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I can has bee
2 January 2009 23:54On the way to the lab today, I found a queen (bumble)bee sitting on the pavement looking dopey and dazed - indeed, I had to give her a good prod to prove she was actually alive. Since it's currently around freezing for much of the day, and likely to continue this way for the foreseeable future, it seems a bit odd that a queen would spontaneously come out of hibernation.
Well, deciding that if she stayed where she was she'd either starve, freeze or be stepped on by someone, I scooped her up and took her to the lab. You've got to be careful bringing in bees from outside - wild bees are usually loaded with parasites, and we don't want our commercially-bought ones to catch them. Indeed, this queen had at least a dozen mites crawling over her, and so probably has all kinds of interesting guy parasites as well. So anything used to handle her has to be thoroughly cleaned before being used with our usual bees.
I sat her in front of the heater (they turn off the heating in the department over Christmas, which is fine but the temperature plummets to less than 10 degrees in most of the rooms over that time, and when they switch it back on it takes a while to warm up, so I was still running the heater today to compensate) and after a while she started to move around, and after a good few hours she finally consented to drink some sugar solution. I picked off as many mites as I could.
I've taken her home and put her in a box (actually, it's an empty Schwarzbrot tin - thanks![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
luin77!) with some bedding. I'm going to feed her and keep her in the (comparative) warmth of our house to see how she does. If she manages to found a colony - which honestly I doubt - then I can put them all outside once the weather warms up. Though if we're going to be realistic, if she's out and about at this time of year, she can't be entirely "right". We'll see what happens, I guess.
I've named her Sherlock, after my current fixation. In the past few days I've discovered I have an embarrassing fetish for super-kinky Holmes/Watson BDSM slashfic. (Holmes just lends himself to mind games, yes he does...) The trouble with having such a relatively obsure fetish is that there are, like, 4 fanfics addressing this craving, and, as is the way of the world, one is invariably unreadable, two are poor and only the remaining one is actually good. Sherlock Holmes is not a forgiving genre in terms of the literature itself - if you do it wrong, it REALLY worketh not at all.
Am considering writing Holmes!slash to indulge my fetish, and also to prove it can be done well without using terminology invented post-1960 or buggering up the geography of London. Have also got a slightly evil idea that I will not share at this stage.
Well, deciding that if she stayed where she was she'd either starve, freeze or be stepped on by someone, I scooped her up and took her to the lab. You've got to be careful bringing in bees from outside - wild bees are usually loaded with parasites, and we don't want our commercially-bought ones to catch them. Indeed, this queen had at least a dozen mites crawling over her, and so probably has all kinds of interesting guy parasites as well. So anything used to handle her has to be thoroughly cleaned before being used with our usual bees.
I sat her in front of the heater (they turn off the heating in the department over Christmas, which is fine but the temperature plummets to less than 10 degrees in most of the rooms over that time, and when they switch it back on it takes a while to warm up, so I was still running the heater today to compensate) and after a while she started to move around, and after a good few hours she finally consented to drink some sugar solution. I picked off as many mites as I could.
I've taken her home and put her in a box (actually, it's an empty Schwarzbrot tin - thanks
luin77!) with some bedding. I'm going to feed her and keep her in the (comparative) warmth of our house to see how she does. If she manages to found a colony - which honestly I doubt - then I can put them all outside once the weather warms up. Though if we're going to be realistic, if she's out and about at this time of year, she can't be entirely "right". We'll see what happens, I guess.I've named her Sherlock, after my current fixation. In the past few days I've discovered I have an embarrassing fetish for super-kinky Holmes/Watson BDSM slashfic. (Holmes just lends himself to mind games, yes he does...) The trouble with having such a relatively obsure fetish is that there are, like, 4 fanfics addressing this craving, and, as is the way of the world, one is invariably unreadable, two are poor and only the remaining one is actually good. Sherlock Holmes is not a forgiving genre in terms of the literature itself - if you do it wrong, it REALLY worketh not at all.
Am considering writing Holmes!slash to indulge my fetish, and also to prove it can be done well without using terminology invented post-1960 or buggering up the geography of London. Have also got a slightly evil idea that I will not share at this stage.
