Do you know adult bees? You probably don't know much. This is harmless: even if you don't know tunnel bees, you can still taste the warmth and sweetness of life. However, as long as we try to understand, these humble insects will tell us many interesting things, and if we broaden our knowledge of this complex world a little, it is not a contemptible thing to deal with tunnel bees. Now that we have free time, let's get to know about them. They are worth knowing.
How do you identify them? They're honey-making craftsmen, and they're generally slimmer, more slender than the bees we keep in our hives. They live together in groups and have a variety of body shapes and body colors. Some are larger than the average wasp, and some are the same size as domestic bees, or even smaller. So diverse that inexperienced people can be helpless, but there is one characteristic that will never change. Any tunnel wasp is clearly and distinctly imprinted on this species.
You look at the last abdominal ring on the tip of the abdomen on the back of the tunnel bee's belly. If you're catching a tunnel bee, its ventral ring has a smooth, bright groove. When the tunnel wasp is in a defensive state, the groove slides up and down. This sliding groove, which resembles a sheathed weapon, proves that it is a member of the tunnel bee family, and there is no need to distinguish its body shape and body color. In the genus Needle Tube Insects, no other bee species have this novel and unique sliding groove. This is the obvious mark of the tunnel bee, which is the family crest of the tunnel bee family.
In April, the work began cautiously and carefully, and if it were not for some new-style small bags, it would not be visible from the outside. There was not a single movement on the construction site outside. Craftsmen rarely came to the surface because they were very busy with their work underground. Sometimes, here and there, the top of such a small earthen bag swayed, and then slid down the slope of the cone, which was caused by a craftsman, who took out the debris and pushed it on the dirt bag, but it did not show the ground itself. Right now, tunnel bees are only busy with this kind of thing. May arrives with flowers and sunshine. The diggers in April are now flower pickers. At any time I could see them on small dirt bags with open skylights, all covered in yellow pollen. The biggest of them is the spotted bee, and I often see them nesting in the trees in my little garden, and we look closely at the spotted bees, and whenever the medical plan for storing food is up, there will always be such a light white eater suddenly coming from nowhere, and it will make us witness the robbery.
In May, around ten o'clock in the morning, when the work of stockpiling grain was in full swing, I had to visit my densely populated insect town every day. I sat in a chair with my waist bowed, arms on my knees, and watched motionlessly until lunchtime. What caught my attention was a white-eater, a small flying emperor who could not be named, but not a fierce gathering tyrant of tunnel bees.
What is the name of this gangster? I think there should be, but I don't really want to waste time looking up something that doesn't mean much to the reader. It is better to take the time to figure out the boring explanations in the Kun Blood Classification Dictionary than to provide the reader with clear and concise narrative facts. All I need to do is briefly describe the physical characteristics of this criminal. It is a five-millimeter-long agricultural insect with dark red eyes, a white complexion, a dark gray chest, and five small black dots on it. The black spots are covered with reclining cilia, the abdomen is light gray, the abdomen is white, and the claws are black.
Among the tunnel wasps I observed, it was abundant. It often curls up in the sun near a crypt and waits. Once the bee returns from the harvest, its claws are stained with yellow pollen, and it rushes up. Flying back and forth, left and right, chasing after each other. Finally, the tunnel bee suddenly burrowed into its own hole, and the two-winged diner quickly landed near the cave population. It couldn't move: its head was pressed against the door, waiting for the tunnel bee to finish its work. Then he finally made an appearance again. The head and chest protruded out of the cave and stopped in front of their house for a while. The white-eater remained motionless. They are often face-to-face, spaced less than finger width apart. Both sides are silent
This is a bird photographed on May 5 "showing" on the eaves of Qu Yuan Ancestral Hall in Zigui County, Hubei Province. It's May 5th
move. The tunnel bee force has a guard against diners who steal food, at least, its appearance is plain enough to make people think that the noodle eaters are not worried about their bold behavior will be punished. In the face of the giant who could press the window with one finger, this Huru still stood still.
