OC Fair (Finally Over!!!)

[aggienaut]

   The fair is over!! No more days of working 7am - midnight! ):

   The Orange County Fair, you see, has been going on for the last month or so. I was foolish enough to allow myself to be voluntold I was going to do the scheduling of shifts at the Orange County Beekeepers Association (not to be confused with rival club the Beekeepers Association of Orange County) booth at the fair. We have a nice little booth with lots of posters with interesting information about bees, an observation hive (think ant farm but with bees) and a "beeosk" -- a kiosk covered in bee posters (:
   Anyway two people needed to be working it at all times from noon till 11pm Wednesday through Friday, and 10am to 11pm Sat and Sun, for a total of 112 shifts. Now consider that we had only 29 people on the club mailing list, and the overwhelming majority of those avoided working any shifts ... so probably less than half a dozen of us ended up working all of them, the club officers and I (3 of us, minus the good-for-nothing treasurer, don't get me started on him) probably worked half those ourselves. And even with them...

   Most club members are retired so it was easy to fill the noon to 5:30 shift, but the evening shifts almost all had to be filled by myself or the officers. So many a day I'd work my normal workday of 7am to 3pm, then barely have time to turnaround and be at the fair 5:30 to 11 (and between getting back to my car and driving home it would be midnight by the time I got home) .. and then repeat the next day. ):
   Hence me not posting as much this last month ;)   :P

   It's very enjoyable to be talking to people who have a lot of intelligent questions about bees and are clearly interested in what you're saying, and there were definitely people like that ... but most people anything you say is clearly going right over their head and you know they're about to walk out and say "the bumblebees were cool!" or something. And then there were all the dumb questions...


FREQUENTLY ASKED (DUMB) QUESTIONS ABOUT BEES:

"How do they make honey if they're stuck in there?"
"They come and go through that tube out the back of the tent"
"They don't all just leave?!"
"Why would they? That's their home"

"So their job is to make honey?"
or
"So their job is to serve the queen right?"
   It's silly that people think that bees should have a "job" or "purpose." Their purpose is the same as all other organisms: to live and survive; to reproduce. They produce honey to store up food, and the queen lays the eggs, and when they have enough bees and honey stored up the hive reproduces by sending out a swarm to establish a new hive. The worker bees do all the work but that's not the same as "serving the queen" ... people seem to forget that only humans have this peculiar sense of "ownership."

"So they're all guys except for the queen right?"
   I really really want to hunt down Jerry Seinfeld and slap him for this one. His "bee movie," which represented itself to actually be informative about bees actually got one of the most basic things totally wrong. Bee populations are 99.999% female!! (there'll maybe be a dozen to up to a few dozen male drones in a colony of 60,000)

"Honey is bee vomit isn't it? That's so gross!"
   Yes bees make honey by injesting pollen and nectar and regurgitating it as honey, BUT it doesn't go in their stomach but a special "honey stomach" or "honey gizzard," and thus does not come in contact with gastric juices or partially digested food (which would be honey anyway) or anything else we associate with vomit. There are no germs or bacteria in honey which could be harmful to an adult human (honey should not be given to babies less than one year of age though as certain spores that can effect them can exist in honey) or cooties ... so it really has nothing in common with vomit thank you very much. Now go drink milk and leave me alone.

"So the bees are disappearing right?"
   Yes and no. Colony Collapse Disorder has led to an average of 30% of hives in America being lost over winter, and specifically the bees seem to "disappear" (dead bees not present), but a bee population can more than double in spring, more than making up for the loss and a recent survey showed there were in fact more hives now in operation than before this "disappearance." I think it all stems from a misunderstanding of the word "disappearing."

"But I'm always finding dead bees in front of my house!" (usually said in a "no you're a crackpot, I know they ARE disappearing!" way)
   You know what you need in order to regularly find dead bees in front of your house? A steady supply of live bees. In an average colony 1200 bees are born every day. That means 1200 are dying every day 47.7 days later.
   And besides, dead bees aren't disappeared bees, genius.

"You know Albert Einstein said if bees disappeared all humans would be gone within three years"
   Fact: honeybees aren't native to the Americas
   Fact: people lived in the Americas before Europeans brought what the indians called "white man's flies"
   So you can suck it Eistein. Though agriculture would produce a lot less (other things pollinate, but can't be cultivated en masse like bees can, or you can do what China does since they accidentally killed all their bees with pesticides and pollinate by hand -- good for employment but surely drives the price way up)

   And about a million questions about the queen.

