In loving memory of Tom Hogg, 1943–2023
MoFunny for
February 14, 2027
What happens to bees in winter?
+----- Answer At The End -----+
Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel. - Bella Abzug
The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of life is to live dangerously. - Fridrich Wilhelm Nietzche
There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed. - Buddha
The Notre Dame bridge in Paris, France, for a period of 380 years, had on it 78 three-story houses, which were marked by numbers in 1512, 214 years before any other home was numbered.
Ramdas Bodhano of Dakor, India, planted a sweet basil seed in his palm, and a 4-inch plant grew from his hand.
How do "Do not walk on the grass" signs get there?
A man was golfing with a friend and went to the restroom. When he came out he sighed audibly and his friend said to him, "Feel better?"
"Yeah," he said, "It's the only place on the whole course where nobody tells me how to improve my stance or change my grip!"
Sheldon, a butcher just out of trade school in Canada applies for and gets a job, skinning and cutting up the kills of local hunters. The first project he gets is to cut up a moose to put in the freezer.
Sheldon finally gets the moose cut up and is putting it into bags and marking them carefully with the contents: chops, rump steak, ribs, sirloin, etc, etc. When he finishes with the stuff he knows, he is still left with a pile of unidentifiable moose parts. At a loss as to what to do with them, he finally puts them all into one large bag and labels them..........
"Moosellaneous"
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
The math teacher posed this problem, "A wealthy man dies and leaves ten million dollars. One fifth is to go to his wife, one fifth is to go to his son, one sixth to his butler, and the rest to charity. Now, what does each get?"
The savvy student answered, "A lawyer!"
Two men went bear hunting. While one stayed in the cabin, the other went out looking for a bear. He soon found a huge bear, shot at it but only wounded it.
When the enraged bear charged toward him, he dropped his rifle and started running for the cabin as fast as he could. He ran pretty fast but the bear was just a little faster and gained on him with every step. Just as he reached the open cabin door, he tripped and fell flat.
Too close behind to stop, the bear tripped over him and went rolling into the cabin.
The man jumped up, closed the cabin door and yelled to his friend inside, "You skin this one while I go and get another!"
You might be a redneck if…
You clean your nails with a stick.
Joe sets up his chum Michael to go on a blind date with a friend of a friend of his. But Michael is a little worried about going out with someone he's never seen before. "What do I do if she's ugly?" says Mike, "I'll be stuck with her all night." "Don't worry," Joe says, "just go up to her door and meet her first. If you like what you see, then everything goes as planned. If you don't just shout 'Aaaaaauuuggghhh!' and fake an asthma attack."
So that night, Mike knocks at the girl's door and when she comes out he is awe-struck at how beautiful and sexy she is. He's about to speak when the girl suddenly shouts:
.."Aaaaaauuuggghhh!"
Two mothers were talking about a third one who had just given birth to triplets.
"You know, that only happens one in twelve-thousand times?" said the one.
"Amazing! How did she ever find time to do any housework?"
What happens to bees in winter?
The survival of the bee through the cold months of winter is largely dependent upon the particular kind of over 1,000 species to which it belongs. Generally speaking, the social bees do not summer in the South during the winter, as do migratory birds, but, instead, live or die in their natural environs.
The young queen bumblebee, who earns her title by being the one egg-laying female, or queen mother, in the colony of social bees, does survive the winter. She does so by burrowing out a hold in a well-drained sandbank, or simply by taking the easy way out by moving into a pre-owned home, such as a deserted mouse nest. Once settled into her nest, she plays happy homemaker and makes beebread from the nectar and the pollen she collected all summer, dumps the load of bread, lays eggs on it, covers it with wax, and relaxes atop it.
Approximately 250,000 eggs later, her Highness washes her hands of the whole thing, and leaves the work to her offspring. As soon as the workers, or fertilized, but non-egg producing females sprout wings, they set to work, and only later get assistance in the form of drones, or unfertilized males. The workers bees and drones, who toiled for the queen all summer, are rewarded for their efforts by a certain death in winter. No bother...they are easily replaced by cheap labor, when the queen lays more eggs in the spring, and puts her new brood to work.
Her counterpart, the young queen honeybee, earns her title by being the first of the special queen cells to emerge, and literally kills her competition, her sisters, in their queen cells, before they have the chance to emerge. The colony she rules is the epitome of efficiency, as it adapts to endure a full range of adverse climates. This species of honey-producing bee, ergo the honeybee, winters in a temperature-controlled hive. The worker bee thermostatically controls his hive with great precision, ensuring that the temperature in the hive's nursery, where baby bees are developing, is maintained at 93 degrees Fahrenheit, and that the temperature in the remainder of the hive does not drop below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. The worker bees accomplish this winter task by fueling up on the honey that they have stored, and by releasing heat as they feast.
The honeybee wisely keeps a stash of honey for himself, after the beekeeper has had his take, thus benefiting from his labor in the warmer months. The social bees utilize these months in a productive manner, by buzzing from flower to flower, sucking up the flowers' nectar as they bumble along. The nectar the bees extract from the flower flows to their honey sacs, which are enlargements of their digestive tracts, and are located in front of the belly of the bees.
Here, the sugars from the sweet nectar of the flower, chemically transform, and are reduced through the honeybee's built-in mechanism to evaporate large quantities of water contained in the nectar. The honeybee stores the end product, honey, both internally, and externally. Pooh-like "honeypot" cells store the thinner version of honey, honey with a short "shelf-life," and honeycombs, the more concentrated version, honey with the "shelf-life" of canned goods in wartime. In a sense, the honeybee is preparing to combat, and to survive, the bitter winter months that lie ahead.