Saturday, January 30, 2010

Bees in the weird news

Inspired by the story of a Polish beekeeper who woke up in his casket after being stung and pronounced dead, here is a round-up of recent weird news involving bees:

A man in Nevada survived multiple organ failure after being stung by 3,000 bees after disturbing their hive while moving a bush. An Indonesian boy is in trouble for playing a prank on a classmate that caused her to get stung by a bee. Bees nesting in a vacant home in Tuscon, Arizona, swarmed and killed a family's 3-legged chihuahua. A Mesa, Arizona, woman has been chased from her apartment by bees whose nest may span the entire bedroom wall. Honey oozing from the wall tipped a Concord, New Hampshire, couple off to the fact that 60,000 bees had nested in the wall. Beekeepers relocated a hive of honeybees that had been nesting in the roof of the Dillon County, South Carolina, courthouse for 10 years. A family in St. Catharines, Ontario, has had to relocate 3 times so that large colonies of bees could be removed from their home. A swarm of bees on a Manhattan sidewalk trapped employees in a game store until they could be removed.

A van stacked with beehives crashed into a truck, killing one person and causing the bees to swarm and attack 5 injured people and some 15 first responders. California Highway Patrol had to close a highway after a truck carrying 400 hives flipped, releasing 8 to 12 million bees. A flight training school in Danvers, Massachusetts, had to call in an expert to vacuum a swarm of 10,000 bees from the wing of a plane.

A pair of Chinese beekeepers got married covered in a layer of bees. Beekeepers in Russia had a baby born with a 5-chambered heart - an anatomical structure typical of bees. A beekeeper in Serbia builds his hives in the shape of churches and monasteries because "bees have a soul, too." A blog features an early homemade beekeeper's helmet. Wyoming beekeepers make their money not from their own honey, but from renting their bees to Calfornia almond-growers during the winter months. The geographic profiling of serial killers is based on the way bumblebees search for food. Australian scientists have dosed bees with cocaine to determine more about how their brains work.

The best news is that the Colony Collapse Disorder that has been killing honeybees nationwide seems to be on the wane.

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