I just started reading ‘The Little Book of Bees,’ by Karl Weiss and C.H. Vergara (2002) – a wonderful read, unputdownable, like science-flavoured crack. A couple of chapters in, I discovered that we share our planet with an item called a ‘bee wolf.’
Not a bee wolf, that is.
But a bee wolf!
That’s a Philanthus triangulum, which ‘attacks bees busy collecting and anesthetizes them with one sting. This hunter then carries her prey under her body into a brood chamber at the end of a tunnel about 40 cm deep in the ground. Once she has collected three to six paralyzed bees there, she lays her egg on them and closes the tunnel to the chamber. The hatched larva nourishes itself on the muscles of the live, preserved bees.’
It occurs to me that ‘bee wolf’ is a fairly inaccurate nickname for this parasitic wasp. I mean, for one thing, it’s solitary; and secondly, whoever heard of a wolf being so sadistic that it broke its prey’s back and dragged it back to the cave so it could lie staring at all the other paralyzed prey in there until the end came? Yecchh. Nature gives me the shivers – and not in a good way.
The studying isn’t going so well. Not only have I got a raging case of the flu, but this random soundtrack mix I put on isn’t helping.
“EXCUSE US! ARE YOU THE SINGING BUSH?”
Ten points if you remember that classic movie scene. 
There’s that semi-famous rude limerick that deals with disappointed expectations, which starts “As I was going to St. Paul’s/A lady grabbed me by the elbow.” For no reason I thought of it as I was running for the bus today – passing the far side of the Powerplant by the Dent-Pharm building, I skidded to a stop upon seeing… a line of mismatched socks on the wall. I scrambled for my camera, snapped off one shot, and then spent most of the ride trying to versify the photo. “As I was going to St. Albert/… nope, not dirty enough.”
Boy, the university can be strange. I’m going to miss it.
Science be damned!
The logic is flawless: bananas and jars of peanut butter show us that evolution does not, and cannot exist (respectively).
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zwbhAXe5yk[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZFG5PKw504[/youtube]
Now, if only I could give back my science degree. I was misled!
This blog gets dozens of spam comments a day. They’re all caught in the moderation queue, of course; but I still have to wade through it just in case a real message gets caught there too.
The funny thing about spam nowadays is that spammers don’t necessarily think blog visitors will click on their messages. Rather, they try to scatter links to their porn sites using very specific keywords. If enough links are generated using these keywords, their search engine ranking is improved.
Here are a few of that were submitted to this very blog (the links have been removed for obvious reasons). Their choice of keywords make them my favourites:
- Fresh news on most beautiful boob
- Fresh information about arabic foot slave
- Agregator of teen lesbian pee
- Popular authors of mature russian lesbian boob articles
- Good information source for fawn forum peachy piper [Ed: Huh?]
- ass masterpiece foundation
Now, if anyone knows of any good spam filtering plugins, be a dear and let me know.
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