I wanted to see either side show timidity, but I failed to do so: there was no indication that Sui Bee knew that his family was in danger of being beaten, and the Western diners did not exile any fears that they would be severely punished. The robber and the victim only looked at each other. Huge tolerance of a large number of tunnels as long as they think, you can use its profits not to open this small secret price of loving the north homeland to break the belly, you can use the big police to suppress it, use its micro-needles to prick it, but the tunnel bee is not allowed to do so, but let the little strong check blood red province eyes live in their old door, motionlessly exist next to it. Why does the leg bee show such a foolish wide plain?
The tunnel wasps were going to fly away. The little fly immediately flew into the hole, as if entering its own door. Now, it can choose itself in the storage room at will. Because all the storage rooms are open. It also built its own nail-producing chamber. Between the return of the lift, no push will disturb it. Let the claws be stained with pollen, and the stomach yellow Chinese sugar gauge is a waste of time: there must be no time to do bad things in the face of the private wind. But the criminal's timer is very precise, can it accurately calculate where the tunnel bee is outside? By the time the tunnel bees returned from the wild, the small fly had quickly flown away. It flew not far from the Lan Cave and would be in a vantage point where the offering would be re-farmed. In case a small fly is hitting something. What happens when you are suddenly bumped into by a tunnel bee? Nothing big can happen. I saw some small fly-like flies following the tunnel bees to turn over and stay for a while while the wake-up bees were adjusting the powder and sugar. When the tunnel bee mixed with sweet dough, the little flying butterfly could not enjoy it, so it flew out of the rain and waited at the door. The little fly returns to the sun, the well is not afraid, and the pace is smooth, which clearly indicates that it has not encountered it in the depths of the cave where the bee works! What a hassle.
If the little fly is too impatient, too annoying, and circles around the pastry, it will be replaced with a slap on the back of the neck, which is a move that the pastry owner will do, but that's all. There was no serious fight between the counselor and the frugal thief. This can be seen from the way Xiu Ru walked smoothly and unharmed from the giant's whiskers who were busy working.
When the tunnel bee returns to its home, whether it is fully loaded or without any gain, it always hesitates for a moment: it quickly flies back and forth against the ground for a while. Its haphazard flight makes me think first of all that it is trying to confuse the gangsters with this messy orbital speed. It does have to do so, but it doesn't seem to have that high IQ.
What it worries about is not the enemy, but the difficulty of finding the door of its own house, because the small dirt bags nearby are one after another, overlapping each other, the insect town is narrow, and new debris is cleared out every day, and the town's face changes day by day. Its hesitation is evident because it often touches the wrong door and breaks into someone's home. One sees the nuances of the doorway. It knew immediately that it had gone through the wrong door. So it began to bend around the earth detectives with great effort, sometimes suddenly flying a little farther. Finally, I finally touched my own house. It was overjoyed to drill in, but no matter how fast it drilled, the little fly stayed near the door of its house, its face against its door, waiting for the tunnel bee to fly out and go in to steal honey.
When the owner of the house came out of the cave door again, the little fly checked out a little, leaving a place for the other party to pass, and that was it. Why does it bother with the places where the two meet so peacefully that if you don't know something else, you won't be able to see that this is a narrow encounter between the thief and the owner of the house.
The little fly did not panic at the sudden appearance of the tunnel bee, it was just a little more careful. Similarly, the tunnel bee didn't care about the robber who robbed it unless the latter flew with it and pestered it. At this point, the tunnel bee made a sharp turn and flew away.
White eaters are also in a dilemma at the moment. When the tunnel bee returned, the sweet juice was in its taste sac, the pollen was stained in the claws, the sweet juice thieves could not eat it, the pollen was not yet amorphous, it was powdery, and it could not enter the mouth. Moreover, this little bit of pollen is not enough to plug the gaps between the teeth. In order to gather the croquets to make round bread, the tunnel bees have to go out many times to collect pollen. Once the necessary materials are in place, the tunnel bees are mixed and stirred with the tip of the large jaw, and then the dough is made small with claws. If the little fly lays its eggs on the material for making small pills, and after such a kneading, it must be a house egg.
