Perchance might any of you be a Melittologist?

[Bhu]

I'm looking for some info on various bee species.

[enderlord99]

I'm looking for some info on various bee species.

Wouldn't the term be "apiologist?"

[Eldan]

Both exist, actually. I'm not one per se, at the moment, but I wrote my master's thesis on a comparison between 20 bee species, so maybe I can help.

[Flickerdart]

Both exist, actually. I'm not one per se, at the moment, but I wrote my master's thesis on a comparison between 20 bee species, so maybe I can help.
Damn, I didn't even know there were 20 bee species.

[Jeff the Green]

Like Eldan I'm not an apiologist, but I put in more time than I particularly care to admit learning about them. My knowledge is definitely North America-centric, though.


Damn, I didn't even know there were 20 bee species.

*Snort* There's three degrees (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080611135020.htm) of magnitude more. Nine families, 30-odd subfamilies, 500-something genera, and 19,200 species.

[Flickerdart]

Like Eldan I'm not an apiologist, but I put in more time than I particularly care to admit learning about them. My knowledge is definitely North America-centric, though.



*Snort* There's three degrees (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080611135020.htm) of magnitude more. Nine families, 30-odd subfamilies, 500-something genera, and 19,200 species.
Dang. How many of these haven't we killed yet?

[Jeff the Green]

Dang. How many of these haven't we killed yet?

You mean like colony collapse disorder? Not my specialty at all, but I seem to recall that wild bees haven't been hit, possibly because they haven't been so strongly selected and inbred like domestic European honey bees. It also helps that most are actually solitary so allee effects aren't that strong if they even exist.

Neonicotinoids may still be a problem, but I'm not sure.

[enderlord99]

You mean like colony collapse disorder?

No, he means on purpose. As in, he doesn't care that most cultivated plant species depend on bees for their pollination, or that honey is delicious, or that it was almost certainly a wasp that he was stung by; he thinks bees are horrible and should all die.

That's what I read it as, anyway.

[Eldan]

Also, most bees can't or won't sting humans at all. Compared to the rest, the honey bee is the suicidally aggressive psychopath of the bee world.

[Flickerdart]

No, he means on purpose. As in, he doesn't care that most cultivated plant species depend on bees for their pollination, or that honey is delicious, or that it was almost certainly a wasp that he was stung by; he thinks bees are horrible and should all die.

That's what I read it as, anyway.
Are you a paladin? Because it looks like you have a bonus to jumping to conclusions.

[enderlord99]

Are you a paladin? Because it looks like you have a bonus to jumping to conclusions.

:smallannoyed:In that case, what were you trying to say?

[Flickerdart]

:smallannoyed:In that case, what were you trying to say?
Exactly the question that Jeff the Green answered, before you decided to jump in with your crusade.

[enderlord99]

Exactly the question that Jeff the Green answered, before you decided to jump in with your crusade.

Okay, good. The original comment was phrased weirdly, as far as I can tell, but I can't really tell.

EDIT: Looking back, I think it might have been your use of the word "dang" when told there were a lot of them; "dang" generally indicates a negative opinion of the subject, in much the same way as "bummer" or "crap."

[Bhu]

Both exist, actually. I'm not one per se, at the moment, but I wrote my master's thesis on a comparison between 20 bee species, so maybe I can help.

Okay guys I need info on the Sweat Bee, Bumble Bee, Hornfaced Bee, Mason Bee, Digger Bee, "Killer" Bee, Cuckoo Bee and Crow Bee. Specifically are there any enhanced senses some of them have that others dont, do they all go into diapause during cold temperature to hibernate, do all of them have pheromone alarms similar to honey bees, and are all the toxins produced by those with stings similar?

Also if there are any species of bee with weird bee powers, feel free to mention them. I'm doing bee monsters for an upcoming class I intend to make called the Bee-Guiler.

[Eldan]

Hmm. That's pretty broad. I'll get back to you with more if I find anything in my books, but for now, I'll do some online-searching.

For one thing, a lot of those you mentioned are geni, not species.

Sweat bee I knew as the entire faimly Halictidae, which isn't small. Nothing much special about them I can recall off-hand. A lot of socials, some eusocials, none as highly as honey bees. Tons of parasites. In D&D terms, they might have low-light vision, compared to other bees who like a lot of light.

Bumble bees: Bombus sp, some 200+ species. Also social. Big, for bees, and fuzzy, of course. Some few parasites.

Horn-faced bees I had to google, wasn't familiar with the English name. A species of Osmia, so see below for mason bees.

Mason bees: also relatively heavy. All solitary, 300+ species. They are special in that some of them line their nest with flower petals, to keep out moisture.

