Attention Deficit David

Get on the bus, the magic bus.

Get on the bus, the magic bus., originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

Small insect hops ride on Monarch butterfly.

My pal cocoa

My pal cocoa, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

A weekend in the catskills

A weekend in the catskills, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

IMG_0813.JPG

Good morning.

Good morning., originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

The view outside our house this morning.

I'm Ovopositively Hooked

I was hanging out today waiting for someone in their garden, watching as a huge number of bumblebees were taking nectar from some plants. I'm a big fan of bumblebees because of my photographic past with them (and the fact that they don't care if you pet their fuzzy bodies while they're gathering) and so I was watching them pretty closely.

At one point I watched as a bee pulled another one off of a flower, weird. Then I saw what looked like bee sex. (One bee climbed on top of the other, which I've never seen them do before. It seemed like they were mating, only, as my wife pointed out when I recounted this story, that's not how bees reproduce.

So I've been reading up online (mostly Wikipedia) and I don't know what was going on there, but I did find some amazing things. And I'm totally blown away by bees.

The queen bee determines if she's going to make a male or female. All bee eggs hatch regardless of fertilization. The queen, through a process completely not understood, cotrols which eggs receive sperm. Unfertilized eggs=male=drones. Fertilized=workers=female.

Virgin Queens is the term for a bee that's being raised to be a queen bee. It's created when the workers feed it only royal jelly during (which is secreted from the head of the bees) during development from larvae and no honey. Virgin Queens are produced when the hive needs to replace the queen. (That's right, the things sense when the queen is dying, and build a new one.)

Drone bees have bigger eyes than the females, that's because sex occurs in flight and so they need to be able to see better as they're, uh, steering.

A colony of honeybees can be—ready for this?—40,000 members strong. They can fly miles for food (up to 14 kilometers). Which means that the bees I saw today in Tarrytown in theory could be the bees that hang out in our yard. Unreal.

A swarm of bees occurs when they're looking for a new place to make a hive. If a location doesn't pan out, they usually travel a bunch of miles and look around again. In the meantime, they'll sleep hanging in clusters from under trees or roofs.

Hive temps stay consistent despite outside temperatures. Get this from Wikipedia

All bees, when they sense the hive's temperature deviating from proper limits, either generate heat by shivering, or exhaust heat by moving air with their wings.

Oh my god.

And it just gets better and better. I found out today that bees and ants all evolved from wasps, and bees evolved parallel to the development of the flower. That means that bees helped create flowers. Not just help create flowers now, they helped invent them.

Emerging queens make a noise called "piping" that can be heard clearly from outside a hive, and it's either G sharp or A natural.

The smallest bee is only a few millimeters long, the largest are up to 1.5 inches.

If you're interested, the Wikipedia articles are fascinating.

Ratios

Just a little reminder: terrorist bombings have killed fewer than 2000 air travelers in a decade (source: CNN) while each year more than 40,000 people die in car accidents (source NHTSA).

That's around 450,000 deaths by car accident vs. 2000 by plane attack.

Clearly we should immediately ban all carry on items.

Product Whore

Sometimes being a product tester for a living can be a little bit overwhelming. UPS came today and dropped of a gigantic HP photo printer and two boxes (about twenty-pounds in total) of Canon inks and papers—that can only mean that a wide-format inkjet is about to show up while I'm trying to figure out how to get the fifty-pound HP printer upstairs.

I'm still trying to find a place to unpack the eight large boxes that came from Sinar Bron the other day, presumably they sent me everything they make, some boxes are a good forty pounds.

Meanwhile, upstairs I have an Epson pro scanner to be tested, and a box containing a Nikon D2Xs and honking pro lens to be reviewed.

For awhile I had an assistant to help me with all this but he's sort of, you know, got a real job now, and so it's just me and the boxes of gear that cycle in and out of my life.

Quick! Throw out the baby, the bathwater is too hot.

So I totally applaud the work of security experts in foiling terrorist attacks on planes. Any time someone prevents a plane from exploding mid-air, consider me a fan.

I do, however, think that some of the articles I've read today might be going a bit...too...far when it comes to airline security. A piece on CNN via the Associated Press indicates that security experts think we should ban anything with a battery from going aboard a plane. Like a watch, for example. Or a hearing aid.

This sentence though actually made me laugh "You can carry a bag into the center of an airport with thousands of people around you before you are ever screened. That, too, must change," he said.

Perhaps, with only about 50,000 miles a year of air travel under my belt, I'm a bit unsure of exactly what an airport is, but if you asked me to define one, I'd probably start off with "it's a big place into which you carry a bag, with thousands of people around you."

Perhaps we should ban all luggage and all carry ons on flights. That would solve the problem. Well, I mean except for anything you might smuggle in on your person.

My neighbor Chris just suggested that we all be made to fly nude. That'll stop terrorism. then he further suggested that we have to fly in three-feet of water. Who would be able to carry out a terrorist plot when sitting naked in three feet of water with other passengers.

Right on.

Milk, does some humor good.

My friend Foster pointed out to me a page on Amazon for whole milk. That might sound strange, but Amazon is working in conjunction with Gristides in New York to deliver grocery items locally.

But that's not the amusing part. The amusing part is the nearly 400 tongue-in-cheek reviews posted by Amazon shoppers for milk.

Check them out.

They're just big rats with Disney movie contracts

I walked out of my kitchen to pick some basil for a dinner recipe. There's a nice little thunderstorm going on, but it's still very light out, being around 5pm on a day when the sun sets after eight.

I glanced up at my tomato plans in my vegetable garden to see something brown, terribly cute and fuzzy looking back at me. Two more adorable (stupid miserable) deer looked on from the side of the garden, happily eating my clover.

Great. Last year's deer nuisance has been replaced by this year's deer and two fawn nuisance. Three big deer mouths chomping on my garden.

Looks like I'll be turning on the motion-sensor water sprayer device, while dreaming of venison.