Backyard beekeeping in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Backyard beekeeping in Japan

japantimes.co.jp

53 pointsUltramanoid17 comments

"Whereas refined sugar converts to fat, honey typically converts to energy"

Come on journalism

Yeah, I can't believe they would forget that it's activated honey that converts to energy. Normal honey acts the same as sugar pretty much.

I didn't even know that urban beekeeping was a thing outside of hotels and fancy restaurants until recently.

It turns out there are over 400 registered beekeepers and over 1,700 hives in the Chicago area: https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2019/06/27/city-has-a-be...

Interesting design that's being crowd-funded that has a chimney to reduce human-bee interaction to help with stinging risk:

* https://kottke.org/19/07/a-small-simple-hive-designed-for-ur...

Stings are last on my list of reasons I’d want to change their flight paths, as they really don’t seem to get to grumpy with people passing by. It’s quite disconcerting when they bump into an eye/ear/head though. Having them crap on the neighbours washing is the main urban issue I think, but good luck changing where they want to go. Fortunately most people don’t seem to recognise what the yellow splodges are.

This!

My neighbor two house apart from ours had beehives. Through a nifty arragement of his shrubs and bushes he achieved the same effect as in this new bee-box and had his bees go up when leaving the hive. Their flight path was a parabel and they came down again in our yard.

In spring time you could not hang any cloth outside. It would get swarmed with the bees as they were clearing out the poo of their hive that they had accumulated over the winter period. It was such a mess. Every frigging spring.

If your neighbours were smart, they’d give you lots of honey. This arrangement has a long history of keeping neighbours happy. It’s a straight win and honey isn’t short - the new season is fast approaching for me, and there is still around 100kgs in the kitchen.

>These large mammals are attracted to a hive by not only the honey in the combs, but also a colony’s eggs, larvae and pupae — and even the bees themselves. In one fell swoop, a colony can disappear.

Wow can you imagine swallowing a bee nest whole? I imagine that must do considerable damage to the stomach.

Pretty sure if I found one of my hives covered in those giant hornets, it would be time to find a new backyard hobby.

Asian giant hornets ain't nothing to fuck with. Their stings can kill a man -- and if just one makes it into a hive it can turn the hive into a scene from insect Attack On Titan. Japanese honeybees can deal with one hornet -- with considerable casualties -- but if it brings friends the whole colony is fucked. European honeybees -- fucked from the beginning.

there is always a bigger fish

> European honeybees — f’ed from the beginning

Just LOL!! So true. #evolution

Oh god those are terrifying. I don’t know if I have ever seen a more frightening animal tbh. They look very durable, fast, and the stinger is huge.

The article suggested honeybees kill them by surround them and vibrating to cause the hornets to overheat and die.

That is also fascinating. How does that ever evolve.

A clump of bees is very warm, picking up a swarm is relatively low risk and the heat is definitely the first thing you notice, though done wrong it could also be the last.

It’s interssting that they turned a survival technique into killing method.

Like how warm? How hot do you imagine the hornets get

They keep their hives at about 35C, which is white noticeable when you open them up. Same goes for big clumps of bees. Angry ones balling a invader are considerably hotter it seems, and this article mentions 49C. I’ve seen other article noting that bees die at about 51, while hornets die at a fractionally lower temperature. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12649-honeybees-gang-...

Kind of like a fever, heating your body up to fight off infections.

Or, in a chemical sense, chemo vs. cancer.

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