Therefore, the eggs of the small fly will be laid on the prepared bread: because the bread is made underground, the white eater must enter the cave of the human tunnel bee. The little fly thief was so bold that he did drill down, even if the tunnel was in the hole, he didn't need it at all. The loss of the lord is either cowardice or stupid tolerance, and even let the thieves do their own thing.
The purpose of the little fly's careful snooping and sneaking into people's houses is not to harm others and gain nothing: it can find food on the flowers on its own, and it is much less troublesome than stealing and robbing. I was thinking, it's going to the tunnel beehole and it's trying to simply taste the food, to know what the quality of the food is, that's all. Its grand, only important thing is to build its own family. It steals wealth not for its own sake, but for its own descendants.
Let's dig out the pollen bread and look at it. We will find that these pollen breads are often crumbled into crumbs and wasted. Scattered in the yellow powder on the floor of the storage room, we would see two or three sharp-billed maggots squirming. It was a descendant of dipteran insects. Sometimes maggots are accompanied by the larvae of the real owner, a tunnel bee, but they are weak because they are not enough to eat. Maggots, although not abusing tunnel bee larvae, prey on the latter's most subliminal food. The tunnel bee larvae were pitiful, hungry, and their bodies deteriorated, and soon they were dying. Its corpse became tiny particles, mixed with the rest of the food, and became the mouth of the worms.
But what is the mother of the tunnel bee doing when the child is in trouble? It is always free to see its baby: it can see the child's plight by just probing into the hole. The round bread was delicate, and the sister worm was drilling around, and a little look at it would be all clear what was going on. Then it must make the descendants of thieves break their stomachs and intestines! Use your jaw to crush them and throw them out of the hole. It was a breeze. But the stupid mother did not think of doing so, but instead allowed the dove-occupier to get away with it.
Subsequently, the mother tunnel bee did something very stupid. After the pupal period came, the mother tunnel bee actually sealed the looted storage room with a mud cover like other rooms. This last barrier is a wonderful protective measure for tunnel bee larvae in their metamorphosis. But when the little fly came, you blocked it, it was ridiculous. The mother tunnel bee did not hesitate to do such a ridiculous thing, which was purely instinctive, and it even sealed this empty room. I say it is empty because the cunning maggots have eaten all their food and have immediately absconded, as if anticipating that in the future the little fly will encounter an impenetrable barrier. Before the mother tunnel bee sealed the door, they had left the storage room.
White eaters are both mean and cunning, but also cautious. All maggots abandon the clay huts, because if they are blocked, they will be buried in them. The inner walls of the clay hut have a wavy waterproof coating to prevent moisture return, and the larval skin of the small fly is very sensitive and delicate, which seems to be comfortable for this kind of hut, which is an ideal shelter, but maggots do not like it. They are worried - once they become small flies, they are trapped in them, so they hurry away and scatter near the lifting well.
The little flies I dug up were indeed outside the hut and had never been seen inside the hut. I found that one by one they were all crammed into a narrow nest in the clay, which they had moved to build after when they were sisters. The following spring, when the excavation period comes, the adult shellfish need to be squeezed out of the broken soil to reach the ground, which is not difficult at all.
There is another and very important reason for this forced relocation of white eaters. In July, tunnel bees give birth for the second time. The diptera, on the other hand, gave birth only a second time, and its offspring were in a pupal state at this time, only to become adults in the following year. The honey-picking Mother is busy collecting honey in her hometown: it directly uses the shafts and huts built in the spring, which can greatly save time! The elaborate shaft house will be all intact. It only takes the money to pay for it. What if a tunnel bee, which was born to love cleanliness, found a fly pupae while cleaning the house? It will dispose of this obstructive thing as construction waste. It would pick it up in a big cover, maybe crush it, move it outside the hole, and throw it into the waste heap. The fly pupae were thrown outside the cave, and if they let the wind blow and the sun, they would undoubtedly die.
