User:Filll/My editing

My editing

Selected articles I had a hand in

• Frère Jacques and subarticles
• hot spring and subarticles
• Saint-Pierre and Miquelon and subarticles
• Botafumeiro
• many articles about the Isle of Wight
• Logan Rock, Rocking stone and related articles
• St. Anne's Well Gardens, Hove
• Lactose intolerance
• Bees and toxic chemicals
• Peter Cusack

Bee inebriation

If you look through my articles and edits, you will notice that I do not always tackle serious subjects, although "bee inebriation" is very serious to some people. I do not just engage in battles with assorted nuts, but I do like to learn things and I like trivia. And I like things like:

• food trivia
  • did you know we have orange cheese and yellow Phillipino rice from anetto, which is also a major colorant in lipstick and was first used as a warpaint in the Yucutan peninsula? It comes from a tree there
  • carrots apparently were purple with orange middles and the orange was bred as a tribute to the Dutch Royal House of Orange (still tracking that one down)
  • Eggplants were originally white? (hence the name)
  • The Durian is a very smelly fruit from southeast Asia that can be very expensive (about 50 bucks when ripe and fresh). It is illegal to eat it on the subway or in a hotel in some places, because it smells so bad.
  • The bubble drinks in Vietnam and tapioca pudding are made with casaba root, originally from South America, and now mainly eaten as a staple in Africa?
  • Sugar cane origins in Hawaii are a bit of a mystery
  • lutefisk, a Christmas special food in Norway, is made from rotting herring that has been doused in lye to stop the rotting?
  • surstromming, a food eaten in the summer in Sweden, is made from rotting fish that is preserved in salt water and smells so bad you can smell it for a great distance

Other interesting facts:

• There were three parts of North America actually occupied by the Axis Powers during World War II: Aleutian islands (obviously), Miquelon and Saint-Pierre (part of Vichy France, and still part of France; within territorial boundary waters of Canada), and some locations in the Canadian Arctic occupied by Germans with weather stations to help with naval and aerial combat by making better weather forecasts for the war (completely undetected during the war itself).
• There are two parts of the lower 48 states that you have to drive through Canada to reach by land (Point Roberts WA and Angle Inlet MN, the latter caused by a misunderstanding of the source of the Mississippi during treaty negotiations)
• The subway system in New York City has 500 miles of abandoned track and tunnels. It has over 1000 miles of track in use. This of course does not count the above ground rail system that also existed and was removed (something like Chicago's I guess).
• If you look at a map of the Pacific, you will see that the islands of Hawaii are all lined up in a row. If you include sea mounts and underwater knolls etc, the Hawaiian islands extend a great distance westward and then there is a sharp bend Northward as the island chain continues as the Emperor chain (the whole chain is called the Hawaii-Emperor chain, for obvious reasons). If you date all of these islands (about 50 I think) the dates get progressively older as you move along the chain, westward and then northward. The interesting thing to me is, what happened to cause the sharp bend?
• Mummies were so plentiful in Egypt that the bodies were used as fuel for early steam locomotives, rather than burn scarce wood or coal.
• "Mummy extract" was also put in patent medicines and sold to Victorians who wanted to stay young.

So I like to know a few unusual facts.

So in the case of bee inebriation:

• bees are badly affected by pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals that man has introduced into the environment. They can appear drunk and dizzy, and even die. This is serious because it has a substantial economic impact of course.
• bees also have brains and nervous systems that are similar in some ways to humans, and so their behavior when drunk is of interest to scientists in several research teams world wide, who get the bees drunk on purpose to see their behavior
• some plants rely on getting the bees drunk so they fall inside the plant. When they are inside the plant, the plant glues some pollen sacks to the back of the bee, and then the plant partially closes to trap the bees until the glue dries sufficiently that the pollen sacks will not fall off, and then let the bees go to spread the pollen
• Some bees like to drink more than others, and become notorious drunks around the hives. So the bees station "bee bouncers" outside the hives to keep the drunk bees from entering the hive and disrupting everything, and force them to stay outside until they sober up. If a bee is a repeat offender and gets drunk too often, the "bee bouncers" will chew the drunk bees legs off as a punishment.

And so on. So as you can see, bee inebriation is an interesting subject. Did you know that most of the bees we have here in the US are not native varieties, but were introduced from Europe to displace the native bees? The indians even referred to them as "white man's flies", according to some writing of Thomas Jefferson. So even bees can be interesting. And this is just a small slice of bee behavior, not counting on their navigational abilities, the behavior when exposed to smoke, the solitary bees, the stingless bees, bees that can sting multiple times, interactions with wasps, battles between bees, etc.