Digger bee: I knew them as fur bees, though apparently, that's not a commonly used name, just a bad translation of the German name. 750 species. There doesn't seem to be much about them at all around online. I've had to dig up some as part of my field work, so I know them as "the annoying ones who build really deep nests where you have to dig for an hour".

Cuckoo bee isn't a systematic term, it's a form of living. These are bees who are disguised, so to speak, as other bee species and then lay their eggs in their nests. This form occurs all over independently in the hymenopterans, there's everything from bumble bees to the tiniest species.

Crow bee: I haven't the faintest. Can't find it online, either.


I don't actually know about alarm pheromones. As an off-hand conjecture, I'd actually assume those only make sense in social species. Solitaries would not need to warn others and in fact, alarm pheromones can be dangerous, since some predators are attracted to them.

Venom: this (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11695823) or this/5607 (http://www.ajol.info/index.php/ejb/article/view/29885/5607) is highly technical, but the short version is that the venoms are different. It seems that there are actually some extremely toxic solitary bees, which was novel to me.

Diapause: again, my answer is "generally yes", which I know is vague, but with tens of thousands of species, there's always the chance that there's one weird one. That said, bumble bees are more temperature resistant than most and they diapause. Tropical species probably don't, but then, they also don't encounter the cold.

As for special senses: bee sensory ecology is highly, highly fascinating and quite unlike that of mammals. THere's actually a lot of studies going on on that, though most of it is very specialized in neurology and not going in the "weird powers" direction.

A few things you might already know:
Vision: bees are trichromatic, like many vertebrates, but differently. Their three receptors work in the ultraviolet, blue and green areas of the spectrum, but they don't have receptors for red, which would appear black to them. Note that this is mainly true for honeybees, a lot of others haven't been well studied and there's some evidence that colour vision may differ.
They can see polarized light, so they can tell the position of the sun and navigate by it even when the sun isn't visible. They combine that with a very precise sense of time. Honey bees, the social ones, use directions relative to the sun in their dances and other bees correct for the sun's course ovre the day. Bees, in addition to their two large compound eyes, also have smaller ocelli on the top of their head, which can only tell light or dark. It's assumed that they help correct for light levels in colour vision, amongst other things. Bee vision has a very low resolution compared to that of lense eyes, like we have, so that they need to get very close to something to make out details. For larger structures, bees are known to "scan" them, by flying alongside edges in several passes, to build up a picture over time as the object passes through their visual field.
Chemical: bees can smell with their feet, as well as some other organs. This is actually quite important in that they mark already visited flowers by depositing some chemicals on them, which other bees can detect upon landing on them.
Electric: bees can detect electric charges in objects they touch. This also seems to help them with flowers: when they land on a flower, they discharge it with static electricity they accumulate in flight. Future visitors can tell the difference and don't bother with that flower.
Magnetic: also one not everyone might now, but bees are highly sensitive to magnetic fields. They probably use it as a compass.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Eldan
Sweat bee I knew as the entire faimly Halictidae, which isn't small. Nothing much special about them I can recall off-hand.

Sweat bees were all over me in Costa Rica--they're so named because they like lapping at sweat for the salts it contains. Stingless, harmless, just a mild tickling.

I knew them as trigonids, but "sweat bee" may be applied to a number of different families.


Originally Posted by Eldan
For one thing, a lot of those you mentioned are geni, not species.

You mean genera, correct? Your version puts me in mind of Robin Williams. :smalltongue:

[Eldan]

Gah. That shouldn't have happened. It's a word I type several time each day.

I know the thing about sweat bees drinking sweat, hence the name. But I don't know any special senses they have.

[Flickerdart]

Chemical: bees can smell with their feet, as well as some other organs. This is actually quite important in that they mark already visited flowers by depositing some chemicals on them, which other bees can detect upon landing on them.
Electric: bees can detect electric charges in objects they touch. This also seems to help them with flowers: when they land on a flower, they discharge it with static electricity they accumulate in flight. Future visitors can tell the difference and don't bother with that flower.
Magnetic: also one not everyone might now, but bees are highly sensitive to magnetic fields. They probably use it as a compass.
Damn, Scent and the Grell's special blindsight? Bees hella OP, nerf now.

[Eldan]

I knew them as trigonids, but "sweat bee" may be applied to a number of different families.:

Oh, and if we're talking trigonids, one should mention vulture bees: meliponines that actually eat meat. The only bees doing so.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Bhu
I'm doing bee monsters for an upcoming class I intend to make called the Bee-Guiler.

Yuk yuk yuk, by the way.

:smallyuk:

I have a whole population of Andrena bees in my yard every year--they're burrowing bees (also called mining bees) which dig into sandy soils in the early spring. Not colonial, but they tend to cluster in patches of good habitat, like my front yard.