I admire maggots for their wise foresight, not for the moment,but for the peace of mind for the future. There are two dangers that threaten it: one is that it is stuck in a death row, even if it becomes a fly, it cannot fly out; the other is to throw the tunnel bee outside the hole when it cleans up the garbage after repairing the house, and let it blow with the wind and rain, and throw the body into the wild. In order to escape this double catastrophe, the house was closed, and before the tunnel bee cleared the cave house in July, it fled the danger.
Let's take a look at one now - to see what happened to the white eaters later;
Throughout June. While the tunnels were at leisure, I conducted a comprehensive search of my insect-dense insect town, with a total of about fifty caves. None of the tragedies that happened underground escaped my eyes. There were four of us, and we sifted the soil dug out of the hole with our hands and let the soil slowly sift through the cracks in our fingers;
One person checks it out, the other person checks it again, and then the third person and the fourth person do it twice. The results of the examination are poignant. We didn't even find a single tunnel pupae.
Not one. This tunnel-bee-dense neighborhood killed all its inhabitants and was replaced by diptera insects. The latter are pupae-shaped, and there is no way to collect them in order to observe their evolutionary processes.
The insect season is over, and the original maggots have shrunk and hardened in the pupal shell, while the brown-red circles remain stationary. They are some seeds with potential vitality. The fiery sun of July could not wake them up from their slumber. In the month of the second generation of tunnel bees, it is as if God has issued a truce: the white eaters stop working and rest, and the tunnel bees work peacefully. If hostilities continue in succession, and the summer is the same as in the spring, then the tunnel bees that are too deeply affected may be exterminated. The second generation of tunnel wasps have such a large one-stage recuperation period, and the ecological balance can be maintained.
In April, when the striped tunnel bees fly around the trails within the walls, looking for an ideal.
When digging holes and building nests, white eaters are also busy pupating into adult worms! How precise and unbelievable is the calendar of the persecutors and the persecuted! When the tunnel began to bear fruit, the little fly was ready; its old trick of destroying the other party by starvation began again.
If this were just an isolated case, we wouldn't have to pay attention to it: one more tunnel bee is less – only tunnel wasps are not important for ecological balance. But, no! Killing and snatching in various ways has become rampant among the loaded beings. From the lowest to the highest, all producers are exploited off-production. Humanity, whose special position is supposed to be beyond these calamities, is the best transmutator of this kind of cruelty. People think in their hearts, "To do business is to get other people's money." As the little fly thought, "To work is to make honey for tunnel bees." In order to better plunder, humans have created the art of fighting for this kind of mass slaughter and taking pride in small massacres such as hanging.
The dream of Chai Gao, which people chant every Sunday in the village chapel: "Glory to the supreme God, peace to the good people of the mortal world!" We will never see it come to fruition. If war concerns only humanity itself, then peace may be preserved for us in the future, because those who are generous are committed to peace. However, this scourge is also extremely rampant in the animal kingdom, and animals are stubborn and will never be reasonable. Since this scourge is a universal phenomenon, it may be an incurable terminal illness. The life to come is chilling, and it will be like today's life, a never-ending slaughter.
So people dug their minds out and finally imagined that a giant could play with the planets in the palm of his hand. He is the embodiment of indestructible power, and he is also the representative of justice and power. He knows that we are fighting, killing, setting fires, and that barbarians are winning; He knows that we possess explosives, artillery shells, torpedo boats, armored vehicles, and all sorts of high-end weapons of mass murder; He was also aware of the terrible competition caused by greed, including the grass people. So, would this righteous man, this mighty giant, hesitate not to crush it if he pressed the earth with his thumb?
He wouldn't hesitate... He will let things go their way. He may think in his heart, "Ancient beliefs make sense; The earth is a walnut with worms, which is bitten by the evil moth. This is a barbaric prototype, a difficult stage towards a more tolerant destiny. Let's go with the flow, because order and justice always come last. ”
(This article is selected from the eighth volume of the original book)
I think it’s a good one。