We went to see my wife’s parents last weekend, and I spent some time in their beautiful garden taking pictures of bugs. This is one of my mother-in-law’s prized Zinnas being serviced by a honeybee.
What, you want wallpaper? Sure, I can help you there.
Unless, of course, you want a widescreen version, in which case… oh, wait. Here you go. [Edit:fixed the broken wallpaper link]
Who loves you? I do!
Andrew Lin stops time for a moment with this great picture of a bee in flight.
Ready for some gratuitous science? Order Hymenoptera contains ALL of the stinging insects: ants, wasps, and bees. Other insects may bite or pinch, and many have venom, but Hymenoptera contains all of the ones that inject venom with a stinger.
(I guess scorpions also inject venom with a stinger, but ah-ha! They are not insects!)
The next bit surprised me, though: ants, wasps and bees all have completely different venoms. Bees inject a peptide molecule containing 26 amino acids. It’s a complicated molecule, but it’s very pretty in its own right. Check it out: it’s called melittin. The molecule is even shaped kind of like a stinger….
Melitten, like acetylcholine in wasp venom, is a neurotransmitter agent. It’s not a neurotoxin; its doesn’t poison or damage nerves. What it does is cause pain receptors to fire uncontrollably. This part of the venom is literally liquid pain. Bees and wasps also inject copious amounts of histamine. That part of the venom is literally liquid allergic reaction.
You know antihistamines? Histamine is the stuff that antihistamines fight. When you get around something that causes allergies, your body produces histamine which causes flushing, swelling and itching. Antihistamines prevent the production of histamines, which in turn makes life bearable for people with hayfever like me. When a bee or wasp stings you, it injects histamine directly into the skin, causing an immediate allergic response.
Great photo, Andrew. Thanks!
Oooh, pretty eyes. Andrew Lin caught a much more respectable-looking Calliopsis bee this time. He sent in this picture noting that, though it’s slightly soft-focused, the reflections of the oregano in her eye were really striking. I agree.
And so does the biology community. Are you ready for some serious name calling? Yesterday I joked about the Latin meaning of the name. If you break Calliopsis into its root parts, you end up with the roots callum, meaning “rough or hardened” (the English word “callus” is a direct transplant from Latin), and ops, meaning “power” or “riches”.
Hmm. “Rough Power Bee” sounds more like an Anime superhero than a bug. And “Hardened Riches Bee” sounds more like an investment portfolio. What gives?
It’s not actually Latin. It’s Greek.
Look again at that bee. What do you notice about it first?
Calli is Greek for “more beautiful”, and opsis is Greek for “A sight / vision / outward appearance / eyesight”. Put them together, and what do you get?
Oooh, pretty eyes.
P.S. I love the color and patterning of the oregano. Andrew sent in a bonus picture, if you’re interested. It’s gorgeous, and it has a great butt-shot of a Calliopsis if you’re into that sort of thing:
Click for wallpaper.
Andrew Lin sends in this great photo of a bee from genus Calliposis, which is Latin for “drunken frat bee”. Here it can be seen doing a kegstand, facefirst into the oregano blossoms.
(Of course this is rubbish. Worker bees are all sterile females. But let’s be honest: “drunken sorority bee” is not nearly as funny. Maybe if a few more sororities lit couches on fire and threw them off the dorm roof.)
Seriously, people. This post needs to be lolbugged. Head on over to SayWhat or ROFLbot and get to work. Feel free to use the portrait image or the larger size.
Today’s picture comes to us from our own Jeremiah, and…
Hmm. Now that we have two Jeremiah’s we may need to distinguish them. I see Jeremiah just registered the nick JFargo, so perhaps I can distinguish them thusly. Anyway, today’s picture comes to us from our own Jeremiah Fargo. I love the lurid green in this photo. Awesome.
For those who want even more lurid green, check out the widescreen wallpaper.