   The only questions that really stumped me is little kids kept asking me where they came from .. do I have to explain "the birds and the bees" to these kids?? I tried making an analogy to a farm but they looked unimpressed. I should have sent them over to ask the people manning the nearby piglet pen.


Obligatory Non-LJ-Cut-ed Picture


Photoessay: The Fair (conclusion: it's about giant hot dogs)

Comments

[morning-stand.livejournal.com]

I wish I would have known you were there, I would have come by :)

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Oh dang. Yeah I think I neglected to mention beforehand that I was going to be doing it, I should have, being as it's dominated my life for the past month d:

[bitchencamaro.livejournal.com]

Your photos are always great but they mess up my friend's page because they are so wide, and they make everything else wide too. So I have to scroll across, etc. Just to let you know.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

):

[buscemi.livejournal.com]

This post made me laugh a few times, mostly because I can imagine all the dumb questions you were asked. Oh, I also like the words "voluntold" and "beeosk". :)

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

:D thanks

"Voluntold" I learned from my brother who was a marine. In the marines they frequently got voluntold that they had just volunteered for something ;)

And beeosk was my boss's invention. Additionally on the beeosk itself is a slot for "beemail" and there used to be a tv screen in it labelled beetube. (:

[drippedonpaper.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed reading the answers to these posted questions. I guess that makes me "stupid" but anyways, thanks for sharing:)

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Haha well they're not all dumb, I mean you can't blame people for thinking they heard the bees are disappearing, but they were all asked so much I got really tired of answering them .. and some of them ARE pretty dumb. I mean seriously people.

[alycewilson.livejournal.com]

These responses were both entertaining and informative. Don't you wish you could have just handed out a sheet like this?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Ahaha seriously. Maybe next year I'll make a poster :D

[alycewilson.livejournal.com]

Actually, that's not a bad idea! You could use your characteristic humor in it to make it fun to read. I bet that people would remember more that way, too.

[klig.livejournal.com]

"You know Albert Einstein said if bees disappeared all humans would be gone within three years"

People seem to have this weird fascination with Albert Einstein, as if he knew what he was talking about. He was freakishly good at physics and maths, but a bit of a numpty with most other aspects of life. People are very keen to attribute sayings to him which he said nothing about, to wit this (http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp").

Einstein & Bees

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Interesting! Thanks for the link!!

(note for others trying to follow it, you need to delete the quote at the end)

[memeworrywort.livejournal.com]

I guess no one asked "won't you bee mine?"

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Nope ):

[whatisbiscuits.livejournal.com]

I had difficulty convincing someone yesterday that a honeybee is not bright yellow and black like a wasp, and in fact really looks completely different.

I was reading an article in a bee journal yesterday about the Albert Einstein and human beings dying out without bees myth (Albert never said this). A different scientist in the 70's said that a third of the world's food is pollinated by bees, but this was an overestimation. Actually the top 12 most eaten crops - bananas, wheat, rice, potatoes etc - are not pollinated by bees. But the variety of our diet would be diminished without them.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah I've heard the "every third bite" quote an aweful lot as well, and already didn't like it just because it makes it sound like it's russian roullette regarding what we eat.. This bite is this bite isn't, this bite is...

[bozotkutya.livejournal.com]

That fair looks awesome!

Oh, I so hear you on the dumb questions! I keep getting them about bees and dogs...sigh My daughter just got a kids' book about animals which states "bees make honey from pollen" and "only male bees work, the females' job is to serve the workers" I was FURIOUS when reading that BS and thought I should write some kind words to the editor!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Bees and dogs?

Also oh dear that is terrible about that book!! It's annoying when random things get it wrong, but when things which are seeking to educate children get it wrong it's a real travesty. ):

[bozotkutya.livejournal.com]

We have a bunch of doggies and take them to dog-school, etc. so we often get dumb remarks and/or questions :) I did not mean relationship between bees and dogs LOL

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Ahh. So you just get dumb questions about dogs.

[pavel-lishin.livejournal.com]

A++ explanation of dead/disappearing bees.

Also, as far as "where they come from", you should say something like "Well, I can demonstrate the mating dance of the common bee, but I'm going to need a volunteer, and also for anyone under 18 to avert their eyes."

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

;D