I can has bee

[enismirdal]

On 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 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.

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the unseasonably mild weather we had just before Christmas has led many plants to bud and many insects to emerge from hibernation; the queen you found today might be one of many, and 2009 may see a serious reduction in colony formation - possibly another year where pollination is a significant limitation in commercial fruit and flower cultivation.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

It's certainly possible that you'll be proven right. I'm hoping that few warm days wasn't enough to throw too many of them out of synch... 2008 was a bad year for bees, and 2007 wasn't any better. They could really use a good year or we'll probably see some of the rare species declining quite painfully. :(

At least commercial greenhouse pollination should remain unaffected as wild bees are irrelevant to that...

[l-j-b.livejournal.com]

We had a warm spell before a cold snap last year too - I know it really screwed over the butterfly populations :(

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Also... Do, please, post the links. I've been reading Sherlock Holmes Casebook on the iPhone on the train.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Links to the slash? Well...I've been reading Haldane (http://books.adultfanfiction.net/authors.php?no=1296766973) on ye X-rated pit of voles - I don't like all of her stuff, but Art For Its Own Sake (http://books.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=544193582) was rather fun and quite hot (even if I don't agree with some of her preferred terminology for the male nether regions).

I haven't read more than the first one in her "Pretence" series - that one wasn't my cup of tea, but it could be that the sequels will convince me.

Aside from that, there's nothing I'd really recommend - some started well but degenerated into me screaming at the screen, "No! No respectable Victorian gentleman would SAY that!"

I think the trouble is, it all gets a bit repetitive. The writer has to start a relationship between the characters, and deal with the inevitable taboos and awkwardness that comes with defying the Laws of England, deal with one or both characters' inexperience with buttsekks, and then take it from there without turning Sherlock into a pussy. It means it's so easy to let it be formulaic.

(Edited to correct link.)

[keiliss.livejournal.com]

Before I read the last bit I was getting ready to tell you to go write it yourself, you're a great writer, you can do it, and sometimes it's the only way to get the story you want to read.

And then I want to read it!

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

I do have some simmering bunnies. I mostly lack confidence in my ability to write detective stories, though - it seems a bit of a cop-out to write Holmes without a good mystery! I've never tried writing the process of discovering clues and twists and false leads...

It is on my list of "things I'd like to do", but I also started an original fic and a recent audit revealed about half a dozen other fics that have enough potential to be worth finishing!

[nienna-weeper.livejournal.com]

Queen Sherlock Bee Fic.

:D

[rainien.livejournal.com]

I recently told a friend of mine (the one with the grammar question) about your interest in bees. He asked me just yesterday how the colony was doing. I told him I'd ask the next time I had the chance. Soooo...How's the colony doing?

We've had several warm days here as well. I've seen maybe a dozen wasps buzzing around (sluggishly), but no bees thus far.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Well, we got rid of most of the colonies over Christmas. The only one I have at the moment is a tiny tiny thing with one queen and currently four workers which I "borrowed" from elsewhere (a spare box of bees was leaking and it took a few hours for people to work out where the bees were coming from, so I put them in my nesting box). They have a couple of larvae that they seem to be looking after, so I guess that's a start.

I've got a proper colony arriving on Thursday. :D

Weird that you've got wasps but no bees. I suppose I don't really know so much about the seasonality and ecology where you are or what species of bees you've got, so can't really explain that! Poor wasps...

[rainien.livejournal.com]

The only time we see alot of bees around here is in spring. They love my flowers. I've got two Rose of Sharon bushes that bloom April to June and the bees ("regular" bees and bumblebees) positively swarm the things. You can hear the buzz of them from 12 feet away.

Once summer arrives, though, is when the wasps take over. We have alot of pecan trees around there (thousands of them). Unless you use chemicals, the trees are attacked by these bag worms that eat the leaves and damage the tree and crop. The wasps kill the worms. I've got a huge pecan tree in my front yard and this summer, I had so many wasps that, if you stood under the tree, all you could hear was buzzing. It was unreal.

Good luck with the arriving colony. Keep us posted!

[luin77.livejournal.com]

Speaking of... would you like some more Schwarzbrot or anything else from over here? I could bring it over on Aedan's birthday! :)

We had three flies in a friend's apartment over New Years and we thought it was rather early for them to be up and about too!