast
| majority of good faith edits will never encounter this
| problem.
|
| It's like when someone gets banned from a Reddit sub for
| a stupid reason and concludes that every one of Reddit's
| thousands and thousands of mods is an evil power-tripping
| egotist.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Def true. I've tried on several occasions to fix small
| issues in the Max Stirner wikipedia page and had them
| reverted within minutes.
| samwillis wrote:
| Love this! It effectively a type of therapy or mindfulness for
| bee keepers, much like prayers and confession.
|
| I wander if as we all start to use chat based LLMs in our
| everyday lives similar "superstitions" and traditions may appear?
| People telling them the things that have happened in their
| lives...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| My intuition is that the AI thing will be a closer experience
| to journaling than to confession. It's a more convincing
| facsimile of a _conversation_ , but a bee colony is a living
| thing in a certain way that an AI definitely isn't right now.
| This conception is an important part of the experience, in the
| same way that talking to a mute but living cat is a different
| kind of experience than talking to a furby.
|
| Though I sincerely practice prayer and confession which
| ironically probably makes me an unreliable witness to their
| mechanisms and value in this venue.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| You would still be a more reliable witness than someone who
| has never done so. The ideal would surely be someone who used
| not to, and can remember how they felt both before and after
| starting to practice.
| timeon wrote:
| Depends if LLM is local or in Cloud.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| People are already using GPT for therapy. It's usually pretty
| compassionate so it's probably not the worst thing.
| renewiltord wrote:
| A similar thing is done in Chekov's short story _Misery_. It is
| short enough that you can read it in about 10 min
| https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/misery.htm
| theiz wrote:
| This does need the context that you would communicate much more
| with your hive then just death and weddings. You need to build a
| relation with them. Ask permission to enter the hive, take good
| care of them, all that. And yes, there are people (like me) that
| still do it that way. And yes, I do think our bees / colonies
| recognise me and my wife as their keepers.
| vintagedave wrote:
| Could you share more about why you think that, or your
| relationship with your bees please? How do they recognize you
| and behave to you? Do they have a group intelligence or do
| individuals know you?
|
| I ask because I'd love to keep bees myself someday and the
| relationships people have with bees are something I don't know
| well, or don't understand, but am fascinated by. (The tradition
| linked for this thread is one I'm familiar with, for example --
| but what I don't know is what makes people believe it. What is
| the experience of beekeeping that leads people to believe bees
| understand?) It's one primary reason I'm keen to become a
| beekeeper, to experience and to learn. I'd love to hear
| whatever you have to say.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Also a framing device in Laline Paull's novel _The Bees_, which
| otherwise mostly features bee characters, and is pretty accurate
| to what we know of bee's lives and social organization. It's one
| of my favorite novels!
|
| (Yes, bees don't have much individuality, perhaps she gives them
| more than they really have to make a book, but it's also part of
| the fun to see how she succesfully makes a story from characters
| mostly without much personality or individuality).
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18652002
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Evoked masterfully by Terry Pratchett in the Tiffany Aching
| stories.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Reminds me of https://aleteia.org/slideshow/the-mystery-of-icon-
| preserving...
| whytai wrote:
| I always thought bee communication through "dancing" was visual.
| On reading more, it seems the bees build up electric charge which
| interacts with the antennae on other bees.
|
| Excerpt [1]:
|
| > Honeybees accumulate an electric charge during flying. Bees
| emit constant and modulated electric fields during the waggle
| dance. Both low- and high-frequency components emitted by dancing
| bees induce passive antennal movements in stationary bees. The
| electrically charged flagella of mechanoreceptor cells are moved
| by electric fields and more strongly so if sound and electric
| fields interact. Recordings from axons of the Johnston's organ
| indicate its sensitivity to electric fields. Therefore, it has
| been suggested that electric fields emanating from the surface
| charge of bees stimulate mechanoreceptors and may play a role in
| social communication during the waggle dance.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance#Mechanism
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yeah, that used to be done in Czech rural regions, but > 50 years
| ago.
|
| One distant relative was a beekeeper (indeed a teacher of
| beekeeping) and when he died around 1970, his wife (born 1922, my
| great-aunt) would tell the bees.
| GloomyBoots wrote:
| Likely relevant: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180319-are-
| lithuanians-...
| hackernewds wrote:
| And yes today was another great day of telling the beeeeezzz
| qrush wrote:
| so glad to know someone else likes watching others save the
| beeeeezzz
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Telling the Bees_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28667197 - Sept 2021 (59
| comments)
| jakzurr wrote:
| The 2021 comments were some of my favorites.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-12 23:00 UTC)