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After filling the chat thread with my bug stories and pictures, I figured maybe we should just have a dedicated bug thread for everything regarding multi legged friends! Obviously, this thread is very  for anyone who does not like bugs, spiders, arthropoda of any kind! Please proceed with caution, especially if you have a phobia against any of these. beep boop Alright as you might know I absolutely love my worryingly growing collection of many legged friends, let's list'em up!! First of all, the center of my world, my ants. Led by fearless leader Queen Brunhilde, currently they are hibernation and sleeping in my fridge, species Lasius Niger: The ants  Brunhilde  Then there's my lovely gentleman scorpion named Hector, species Androctonus Australis:  The second queen of my home, the black widow Toci, named after the goddess of healing in the old Aztec religion, her name means "our grandmother" in Nahuatl. She is of the special color variant called Mexicanus, which only exists in northern Mexico and southern Texas, species Latrodectus Mactans:  A single desert locust named Keith that just refused to be eaten by Hector and grew to be my friend and family, species Schistocerca Gregaria:  And as of yesterday I expanded my bug universe even further with a new terrarium for a variety of insects I mostly keep for food for the others or just because, namely being around 50 Pallid Roaches, species Phoetalia Pallida, around ~20 or so panda-colored swift woodlice, species Porcellio laevis and of course various species of springtails, class Collembola, impossible to tell how many species it is, let alone individuals. So byob tell me your bug stories, bug friends you met outside, bugs you maybe had or have at home, insect pokemon you caught and loved, give me everything, the more legs the better!!
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Jan 14, 2021 15:19
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Jan 14, 2021 15:37
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sig by Prof. Crocodile
BYOB spells: Mutually Assured Kindness|
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those are some sexy butts drat
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Jan 14, 2021 15:40
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Most of the time the bug friends I meet outside that are fun and interesting enough for me to pull out my phone to take a picture are moths I find in the morning during the summers when I'm leaving for work. Here are some of those beauts:   
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Jan 14, 2021 15:44
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woah those colors are mesmerizing 
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Jan 14, 2021 16:47
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I grew up in a city in western Wisconsin, on the Mississippi river. In spring and early summer mayflies hatch in swarms that are big enough to show up on weather radar. This site has information on these events: https://www.weather.gov/arx/mayfly_tracking Click on the buttons for more info, then check out events in various years. Some of them include photographs. Mayflies are attracted to lights, so they pile up under any outdoor light source at night. Also, ShallNoiseUpon posted:Most of the time the bug friends I meet outside that are fun and interesting enough for me to pull out my phone to take a picture are moths I find in the morning during the summers when I'm leaving for work. Here are some of those beauts: Moths knew. |
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Jan 14, 2021 17:03
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I met this beautiful cat-er-piller (Greg) last summer. We kept him in a jar for a while, feeding him his favourite lovage and cleaning out his green poops. We had to travel away briefly in August, and some friends took care of Greg until he finally became some kind of swallowtail butterfly. But they forgot to take a picture and I am still annoyed. Greg never sent us a card either. This is Bertrude  She never calls. |
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Jan 14, 2021 17:24
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Oh golly, a Luna moth! One time I spent a whole day vectorizing a luna moth for work. 
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Jan 14, 2021 17:29
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Here's a photo I took in 2005 of a black widow and a weta hangin' out in our garage.
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Jan 14, 2021 17:35
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Can I talk about bees? I'm gonna talk about bees, even though this is my third post in a row. Here is my top-bar beehive!  Most places in the US are all into the Langstrom beehive, but in New Mexico, there are a lot of topbar hives. It's kind of a V shape, with three holes on the bottom that you can pull corks out of as the colony grows to give them more entrance space once they have enough bees to guard it all. They have several advantages:
There are some disadvantages:
Anyway, as I mentioned in the welcome thread, my bees died one winter. I miss those assholes a little bit, but not enough to get back into beekeeping. We also have a ton of skunks and bears here, and while skunks are cute, I don't miss hearing them eat my bees all night. cruft fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 14, 2021 17:50
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My cousin keeps bees for fun and has 4 or 5 hives out in the woods and he produces an insane amount of honey and wax and I want to try it in my back yard sometime. We have lots of big bugs here including GIGANTIC banana spiders but they have all gone to bed for the winter 
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Jan 14, 2021 19:07
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bugs are friends. cruft posted:Can I talk about bees? I'm gonna talk about bees, even though this is my third post in a row. this rules, i am planning on making some of these guys to try them out. when i started getting serious into the idea of beekeeping i was fascinated by historic hives/alternates tot he langstroth, but i have yet to see a single top bar hive in real life as basically no one in canada uses them. i have been thinking about overwintering issues and i am just now wondering if the difference in shape would have an effect on the bees ability to regulate their temperature in the cold. i assume there was a tighter fighting lid at some point? BUG FACTS: in the winter the bees cluster into a ball and vibrate together to keep themselves and the queen, who is mega cuddled at the center of the cluster, warm and dry and cozy. the biggest killer of overwintering bees isn't cold, it's damp, oddly enough. another fun fact is that in the fall when the temperature drops every male is forced out into the cold to die and that rules.
