The colony doesn't grieve them

I woke up early enough yesterday to see the bees clocking in for work at the flower bed next to my porch and after a few minutes this doofus bumblebee showed up late. You could tell it was flying a little embarrassed about it too. Literally bumbling. It was Labor Day to be fair. Maybe it had assumed it had the day off.

I went out there just now this morning and they were back at it. I figure they'll probably die off soon. Or else go into hiding. I forget what happens to them even though I wrote a story about this very thing a couple years ago. Let me just refresh my memory.

"Every October, if you watch a beehive entrance long enough, you'll see something that looks like a murder but is actually a budget meeting," the Apiary Project writes.

"The workers drag the drones out. Not metaphorically – physically. Worker bees grip their larger brothers by the legs and wings and haul them toward the entrance, dumping them onto the landing board. The drones, who lack stingers and haven't done anything useful since summer, stumble around for a few days and die. The colony doesn't grieve them. The colony was the one who killed them."

Jesus buddy. Did you have to say it all like that?

That is some nice writing though. I like it when you can tell a scientist or whoever also likes to write.

I haven't done anything useful since summer myself. I can relate to that.

I guess the ones fucking around with flowers – the honeybees and bumblebees – are all female and not drones. Some of the honeybees die off soon enough once the real cold comes and the others cuddle up inside the nest vibrating constantly to keep the place warm while living off the rest of the honey until it's gone. Apparently all of the bumblebees die with the cold except the queen who chills out with a belly full of eggs and honey.

Men love to do nothing then stumble around and die while women love to take a little cozy nap with a full belly.

I saw a post about some fucking thing or other Meta is or was planning on doing – or maybe it wasn't even real at all which is always a safe guess about anything you see or read now – where they expect to or have already started training some computer thing on all of our posts and chats and such so that one day they can animate an avatar of our dead friends and relatives that we can talk to. Next thing: $$$ (?).

What a nightmare we have built for ourselves. Or have allowed to be built upon ourselves rather.

A good enough excuse to share this little bit I've been dinking around with.

A chat request from a late friend

I recognize the pain of thinking if I could only talk to them one more time. It is among the more familiar human laments. But that's just the thing it is a human problem to be endured not a technological problem to be solved and sold. Our capacity for loss – in fact the necessity of losing and having lost – is what makes us who we are. Individually and collectively. There is no workaround. There will be no workaround. And every step toward preventing that or perverting that is an affront to our humanity. Why not just taxidermy nana and prop her up at the Texas Chainsaw Massacre dinner table? At least there's something real and tangible about that. Undeniable in its sacrilege. You should have to smell the dead when you disinter them.

If you're not on Bluesky all day you may have missed the latest thing no one (including me) could shut the fuck up about for five minutes all weekend which is whether or not the left or Democrats or whoever need to take the concerns of "MAHA" people seriously in order to bring them back into the fold. This was all spawned as best as I can tell by AOC meeting with some lunatic or other and trying to find common ground. My answer to that is lol no fuck off.

The left already has a framework to disempower the predatory healthcare and insurance industries and mega food corporations. You can just keep trying to do that.

I'll tell you one thing we're not going to do for starters though and that is take the stupid fucking acronym "MAHA" seriously.

Make America healthy again you say? So open up thousands more hospitals around the country especially in rural areas or towns where private equity is buying them up and stripping them for parts? Make healthcare free for all? Invest in a big push to train and hire more doctors and healthcare workers? Is that what they want to do?

No? Oh so it's just the individualistic fash parts I guess. Doing pushups against cancer kind of shit.