Arbor Update

Ann Arbor Area Community News

Bee Alert on State St.

14. June 2005 • MarkDilley
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Thanks for the image Stephen Smith!



  1. Sorry about that. I thought that the mind control helmet would have been able to make the swarm kill. But all they wanted to do was eat spilled soda from the trash.
    Next time: Make them meaner? Diabetic?
       —js    Jun. 14 '05 - 01:53AM    #
  2. Yeah, that was really the last thing I needed to see, heading home after a hard days’ work—a bunch of nasty-lookin’ bees gathered around a trash can like those crows on the jungle gym in “The Birds.”

    Still wondering what was behind it.
       —Lazaro    Jun. 14 '05 - 10:51AM    #
  3. You really need an explanation? Didn’t anyone teach you about bees?

    When a hive gets to be too big, somehow, another queen bee is born, and about half of the bees decide to follow the new queen. The old queen’s loyalists throw them all out of the old hive, and the homeless bees, under the leadership (?) of the new queen, wander around as a group until they find a place for their new hive. This phenomenon is called “swarming”.
       —Larry Kestenbaum    Jun. 14 '05 - 10:57AM    #
  4. thanks, larry, for the lesson on bees.

    now, how about birds?
       —peter honeyman    Jun. 14 '05 - 11:49AM    #
  5. No, Larry—I was homeschooled, and “they” thought “all that” was “immoral” (and my social life has suffered accordingly).

    I was just wondering what a hive was doing on a trash can in the middle of State Street. Never seen that happen before.
       —Lazaro    Jun. 14 '05 - 08:05PM    #
  6. Bees are attracted to sweet things. My guess is that people threw pop cans, coffee drinks, and an assortment of sweet goods into that trash cans. And that queen bee that Larry was talking about found it, and brought along with it her drones, and the rest is obvious.
       —Jared Goldberg    Jun. 14 '05 - 09:13PM    #
  7. I think I heard that it was what Larry said.
       —Mark    Jun. 15 '05 - 08:13AM    #