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Jan 14, 2021 19:39
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i loving love bees!! beekeepers must post, this is a rule now
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Jan 14, 2021 19:42
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Heather Papps posted:this rules, i am planning on making some of these guys to try them out. when i started getting serious into the idea of beekeeping i was fascinated by historic hives/alternates tot he langstroth, but i have yet to see a single top bar hive in real life as basically no one in canada uses them. i have been thinking about overwintering issues and i am just now wondering if the difference in shape would have an effect on the bees ability to regulate their temperature in the cold. i assume there was a tighter fighting lid at some point? I'll reiterate that my colony Top bar hives are apparently very popular all over Africa, and there's a small (sort of woo-woo) top bar community in England. Anyway. The gaps you noticed at the top were a real problem, especially when I smashed bees trying to put things back together, which pissed them off and resulted in my two stings. And yanking the bars out every week to inspect them probably destroyed whatever they had done to plug the gaps, so that wasn't cool. If I'd put a second colony in there, they could have reused all the comb I'd straightened out, and I wouldn't have to gently caress around with their house as much. In hindsight, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to run a couple extra bars through a table saw to get them narrow enough to prevent these gaps. If I were starting over, I'd do this, and also make some wedge-shaped shims to get things nice and tight. The corks come into play in cold weather, you seal off the entrances to keep things nice and warm. I think the top-bar folks would probably say something like "bees live in hollowed-out dead trees normally, so you don't have to freak out about insulating them if you just let them do their normal bee stuff". That means leaving them enough honey to make it through the winter, since "survive through winter" is the whole reason they make honey in the first place. I may have hosed this up too, by pulling too many combs out the first year without even giving them sugar water. I don't know. For what it's worth, though, if I were going to get back into the bee game, I would 100% go with a top bar hive. Prefab Langstroth honeycomb, scientifically spaced to reduce drone production, rubs me the wrong way. I guess I saw them as sort of pets, and not livestock. Speaking of which, after they all died, we decided that we'd be a lot more successful understanding the needs of social/pack mammals, so we got a doggo. cruft fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 14, 2021 19:55
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Glutes Are Great posted:i loving love bees!! beekeepers must post, this is a rule now Here are my mail-order bees going into my first topbar hive. It was based on a British design, described in a book called "the barefoot beekeeper". I guess this one had wooden dividers, to encourage them to not make brood combs wherever. You can also see how I cut little grooves into the bars: this was supposed to encourage them to make sort of straight comb.  Same bees, a few weeks later, telling me to gently caress off with my idiotic British hive with a mesh bottom. In fancy beekeeper terms, we call this "absconding" and it makes you feel like a bad beekeeper. Which I was.  New bees! A friend in a nearby town was splitting one of his hives, and gave me a bunch of bees. We had to tape over all the gaps so they didn't start flying around in the 60-minute car ride. Side note: I bet you didn't think New Mexico was so green, did you.  Here's a low-res copy of me looking at one of the bars, because I still have this outdated notion that someone on the forums who wants to find out my true identity couldn't do so with under 5 minutes of work. Langstroth hives typically use this plastic "starter comb" that is perfectly square and every cell is the same size, which makes it tough to make drones because they're enormous. So they don't make many drones. When the bees make comb themselves, they're all globby and irregular, and some cells are extra big for the giagantic drone bees. Drones eat a lot of honey, which means less honey for you, so if you're trying to make a living at this, top-bar hives might be a dumb thing to do. But they're apparently popular in parts of Africa, where I presume they've been keeping bees longer than anyone else, so maybe it's not all that dumb.  Here's a Langstroth hive in case you don't know what those look like:  Fun fact: I first got interested in beekeeping because of a GBS thread. |
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Jan 14, 2021 20:23
