Lachryphagy. Bees. This Post Respectfully Dedicated to James Nicoll

[beamjockey]

You know how james_nicoll sometimes suffers through a book of questionable quality, to produce a review that will warn or entertain his correspondents?

You know how he labels these reviews "Because My Tears Are Delicious to You?"

Well, over in Thailand, Hans Bänziger of Chaing Mai University and his colleagues described bees that would like to drink James's tears.:

Lisotrigona cacciae, L. furva and Pariotrigona klossi (Meliponini, Apidae) workers drank lachrymation (tears) from human eyes in more than 262 naturally-occurred cases at 10 sites in N and S Thailand during all months of the year. [...]On man the bees were relatively gentle visitors, mostly landing on the lower eyelashes from where they imbibed tears for 0.5–2.5 min, often singly but occasionally in congregations of 5–7 specimens per eye.

If you are squeamish enough not to want to see lachryphagous bees in action, DO NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK, which leads to pictures described in this article accurately, but somewhat inadequately,as "Selfie photos by Hans Bänziger." You can't unsee them.

(It's possible everyone but me knew about this already.)

Comments

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

That's news to me! I had read about sweat bees, but tear bees...

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

There was a segment about this on _All Things Considered_ a couple of days ago. One of the more memorable comments was "Well, yes, it hurts! You've got bees licking your eyeballs!"

[kaffy-r.livejournal.com]

Oh. My.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Eep!

[kaffy-r.livejournal.com]

It's not that I don't love bees ... in that "I love all Mankind" way that I can also employ about my fellow humans. In fact, I'm going to be heading to a prairie garden a little later this afternoon, and I hope to see a humongous number of honey and bumble bees there.

But when one's earliest memories of bees (and wasps and hornets) is of stepping into a hornets' nest at the age of 3 or 4, and when one's intellectual appreciation of them is overlaid by a completely irrational horror of sideways mouth parts/mandibles, it becomes easy to understand how the motto "two legs good, four legs good, six legs bad, eight legs worse" can muddy judgement.

Also? I love it when I have the chance to use that icon. Heh.

[schulman.livejournal.com]

How has this not happened to James yet?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Like me, he is avoiding Thailand for a while.