Bees get the Short End of the Stick
from Reuters:
Reading articles like this makes me want to run out onto the street with my STUPID stamp and foam bat and go nuts. Two things bother me about the way this situation was handled:
First, out of all the all the things we might have learned from a quarter ton nest that was home to 120 000 bees, the sole tidbits of scientific knowledge gained are that there were, in fact, 120 000 bees and that the nest did indeed weigh 500 lbs. I mean, honestly folks, bees are pretty interesting to begin with, being hive creatures and all. A nest of 500 bees gives facinating insight into their behaviour - how they interact, how they can tell strangers, how they cool the nest, etc... I don't think anybody knows how such a large hive would work. Certainly you can't say a 120 000 bee hive would function the same as a 500 bee hive. Take a human example - do people organize a 500 person town the same way they do a 120 000 person city? From an engineering perspective alone, the cooling mechanisms/behaviours employed by the bees would have to be fundamentally different. Were the bees all one hive with one queen, or were they several queens? If so, were the several queens related or not? Did they have an aggressive monopoly on neighbouring resources, or did they share and venture far afield? How far within the hive does any one bee travel - do they live in one spot, or is the whole thing a unified community? So many questions unanswered, and I'm sure that a bee specialist would have far more.
Second, how do you condone killing so many bees? If we have approximately 100 billion neurons in our human brains , and a bee has fewer than 0.01% of the neurons that a person does, 120 000 bees must have - collectively - the equivalent neurons of 12 people (or slightly less). Now I realize that this hardly makes for an argument on its own - 10 cats don't have the rights of 1 person - but consider that bees are a hive insect. We really don't have any idea how complex the behaviour of such an entity is. The article quotes the fire chief as saying that the hive must have been there "for years", and yet the first indication that anyone had that 120 000 bees were living in close proximity was when children threw rocks at it! It's a shame that, while the bees were happy (and inoffensive enough) to live with people, people couldn't extend the favour in return.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Kids throwing rocks stirred up more trouble than they bargained for when they dislodged a swarm of bees from an enormous hive built in the wall of a Southern California apartment building, authorities said on Friday. An estimated 120,000 bees held residents of the apartment building and nearby homes hostage in Santa Ana, California after the children pelted their 500 pound (227 kg) hive with rocks on Thursday, Santa Ana Fire Captain Steve Horner said. Several people, including firefighters, news reporters and a TV cameraman, reported being stung and at least two people were taken to a hospital with multiple stings, Horner said. Firefighters cordoned off a four-block area to allow the bees to calm down and return to their hive. An exterminator later fogged the hive and vacuumed out 40,000 dead bees, then set a trap for returning worker bees, of which about 80,000 were captured, Horner said. The quarter-ton honeycomb, which may have accumulated inside the apartment wall for years, was so big it was threatening the structural integrity of the two-story building, Horner said.
Reading articles like this makes me want to run out onto the street with my STUPID stamp and foam bat and go nuts. Two things bother me about the way this situation was handled:
First, out of all the all the things we might have learned from a quarter ton nest that was home to 120 000 bees, the sole tidbits of scientific knowledge gained are that there were, in fact, 120 000 bees and that the nest did indeed weigh 500 lbs. I mean, honestly folks, bees are pretty interesting to begin with, being hive creatures and all. A nest of 500 bees gives facinating insight into their behaviour - how they interact, how they can tell strangers, how they cool the nest, etc... I don't think anybody knows how such a large hive would work. Certainly you can't say a 120 000 bee hive would function the same as a 500 bee hive. Take a human example - do people organize a 500 person town the same way they do a 120 000 person city? From an engineering perspective alone, the cooling mechanisms/behaviours employed by the bees would have to be fundamentally different. Were the bees all one hive with one queen, or were they several queens? If so, were the several queens related or not? Did they have an aggressive monopoly on neighbouring resources, or did they share and venture far afield? How far within the hive does any one bee travel - do they live in one spot, or is the whole thing a unified community? So many questions unanswered, and I'm sure that a bee specialist would have far more.
Second, how do you condone killing so many bees? If we have approximately 100 billion neurons in our human brains , and a bee has fewer than 0.01% of the neurons that a person does, 120 000 bees must have - collectively - the equivalent neurons of 12 people (or slightly less). Now I realize that this hardly makes for an argument on its own - 10 cats don't have the rights of 1 person - but consider that bees are a hive insect. We really don't have any idea how complex the behaviour of such an entity is. The article quotes the fire chief as saying that the hive must have been there "for years", and yet the first indication that anyone had that 120 000 bees were living in close proximity was when children threw rocks at it! It's a shame that, while the bees were happy (and inoffensive enough) to live with people, people couldn't extend the favour in return.
posted by Aryn at 13:50
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