*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.

[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!

[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.

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

[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.