*facepalm*

[agilebrit]

WHY is it so difficult to find the specific piece of information I need for this damb beefic?

It's a well-known fact that if you cut off a cockroach's head, it will live until it starves to death. Cockroaches are tough little buggers.

However...what happens to a bee if you whack its head off? How long does it live? Can it still fly, or sting?

I called a beekeeper. He didn't know, but suggested trying the library. I've looked through Google until I'm blue in the fingertips.

And I'm squeamish about catching a bee and cutting off its head to find out for myself. That just seems...I don't know. Unnecessarily cruel. To a bug.

Yeah.

And the damb story is stalled until I find out one way or the other. CRAP.

In other news, apparently the author I've been stalking reviewing at FFN has taken the reviews to heart...in a way. She's fixed the script format, but now it's all one big block of text. The word "sinus" is gone, so yay for that.

It looks like she can be taught.

Comments

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

When a bee is decapitated it dies almost immediately. Giant hornets, which eat bee larvae, kill the defending worker bees by biting off their heads. This is a technique so efficient that 30 hornets can kill 30,000 bees within a couple of hours.
http://www.maniacworld.com/hornets-vs-bees.htm

It is also the standard method of killing bees when individual dead bees are needed for research purposes, e.g. studies of the sensory organs located in the bee's legs.

And when bee-keepers want to obtain the sperm of male bees for artificial insemination of new queens they decapitate the male bees. This causes the bee equivalent of an erection at the moment of death and the corpse can then be 'milked' of the sperm.

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

AHA. THANK YOU. I knew about the male bee thing, but it was unclear to me if death was immediate or not. I've seen that video (or one similar to it), but it didn't focus on the decapitated bee long enough for me to get a bead on what actually happened to it.

Now I can write the silly story. *massive squishy hugs*

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

I can't guarantee that the bee dies immediately. It might twitch for a while, it might even continue to breath through its spiracles for a few minutes, and some automatic reaction might possibly trigger a sting if something brushes against the rear of the decapitated bee - I wouldn't like to risk touching it as an experiment; but as far as flight or walking goes, when the head comes off that's all she wrote.

Stingless bees in South America kill honey bees the same way.

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

Thanks! That definitely gives me enough info to write my battle with. :)

[appomattoxco.livejournal.com]

I was going to answer that bees are much more delicate than roaches and die right away. Did you know you can tell the age of a honey bee by it's color? The yellower fuzzier ones are younger.

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

*gleefully incorporates this detail*

[appomattoxco.livejournal.com]

Glad I could help, my dad kept bees professionally for many years before we sold our farm in New Jersey.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I would reckon that if it is so hard to find out how long a bee lives without its head the chances are that you can just be reasonable about it and no-one will know any better.

Reasonably they might live for a little while , but would not be able to fly in any logical fashion as they would have lost their sense of direction. They might well be able to sting though.

If I was reading something in which bees kept going after decapitation by a fairy I would probably find minutes or hours rather than days believable.

Don't know if this helps!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Hmm - the husband beat me - with facts - curses, foiled again!

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

It does help, thanks. I need to just write the silly thing and not be so worried about nitpicky details, but I'm so anally rententive about stupid little factoids that I'd be incredibly embarrassed if I got it wrong. *rolls eyes @ self*

[ericjamesstone.livejournal.com]

The question I have is whether decapitation would kill cockroach vampires.

I mean, decapitation works on human vampires, so you might think it would work for cockroach vampires, too. However, decapitation works on non-vampire humans, but not on non-vampire cockroaches, so perhaps being a cockroach provides immunity to decapitation for cockroach vampires as well.

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

You...are an evil, evil man. And I will now have to file that one away in the Plot Bunny Hutch. Considering the fact that I had a previous bunny involving a war between mice and cockroaches in a sewer, this might fit in well with that concept.

But you're still evil.

Buz buz!

[peterchayward.livejournal.com]

I use little_details and ask_me_anything for stuff like that.

Although really, looking at the above comments, all you need is your f-list. Who are apparently all bee expercts. :P

Re: Buz buz!

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

My flist is a font of information about nearly everything. *snuggles it liek whoa*

Re: Buz buz!

[peterchayward.livejournal.com]

"Your friends list are apparently all bee experts."

I've got to work that line into a sitcom somehow.

*starts plotting*

[crayonbreakygal.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that about cockroaches. Ewww.

I would think if you cut off the head of a bee, it would die. I'm hoping you've found that piece of info by now.

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

Yup. They die. Quickly.

Cockroaches are amazing. Poor things get such a bad rap, but there's over 3000 species in the world, and fewer than 10% of them are pest species. The rest of them live out their lives quietly in the woods or the desert or the swamp, and no one sees them. But the 10% give the other 90% a bad name. *cuddles the Hissing Cockroach, because they're just that cool*