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Heather Papps posted:i have yet to see a single top bar hive in real life as basically no one in canada uses them. i have been thinking about overwintering issues and i am just now wondering if the difference in shape would have an effect on the bees ability to regulate their temperature in the cold. i assume there was a tighter fighting lid at some point? Yo, check out this photo I just stumbled on:  This makes me feel like it's possible to do a top-bar hive in Canada? I totally recognize that design, by the way. There's a flap you can open to peek inside through plexiglass to spy on your bees without loving around with the bars. I would totally buy one of these if I were starting new and could afford it, because watching your bees do bee stuff through a plexiglass wall without having to suit up and smoke 'em WOULD TOTALLY RULE. Also those legs get it high enough that skunks wouldn't be able to use it as a bee buffet. THIS IS THE LAST CRUFT BEE POST FOR A WHILE I PROMISE |
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Jan 14, 2021 20:30
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I think I could build one of those top bar hives pretty easy and make it cute, which the box ones aren’t. Do you have to build new hives pretty frequently or are they built out of cedar or some other rot resistant wood? There’s also a whole beekeeping thread in HCH for anyone willing to venture out into a grey forum: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3091681
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Jan 14, 2021 20:32
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cruft posted:THIS IS THE LAST CRUFT BEE POST FOR A WHILE I PROMISE I am absolutely buzzing at these beeposts. I love them. I watched a bunch of beekeeping videos of the summer and I think I'm going to try and get my mom to set aside some land at her place for bees because it's right up her alley. |
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Jan 14, 2021 20:34
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:I think I could build one of those top bar hives pretty easy and make it cute, which the box ones aren’t. Do you have to build new hives pretty frequently or are they built out of cedar or some other rot resistant wood? There’s also a whole beekeeping thread in HCH for anyone willing to venture out into a grey forum: Both of the ones I built appear to be pine, which is pretty easy to get out here in the western US. So I guess the answer is: I guess you don't have to worry too much about the wood? I totally don't remember feeling like I was ever going to have to "rebuild" the hive, but pretty much every top-bar hive I've ever seen appears to be made out of whatever poo poo was lying around, so I guess that's possible. Given how easily my pal split his hive, it doesn't seem like this would be a big deal. ShallNoiseUpon posted:I am absolutely buzzing at these beeposts. I love them. I watched a bunch of beekeeping videos of the summer and I think I'm going to try and get my mom to set aside some land at her place for bees because it's right up her alley. Build Your Own Beehive, yo. The bees don't need much space. My experience of bee procedure was pretty much:
But I'm like 99.995% sure they were venturing out into the world beyond my back yard, other than stopping by for a drink at the pan I set out with a bunch of rocks and water. Want to help bees but don't want a beehive? Here are a couple things you can do to be a good bee neighbor, even for native bees (which are super duper important)!
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Jan 14, 2021 20:45
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this is good insight cruft, thanks! i have a handful of langstroth boxes already, and it's what i've familiar with so for my first season at least i'm gonna stick with em. the plan this year is to choose a good hive site and just do absolutely everything i can to get the colony buzzing along. not going to harvest a lot of honey but i am going to see how possible splitting the hive before winter is. wintering, well i'm not sure. i could build a small shelter, i could overwinter them indoors perhaps... i need to do some reading and send some emails to local beekeepers. i have a relative who apparently has a bunch of hives but due to familial feuds after uncle llyod died i'm not supposed to talk to them, which kinda sucks and i may have to invite the ire of my grandmother and figure this out,
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Jan 14, 2021 20:49
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Heather Papps posted:this is good insight cruft, thanks! This is a highly solid plan, especially the part where you talk to other beekeepers nearby. Good luck! |
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Jan 14, 2021 20:51
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Do you have to build new hives pretty frequently or are they built out of cedar or some other rot resistant wood? a neat thing about beehives is that the bees basically treat the wood with propolis and wax so they last longer than you'd expect. painting/sealing the outside helps with longevity but when you only have a couple hives i can't imagine you'd be as rough with them as we were at jasons apiary.