Scott Roche sends us this picture, along with this commentary: “I’m almost positive that this is a Xylocopa virginica (Eastern carpenter bee). Due to its black face it’s a female, which means I could have gotten stung. In retrospect taking a half dozen pictures of it from scant inches away probably wasn’t wise. Wikipedia says they aren’t aggressive so that’s good I suppose. In any case she was busy starting a new hole to lay eggs in and so could have really cared less what I was doing. This is part of the roof to my mother-in-law’s deck. Wikipedia also says that the holes they make aren’t usually very big so hopefully it’s right about that too. I’m guessing that she was probably around 3/4’s of an inch long.”
I was about to write back to Scott that this cannot possibly be a carpenter bee, as carpenter bees are tiny–like 5-8mm tiny–where this bee is around 18mm. Wayyy too big, right?
Well, I think we’ve already dismissed my expertise here. Turns out there’s two genuses of carpenter bees in the US: Ceratina, which is latin for “so very teeny” and Xylocopa, which is latin for “big honkers”.
Thanks for the great pic, Scott!
Whenever Alan Krause sends in a picture, I know I’m gonna be crying myself to sleep for a week wishing I were a better photographer. This one came in a batch of pictures of which he commented “tried to find some interesting bugs… unfortunately, I only found the ordinary.”
It’s Alan, so you know there’s gonna have to be wallpaper.
Alan actually sent me a bunch of photos. I include this one here because there’s a run of bees right now. Tomorrow we’ve got Spider Friday, but Alan will be back on Monday. Oh my, will he be back on Monday. You know what the best part of running insectpod is? I’m already using Monday’s wallpaper. 
Thanks, Alan!
A few days ago I got an e-mail from Jeremiah titled simply, “YES!” I quote now from his e-mail:
I’m extremely excited about this picture, only because I’ve been trying to capture a bee in flight for about a week now. This little bugger was taunting me for an hour or so while I worked in the yard.
Well, I’m excited about this picture simply because it’s awesome. I love the not-quite-stopped-in-flight feel of this shot.
Jeremiah did continue with a key question that I figured I could answer here for everybody:
I heard somewhere that these kinds of bigger bees don’t sting, but have always been afraid to test that. Looking at the pictures I’ve taken, I don’t see a prominent stinger, but I do see ~something~. Glands of some kind? I don’t know. A hidden stinger, waiting like a ninja to strike when an unsuspecting me decides to test the “no sting” theory? Probably.
Let me save you some heartache: yes, they sting. A friend of mine stepped on one once while barefoot in such a way that the bee was not squashed but was trapped between his toes. It expressed its displeasure in a manner quite suited to its membership in Family Apidae, which as we learned yesterday means “the family of bugs who are pointy.“
According to Steve Jackson, this is “Our old friend Apis mellifera, getting very happy about an oxalis in a sidewalk planter.”
So, I bought a book a few months ago called “A Dictionary of the Roots and Combining Forms of Scientific Words”. It rocks. For example, from this book we discover that meli- means “honey” and -ifer- means “bearing, producing or plundering.” Apis is in fact simply the Latin word for “bee”. The word is not merely a name, however: its base form api- means “point” or “tip”, so when you run it all together you get “honey-plundering pointy bug”, which sort of explains why Latin died out.
Okay, before you relegate me to the “less reliable than Wikipedia” category, the name actually translates to “honeymaking bee.” (The name apis really does mean “point” or “tip”, however, and I think it’s awesome that the ancient Lats¹ really did go around calling them “pointies”. About the only thing funnier would be if there was a creature named “stingme”.)
¹ You know, the people who spoke ancient Latin. Not to be confused with their neighbors, the ancient Delts, or their longtime rivals, the ancient Glutes.
Jim Phillips sent in this great photo of what he describes as a “Cold Bee”, one of the last insects of the year near his place last winter. This bee is, I believe, of the genus Bombus, but there are so many similar species that I can’t narrow it down from there.
There are so many bumble bee species in Bombus that they subdivided the genus into… well, wait. They promoted the genus to a Tribe, named the tribe Bombini (also “bumble bees”), and then put the bumble bee genus (along with several other geni) under it.
As usual, Jim got a great photo. For those of you inclined wallpaperward, I cropped the photo in widescreen format, and here it is at 1920×1200.
Thanks, Jim!
