Be Excellent To Each Other

Alright me little cockers, I went to Wayne Manor for a party on Saturday:



And he'd put on some bands. I saw hard Fi (the man was very rock and roll as he said 'fucking' twice. At 4 in the afternoon!), The Lightening Seeds (the man was from Liverpool and seemed quite a good guy), Razorlight (Half the band were dressed as camp pirates, and for some reason, they didn't just play chasing cars then fuck off again, like a decent person would) and Dizzee Rascal who was Bonkers.

The next day, we were watching the highlights of the TdF and there was a massive buzzing outside. We looked out the window and there were thousands of bees flying around. They seemed to go after a bit, so we retired to play Catan. Our friend's neighbour knocked on the door and we went outside to see this:



And so we didn't know what to do so we phoned some spacemen to sort it:

Razorlight didn't sing 'Chasing Cars'.

No, they didn't. Were you as disappointed as I was? I didn't realise you were going too.

Haha!

Arf.

Who did you call to get the spacemen out? Is a swarm a usual thing these days? Is it a hive migration or a natural thing?

So many bee questions.

It's a pretty normal thing. Perfectly safe as well, so long as you don't bother the queen. They're just looking for a new home and surrounding the queen whilst the scouts are out looking for a new nesting location. It'd move on naturally before the day is out.

Those bee guys will likely home them on their own farm, where the bees will help to pollinate their land, or at least sell the swarm to a farmer who keeps bees for that purpose.

[Source: We had a nest in our loft, and I had a nice chat with the brave spaceman who removed it.]

Over the weekend I tweeted about seeing a loa of flying ants, and that it was later in the year than usual for Flying Ant Day (there always seems to be one or two dad a year where there are tons of them).

Got tweeted back by someone asking me to fill in a survey on them for the Society of Biology, which it trying to track how and where this happens. That's kinda cool.

Also, a hive is a man-made thing, bees live in a nest!



(Technically, "natural" hives can occur as well, but that's just a structure within which the bees build their nest. A hollow tree, for example.)

But we're getting into, er, beemantics?

That's pretty much what the spaceman said. He showed us some of the honeycombs they had brought for the box to transport them in, too. It was all most educational. I think the sapcemen were summoned by someone calling with the bee keeping society, or council pest control. he said that due to the hug amount of wet weather, he was expecting lots of swarms as soon as the sun came out. The bees were Italien, apparently, as tehy were more yellow in color, the British bees being mainly black.

Bee spacemen are generally very nice, I find.

My spaceman, let's call him Buzz, also told me an interesting factoid about bees and honey. All bees make honey, but most varieties only make enough honey for personal use. The honey bee, however, makes a great excess of honey, which is why it can be harvested. So remember, "bees" does not always equal "honey".

Bees.

Dark Souls.

Apparently, Dark Souls is in the post to me right now.

Yesssss! Put your "ready to be impressed" face on!

Or your "ready to be bored by having to fight the same boring enemies 300 times, slowly" face.

You should have ordered some bees instead.

Buzz off!

Indeed, hence why I asked if it was a hive migration or a natural thing

Yeah yeah!

The man said that after a while, half the bees leave the hive with the queen and go off and start anew somewhere. Prior to this, the old queen has laid some new queen eggs so that colony keeps going.

When we have our field, we're going to have bees so as to help assure pollination of the trees and plants. And for the honey. Apparently.

The scale of our (field of) dreams is really getting a bit out of hand. Oh wait, I hadn't mentioned my four-storey-underground-Grand-Design-that's-actually-really-simple-and-cheap, had I?

I have one of those. It will have real lava floors.