I love, almost beyond my ability to describe it, the fact that there is an entire sub-genre of scientific endeavour devoted to feeding various animals psychotropic substances. Basically there is a group of scientists whose day to day job essentially involves them picking an animal and then deciding how they want to make it party. Bees on cocaine? It’s been done!

To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain.

The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.

Apparently when bees discover an exciting new food source they return to the nest and perform “a waggle dance” to let everyone know how awesome this new batch of pollen is. However, when coked off their tits on freebase, the bees “danced more frequently and more vigorously for the same quality food”. It may just be me, but goddamn that evokes a pretty amazing mental image. Bee discotech mother fuckers!

Another killer experiment of late has been research that suggests feeding mice copious amounts of red wine – or rather resveratrol, a constituent ingredient – actually increases their fitness and longevity:

The new research helps confirm and extend the possible benefits of the substance, resveratrol, and offers new insight into how it works — apparently by revving up the metabolism to make muscles burn more energy and work more efficiently. Mice fed large doses could run twice as far as they would normally.

But before you start mainlining the cask wine straight into your veins, the article goes on to state that in order for humans to get a similar effect they would have to “drink hundreds of glasses of wine a day”. So let that be a warning to you: if Fievel Mousekewitz ever challenges you to a drinking contest, just say no. Instead, hit him with a tennis racquet. Ain’t no amount of red wine that’s going to insulate you from that, mouse. That’s what you get for being small (Cf. Noah Baumbach in the New Yorker. Terrifying)

But, of course, this all just hails back to those experiments of the early 60s when a group of enterprising scientists decided to see what would happen to a spider’s ability to weave its web if they fed it various psychoactive substances. You can see some of the results here, but I think this video from 1960 explains it pretty well:

Makes sense.

So… anybody else kinda want to get some coke and party with the bees?

/Luke

Back in August Paul wrote a piece on Colony Collapse Disorder in Britain, a mysterious plague that is decimating bee populations across the globe and throwing into chaos our long term honey stocks. He later revealed to me in private that in truth he cared not a whit for the bees and was doing it solely so we’d have a tag on the side of the page that read ‘Bees’. Thinking, of course, that we would never have recourse to the ‘Bees’ tag ever again.

Well, wrap your laughing gear around a big fat slice of humble pie Verhoeven, because I am invoking the ‘Bees’ tag once more. Why, you ask? What could possibly justify such a ridiculous tagging choice?

You know when there’s that special someone in your life for whom you want to go the extra distance and get something truly special? Well, this beautifully formatted and grammatically immaculate website offers you the opportunity to send your loved ones a box full of bees for the bargain basement price of $US 23. Yes, for a little over $30 Australian you could send a box containing (and I quote) ‘ITALIAN QUEEN MARKED,CLIPPED AND SHIPPED WITH ATTENDANTS IN PLASTIC JZBZ CAGES’ to anyone in the US mainland area. And if that doesn’t spice up your next party, I don’t know what will. Yeah, fuck clowns, make your child’s next birthday party a ‘Bee-rthday’ to remember.

I sometimes get the feeling it’s probably for the best that I haven’t reproduced quite yet.

/Luke

In a piece of news that isn’t specifically nerdy, but that I feel very passionately about, Britain’s honeybee population has been decimated*, resulting in a national honey shortage. What will make sweet the Queen’s crumpets now? The crisis was raised by the British Beekepers Association (ladies men, all), who revealed that nearly one in three of the 240,000 hives did not survive the winter. The National Bee Unit and the Honey Association are very concerned, warning that losses could rise, and coupled with the 11% rise in honey demand across the UK, bees might be buzzing off for good.

My question is this: with groups like the British Beekeepers Assocation, The National Bee Unit and the Honey Association, all sporting large memberships and reasonable funding, how can we be losing so many bees? It’s not like they take manpower to keep in a given location, they’re not fucking tigers. It takes two bookish chums in hazmat suits with sticks.

As far as I know.

/Paul

*Yes, I am aware that to decimate means to remove one tenth of the amount. For example, “I say, Maximus, go forth and arrest exactly one tenth of the rebel Militia”. But it sounds brutally violent. I mean, it did before I ruined it for you all.