Apparently Andrena is one of the largest genera of bees, distributed virtually worldwide, so there might be a lot for the Bee-Guiler to work with there.




Originally Posted by Eldan
Oh, and if we're talking trigonids, one should mention vulture bees: meliponines that actually eat meat. The only bees doing so.

Interesting...predators, or scavengers?

Reminds me of Feniseca, the harvester moth, whose caterpillars feed on aphids--extremely unusual for a lepidopteran.

.

[Eldan]

The clue is in the name, sort of. Vulture, so carrion. They have a saliva that dissolves rotting meat so they can then suck it up.

[Eldan]

Honestly, very wrong. Let's see.

a) Wasps pollinate. Just off-hand, there are several wasp-pollinated orchids. Figs, I think, are actually pretty exclusively wasp-pollinated.
b) Not all wasps are aggressive. Most can't hurt humans.
c) There's a handful of wasps that produce honey.

And, most importantly: they are absolutely essential to agriculture. They kill so, so many pests. In fact, a lot of crops really only survive because farmers breed and distribute wasps on their fields.

[Jeff the Green]

I'm afraid Eldan covered most of what I know. :smallmad: I'll note that he's right in his guess that tropical species often don't go into diapause, though. Meliponines (stingless honey bees), for example, typically don't, and this restricts their range. (Incidentally, if you ever have the chance to buy stingless bee honey, you ought to. It's subtly different from the honey we're used to, and the traditional apiaries in Central and South America are in danger of being wiped out by competition from European honey bees. This would be a bad thing for the native flora.)


Figs, I think, are actually pretty exclusively wasp-pollinated.

Yes, indeed. It was one of my advisor's favorite case studies in class, since they're pretty similar to his favored model (yuccas and yucca moths), but better characterized. Basically, fig flowers can only be pollinated by fig wasps (which are tiny), and fig wasps can only lay their eggs in the fig inflorescence (what we typically think of as the fig fruit but isn't). The females climb into the inflorescence (called a synconium) and both distribute pollen to the flowers inside and lay their eggs. Then they die inside. When the eggs hatch, males mate with females (yes, often with siblings) and die. Then the females climb out of the synconium, getting covered in pollen on their way out.

Some fig wasps are parasites and instead use long needle-like ovipositors to place their eggs (if you speak Latin you realize how redundant this phrase is) in the synconium without climbing inside and dying there or pollinating the flowers. They thus rely on other species to pollinate the figs.

Fun fact: this means that figs are generally not kosher, vegan, or vegetarian.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Eldan
Honestly, very wrong. Let's see.

…what are you responding to here?

Seems like you're answering a message that later vanished. Is there a missing post about wasps?

[Bhu]

Crow bee: I haven't the faintest. Can't find it online, either.

As for special senses: bee sensory ecology is highly, highly fascinating and quite unlike that of mammals. THere's actually a lot of studies going on on that, though most of it is very specialized in neurology and not going in the "weird powers" direction.



Much thanks for the info!!

The only thing I know the crow bee from is this: http://kswildlife.org/ww/crow-bee-with-pollen-by-sam-droege-usgs/

As an example of what i meant by weird bee powers, there are asian bees whose defense against the Giant Japanese Hornet is supposedly microwaving them to death. https://notexactlyrocketscience.wordpress.com/2007/09/17/mobs-of-honeybees-suffocate-hornets-to-death/

and then there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp8tLPDMUyg

I missed the vulture bee somehow, I'll need to add that. Does it have a sting? I know a lot of the bees only have stings in one sex, and even then only use it rarely.

[Jeff the Green]

I missed the vulture bee somehow, I'll need to add that. Does it have a sting? I know a lot of the bees only have stings in one sex, and even then only use it rarely.

Nope. Or rather, their stingers are greatly reduced and are basically useless for defense. They're one of the meliponines I mentioned, the stingless bees.

[Eldan]

…what are you responding to here?

Seems like you're answering a message that later vanished. Is there a missing post about wasps?

Yeah. Someone made a post along the lines of "wasps are not useful for anything and should all be exterminated."

[Maelstrom]

Oh, and if we're talking trigonids, one should mention vulture bees: meliponines that actually eat meat. The only bees doing so.

Thinking I'll be shying away from any of their honey :smalleek:

[Eldan]

Oh, most bees don't make honey, either. Stingless bees usually do, but these don't. What's more common is a nest and food arrangement like this:


http://www.christinefarmer.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/leafcutter_searching_for_nest01_christinefarmer_we b.jpg

http://www.ars.usda.gov/images/docs/18333_18528/eggs.jpg

Or something like this:

http://seatuck.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54fa4e2d98833016302d991ab970d-pi

http://www.vernalpools.org/Thorp/images/Thorp_19.jpg




At least in the solitary bees we encounter around here.

