Sat 3 Feb 2007
This week we introduce our new sloth/bees/babies focus for the show with:
* Sloth
* A great many Tvindy voicemails
* Bees
* Possible immigration destinations for the coming environmental apocalypse.
* More sloth
* The Australian Flag
* More Bees
And, in a new Things that are Dumb, Jana talks about the medicalisation of chilbirth (that’s the babies part).
February 4th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
The previous Canadian flag featured two beavers playing hockey. Honest.
Until someone posts below with actual links to dispel what I said, that’s the truth.
February 5th, 2007 at 1:38 am
Useless fact (but still relevant): In Aliens 4, the hybridized queen gives birth on her back, despite not even being human. How’s that for bad money chasing out good. Also, in Children of Men, Ki gives birth on her back by default. But at least she walked around first.
Modern delivery procedure is a prime example of non-optimal (but stable and “natural”) equilibria. You can pull out that example any time you meet a free-market nut or a conspiracy nut.
February 5th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
There’s also the issue of pediatricians telling new parents that it is essential that they put shoes on their babies as soon as they can crawl so their feet develop properly. At least that’s what my parents were told when I was born; maybe they don’t do that anymore.
February 5th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
It was Louis XIV, the Sun King, who liked to hide behind a curtain, voyeuristically peeping through a gap to watch his mistresses give birth.
And so to what you need to ‘make’ a queen bee…
Queens typically live three to five years, surrounded by about a dozen or so attendants. A typical queen lays 1 million eggs during her lifetime - 1,000 to 2,000 eggs a day - into wax cells of slightly differing sizes.
The smallest cells always hatch workers. The largest cells are sometimes used to produce queens, but all the eggs are the same at this stage.
After three days, the eggs hatch into grubs. The grubs are fed constantly by worker bees.
The first food they are given is a substance called royal jelly. It is creamy, rich in protein, and is produced by the workers’ head glands. After three days, grubs destined to become worker bees shift to a less fattening diet of honey and pollen called ‘bee bread’. Future queens continue to be fed on royal jelly.
The control of who gets what food is done by the levels of pheremones in the nest. If few queens and queen grubs are present, then workers are triggered to start off some more queens.
When a queen grub is five days old, her nurses seal her into her cell with a supply of royal jelly. She eats that, then forms a cocoon.
Seven days later, after maturing, the new queen bee emerges and bites her way out of her wax cell’s lid. When a new queen is about to emerge, the old queen moves outside the cell, waiting to fight with her and (usually) sting her to death.
The attendant workers try to keep the old queen away. Queen bees have smooth curved stingers which can be reused repeatedly without injury to the queen.
If the old queen is not able to kill her or is not present, a new queen’s first action is to crawl around searching for other queen cells to murder the occupants. If two queens are born at once, the rival queens battle to the death.
If all the queens die, or have flown away, the workers promote some grubs with royal jelly so new queens can be born in ten days or so.
If the hive is overcrowded, a swarm forms a new colony. The old queen leaves, the new queens remain behind. You would think the new queens would leave, but doing it this way round avoids the risk the old queen has in fighting with her daughters.
It’s a lovely fail-safe system of ensuring there is a plentiful supply of queens but only one in charge at a time. Extremely vicious, but fair.
So, to make a queen bee all you need are some grubs and some workers - you do not need a queen bee. Just catching some worker bees on their own will not give you a queen bee.
February 5th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Sorry, I forgot to mention: eventually an old queen looses out to a new queen and is stung to death. This process is called supersedure, and ensures there is always a strong queen in charge.
February 6th, 2007 at 4:32 am
Bees are just like klingons (except for being matriarchal).
February 9th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
By the way, I noticed that you (Zan and Jana) hadn’t yet submitted BYU to Digg Podcasts, so I did it for you:
http://www.digg.com/podcasts/Bob_s_Yer_Uncle
Be sure to encourage your listeners to Digg both the podcast and their favorite episodes.
February 12th, 2007 at 12:39 am
Just saw this video and thought it might make good BYU fodder:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qehxjub5lyo&eurl=