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Jan 14, 2021 20:53
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Heather Papps posted:a neat thing about beehives is that the bees basically treat the wood with propolis and wax so they last longer than you'd expect. painting/sealing the outside helps with longevity but when you only have a couple hives i can't imagine you'd be as rough with them as we were at jasons apiary. Please tell us about working at Jason's apiary. I have no idea what it's like to have more than one hive. |
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Jan 14, 2021 21:13
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I wish I had some sort of garden or spot where I could keep some bees. I seriously considered renting a garden plot somewhere out there to do this, but I'm afraid I wouldn't stop getting multiple hives and also use the new space for even more bugs and then I'd go broke by having too many bugs
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Jan 14, 2021 21:28
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By the way I just placed a delivery order at my bug based pet store for another terrarium so I'm afraid I have to expand even further I might need to get a new flat
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Jan 14, 2021 21:30
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cruft posted:Please tell us about working at Jason's apiary. I have no idea what it's like to have more than one hive. jason had about 40 hives to a yard, and more than a dozen yards which ends up being a lot of bees, and sand hills honey was one of the larger apiaries in saskatchewan. i loved it, as i went there specifically to learn how to keep bees while making money at the same time, but it was definitely a weird experience. the three other employees of the apiary besides jason and i were nicauraguans who had been working with him for years, and were really nice guys for the most part. very macho culture i guess, but it made it easy to make fun of them which was basically how we interacted. at one point they scultped a life size phallus out of propolis and hid it in my front door and then we started a month long game of me hiding it in their car after work and them hiding it in my lunchbag back and forth. that's not much about the tending of bees tho' i guess? every day was different but the season went from taking out the hives from the hot room in the spring and placing them in the various yards, then feeding the hives by pouring a mixture of sugar and water into an oil drum filled with straw (to prevent drowning). the spring was medicating, putting in mite strips, building new yards, maintaining fences and cleaning old boxes and frames to be re-used. the summer we cut back on feeding almost completely besides at yards with newer or weaker colonies, and would just do general checks on the health of the hives. sometimes you swap frames of brood to help boost a faltering hive, or choose to split a hive that's doing really well. we split about 50 new hives off, and setting up the nuc yard and tending to it was a good chunk of time. when you move a bunch of bees, you do it at night, which sucks. we would start work at around 2 am and then work 12 hours and do it again for a few days. luckily beestings and electric fences are amazing at waking you up. also we build hundreds of langstroth boxes and thousands of frames on rainy days. camillo worked at queen grafting and i observed but didn't get to actually try it. also in the summer we'd check brood patterns and occasionally replace queens. fall comes and that means going to yards, pulling off honey supers and either setting them down on their side and returning hours later, or using a leaf blower to blow the bees off. then we would unload empty honey supers from the truck while lifting full ones to put in their place. this poo poo is terrible because a full honey super can be around a hundred pounds, and some productive yards will have 5 dripping full supers per hive. BUT you can grab hot from the hive honey and that poo poo is delicious beyond words. also a huge chunk of time in the fall is extracting the honey - we'd bring the honey supers back to the honey house and store them in the same room the bees over winter in, but now the heat is mega on to get the honey flowing. supers get brought out from that room into the extraction room where the frames are sorta scraped with a brush, loaded into a conveyor belt and then spun around real fast so the honey flows out and into the main tank. it was a really large tank, i wish i remembered the volume. when the tank is pretty full we'd empty it into 60 gallon drums and a truck would come grab a bunch at once. eventually the bees start to slow down, we stop collecting honey, reduce the hives to 2 brood boxes and 2 food boxes, load all the hives onto a truck and bring them to the honey house to over winter. the hives we couldn't fit inside would get wrapped in these fancy sleeping bag type things, and the season is over. i learned a lot about practical beekeeping, emptied hundreds of traps with skunk corpses in em, got stung more times than i could count and made a decent amount of money as a labourer. my long term plan was to do this, come back to ontario, do bees here with the knowledge i've accrued working at an industrial level apiary, hopefully make a little bit of money doing it. there are a lot of industrial practices that are only necessary because of scale. mite strips could be avoided potentially by just checking/sugaring more often, i don't need to use antibacterials because i'm not going to overwinter like a thousand hives at close quarters, etc. i love bees. gotta dig up some pictures - i didn't take a lot because usually i was working too hard to think about getting my phone outta the truck but i have some.