[Flickerdart]

Reminds me of a joke.


It reminded me of the story regarding Lord Mackay of Clashfern, the former Lord Chancellor drawn from the ranks of those unbending Scottish Presbyterians known as the "Wee Frees," and a firm believer in moderation. One evening he was reportedly hosting a gathering for the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, during which the hungry lawyers were served microscopic pieces of toast with a minuscule pot of honey. Eventually, one wag could stay silent no longer: he stared at the tiny honey-pot, and observed: "I see your Lordship keeps a bee."

[Bhu]

Any other potential bee species I may have overlooked?

[Jeff the Green]

Well, there's the carpenter bee (burrow in dead wood), leafcutter bee (like a mason bee but uses plant matter), and mining bees (burrow underground).

[Bhu]

I have Digger Bees for burrowing and carpenter bees are on the list. Leafcutter bees might make a nice anti-plant minion though....

[Eldan]

They look lovely, too.

If we're talking about nests, there's also potter bees, as they are apparently called in English (the German name for what I'm thinking of is Resin Bee). They build nests like this:
http://www.wildbienen.info/Fotos/klein/anthidium_strigatum_003_350.jpg

These are air- and watertight chambers made of resin attached to the side of rocks. The small tubes aren't exits, they are too small for that, they are air holes.

[JDL]

https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/tumblr_lzdjy2adiu1r2pxgdo1_400.gif?w=650

[Eldan]

Again, most bees are pretty damn harmless. I've held some in my bare hands to get pollen from their abdomens, while standing in a swarm of their relatives. They may try to bite you, but that just tickles a little.

[Rawhide]

Australia has over 1,500 species of native bee. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_native_bees)

[Eldan]

Australia has over 1,500 species of native bee. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_native_bees)

That is a really, really weird article. Like, two thirds are redundant.

[Rawhide]

That is a really, really weird article. Like, two thirds are redundant.

Ok, we have 500 different species of native bees, and 1000 redundant species of native bees.

[Eldan]

Not what I meant. That article just has a lot of passages along the lines of "Australian bees, like all other bees, are..." That seems to me to be bad writing.

Though 1500 species for a whole continent honestly isn't all that much either.

[Rawhide]

Not what I meant.

I know, though that's how it read and I found it hilarious.

[Bhu]

I don't spose any of you would be interested in helping with ideas for bee magic? :smallbiggrin:

The Bee-Guiler will need new spells after all.

[Flickerdart]

I don't spose any of you would be interested in helping with ideas for bee magic? :smallbiggrin:

The Bee-Guiler will need new spells after all.

Bee's knees: Attitude towards caster improves by one step.
Spelling bee: Imbue a swarm with spellcasting power.
Busy bee: Target creature is occupied by angry swarm of bees.

[JDL]

Honeyed Words: +5 competence bonus to bluff and diplomacy
Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: Touched creature gains fly speed 20 ft. (average) and adds poison to all unarmed attacks (Injury, Fortitude DC 11, initial and secondary damage 1d4 Con)
Hive Mind: As per Telepathic Bond

[Bhu]

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/21/bees-can-sense-the-electric-fields-of-flowers/ would it be correct to say that this is blindsight that can be disrupted by powerful electricity?

[enderlord99]

What do people think of this (http://www.honeyflow.com/)?

[Jeff the Green]

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/21/bees-can-sense-the-electric-fields-of-flowers/ would it be correct to say that this is blindsight that can be disrupted by powerful electricity?

I'd go with something more restricted, honestly, sort of like lifesight. Electrical fields aren't all that reliable.

[Flickerdart]

I'd go with something more restricted, honestly, sort of like lifesight. Electrical fields aren't all that reliable.

Tell that to the Grell.

[Bhu]

howzis look Electric Sense (Ex): The Bumble Bee effectively has Blindsense in a 60 ft. radius. This is disrupted for the round anytime someone in this area of effect uses an attack doing electrical damage. If it has ongoing damage, the Blindsense is disrupted until the damage stops.

Scent Mark (Ex): As a Swift Action you can leave a message of up to 6 characters on any surface. This message is only detectable by beings that have the Scent Ability, and usually only decipherable to members of your species (unless someone takes the time to learn your species Scent Markings as a Language).

Also: how many bee species can do this? Does anyone know or have they just studied the bumblebee?

[Bhu]

Thanks much for the help guys. The Bee Monsters will be in my critter thread in a bit. Preliminary work for those interested in the Bee-Guiler has begun here: http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=15697.0