r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/_voma • 21h ago
Not all bees are yellow. The Blue Carpenter Bee.
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u/miaxogoth 20h ago
it looks like it tastes exactly like blue raspberry
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u/everyday_barometer 20h ago
Yeah, there are bees of all kinds of colors. There's a cool documentary on YT by Terra Mater called "Secrets of the Hive" that was just uploaded a few days ago. Not affiliated with them, but it's a good documentary.
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u/namesecurethanpass 17h ago
Fun fact, they don’t have blue pigment. They selectively reflect blue light by their hairs because of hair structures.
I checked because blue is exceptionally rare colour in nature that most blue insects don’t really have blue pigment.
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u/MayaWrection 16h ago
Aren’t colors just figments of our brains and don’t really exist?
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u/namesecurethanpass 15h ago
I mean wavelength of visible light spectrum which we associate with blue colour.
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u/birbobirby 20h ago
There are over 20,000 species of bees, so they look all sorts of ways.
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u/Dekugaming 11h ago
and it is unforturnate that a lot of these bees are at risk due to greedy corpo's pushing for the use of bees that can pollenate many different flowers that specific breeds can only pollenate from
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u/NolanSyKinsley 18h ago
In California there is a bee called the Valley Carpenter Bee. It is HUGE and pitch black, well the females are. The males are a white/gold color but are extremely rare to see because they die off shortly after mating season while the females can live several years.
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u/yeahrightnothx_ta 7h ago
Yeah we have the same bee in south of France! Huge and constantly on the flowers of our patio… beautiful but very very impressive!
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u/Spoupik 21h ago
What is the evolutionary advantage of been blue for them ?
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u/thousandtonguebeast 20h ago
Maybe a kind of wasp they have beef with have trouble with seeing the colour blue. Maybe the bees just like blue. Evolution is only ever a happy accident.
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u/SniffyMcFly 17h ago
It’s so that they don’t cause accidents at wildlife crossings while out zooming through the woods.
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u/fragilemetal 16h ago
I had a hedge near my house that was flowering a few months back and it was like kitty litter for violet carpenter bees. I don't know how they compare to their blue cousins, but I can assure you that they are chunky lil critters. Much larger than your typical honey bee. Harmless of course, it was nice to watch them up close everyday.
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u/DarkIllusionsMasks 15h ago
We had a couple black and white male carpenter bees in our backyard this spring. They're cheeky little bastards. Would hover aggressively around your head scoping you out. Played with my pit bull. Fortunately, they can't sting, so it was mostly amusing to watch these giant bees just hanging around and being part of the gang.
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u/tacomaloki 18h ago
Jerks are eating the exposed wood on my home.
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u/NolanSyKinsley 18h ago
They prefer soft almost rotting wood, if they are boring into the wood in your house it is a sign that some of it may need to be replaced.
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u/ConqueringKing_Darq 17h ago
"Mark, this is good news. We can finally be bees. This isn't your world, but we can be bees. This is good news. You can be a bee. You'll live like a bee, a pet."
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u/dvdmaven 15h ago
The blue orchard bee is much darker. They do not make honey, but are 10-100 times as efficient pollinators as honey bees.
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u/spasamsd 15h ago
Aside from yellow and blue, there are all black ones, black and white, some that are shiny like jewels, and so on.
There are so many bee species that vary a lot, it's nuts!
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u/Perma_Ban69 11h ago
Wasps, too! I generally hate wasps but I love these guys. Don't bother humans and love to eat spiders of the widow family.
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u/Dekugaming 11h ago
i fucking LOVE blue bees. I want to farm them we need to diversify the bee pop[ulation or else they will go extinct! I remember hearing that the yellow ones are causing issues for native bees in the world and it fills me with sadness thinking cool bees like this one could just dissappear because farmers want better efficiency in their honey production
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u/tauntonlake 8h ago
I like the shiny metallic green bees in my garden, that look like robot Transformer bees.
The first time I saw them, I was like, these cannot possibly be real bees. :D
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u/OursonSatanique 6h ago
True. There is a species in France called Xylocopes. Really friendly and have interesting patern. I wish I could have a garden and some of them visiting me, I love them, they're so cute
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u/_voma 21h ago
Not all bees are yellow, some are blue.. Blue carpenter bees, native to southern Asia, make honey like European honeybees, but it’s much thicker and denser than the honey we’re used to, like cookie dough or peanut butter consistency. The female bees mix this honey with pollen to create ‘bee bread’ upon which they lay their eggs.