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Jan 14, 2021 21:53
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That is all super interesting and I wish I had something more intelligent to say than "whoa, dude". It blows my mind that 5 people could manage over 480 hives, that's like 28 million bees! Also: holy snot, Heather Papps knows a ton about bees, why are y'all reading my stupid hobby posts! Heather Papps, are you thinking commercial apiary where farmers pay you to truck in hives, or more like "Heather Papp's Honey Hut" at the weekend arts+crafts fair? |
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Jan 14, 2021 22:27
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it is a lot of work! jason hired a sixth guy midseason but he lasted one day before he took his veil off at the worst possible moment and was stung about the face and neck a whole lot. for extracting he hired a nice local lady and her son to help prep frames and load the machines but that was only for a few months at the end. also my dream is to have as many hives as i can manage alone, or with one or two others, and sell the bee products directly to consumers in a boutique sorta way. almost all the honey consumed is blended from countless sources, so if you can offer monofloral honey (i think the cutoff is like 80% from one nectar source) you can charge quite a bit more and people will pay, ESPECIALLY if you can offer organic varieties. there's also a large market for the wax and royal jelly and the like. i don't think i'm going to be one of those driving in a hundred hive types, but i have some vague plans for trying to get local municipalities to install hives, or providing a service to individuals who would like to have a hive on their property to help with gardens, etc, but don't want to get stung. this is all long term stuff tho' if i'd been more on the ball i'd have gotten bees last spring but well, it was a special year. it's nice knowing that they are going to be here in a few months, and i've been trying to figure out the best but also closest place to put them. maybe my roof?
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Jan 14, 2021 22:52
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Heather Papps, I'm increasingly excited to hear what comes of a non-noob beekeeper (you) trying out different hive designs. Top-bar hives are definitely A Thing where I live: they don't have this culty feeling that they seem to have elsewhere, they're just how you make hives. But being the first to do this in Ontario sounds like Hard Mode Beekeeping and you sound like exactly the right person to give it a shot. I bet you've also looked into Warre hives, which seem like crazy mystical alien technology to me, and I would love to hear what you think about them. Keep us posted, please! |
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Jan 14, 2021 23:23
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God drat it, now I'm considering giving this another shot. I hate the bug thread right now. |
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Jan 14, 2021 23:25
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If it leads to more bugs on SA, I'm down 
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Jan 15, 2021 00:12
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Okay, I swear I am going to stop posting about bees but... It has come to my attention that the top-bar hive being less susceptible to Varroa mites is unproven hearsay. It's probably false. Nobody's actually got solid evidence that it's true, so we should assume it's false. They're still cool, but I don't want to be responsible for passing off unfounded claims as fact. On a related note, after researching, I'm retracting my claim that my colony froze to death. I actually don't know why they died. Maybe they died off from a parasitic infection and the couple dozen still on the comb starved to death trying to keep the queen alive. Maybe they were killed by aliens from Alpha Centauri. I have no idea, and didn't look into it enough to be sure of any statement other than "they all died". Non-Bee Content: New Mexico has the coolest state insect in the United States! It was chosen by a poll among elementary school students: they chose the tarantula hawk!  This scary-as-hell mofo:
This wasp is so big that it can drag a tarantula around. Its sting has been described this way: quote:... immediate, excruciating, unrelenting pain that simply shuts down one's ability to do anything, except scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations. Now imagine you walk into your office for the morning and find one chilling on the back of your chair. cruft fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 00:44
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New Mexico honestly kind of sounds like America's Australia. I had a couple of friends who lived there years ago who would tell me about finding scorpions in their shoes and I can not abide that in any way. |
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Jan 15, 2021 01:06
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cruft posted:Okay, I swear I am going to stop posting about bees but... why?? keep posting about bees thanks
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Jan 15, 2021 01:15
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 about bees
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Jan 15, 2021 01:16
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biosterous posted:why?? keep posting about bees thanks The chief reasons are that I've run out of things to say, and I need to get this DL180 reprovisioned before they fire me. |
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Jan 15, 2021 01:18
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ShallNoiseUpon posted:New Mexico honestly kind of sounds like America's Australia. I had a couple of friends who lived there years ago who would tell me about finding scorpions in their shoes and I can not abide that in any way. Naw man, these wasps don't come after you unless you're a tarantula. I got the gal out of my office without incident, although I was scared the whole time that I would wind up curled up on the ground screaming in pain and pissing my pants. Texas has fire ants, and those fuckers are just straight up mean. There are many reasons to avoid Texas, but this is one of the more compelling ones. |
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Jan 15, 2021 01:20
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i love fire ants, I'd keep them if it wasn't quite expensive to get the setup running here in the cold north
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Jan 15, 2021 01:34
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cruft posted:Texas has fire ants, and those fuckers are just straight up mean. There are many reasons to avoid Texas, but this is one of the more compelling ones. Glutes Are Great posted:i love fire ants, I'd keep them if it wasn't quite expensive to get the setup running here in the cold north Fire ants are nasty. You can have all you want from my yard. |
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Jan 15, 2021 04:20
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sometimes you ignore stuff from people you are trying to learn. when it came to ants Jason was like " pour gasoline on them sneaky like" aaaaaand we never did
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Jan 15, 2021 04:21
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