beehammer

When I started gardening, I had these ambitions that I was going to, I don't fucking know, grow my own food or something.  Which is an admirable goal, yes, but my yard is composed of sand and bullshit.  Apart from almost drowning myself in cherry tomatoes, annoying everyone I knew with free jalapenos, and spending a lot of time fighting with aphids and the ants who turned them into a problem (yes, I know: coffee grounds), I didn't accomplish much.

It turns out that flower gardening with an eye on helping out bees and butterflies is a lower-stress proposition, so that's mostly what I shifted into.  The thing that you have to understand about bees, though, is that honeybees have a specific register they buzz in when they're pissed off about something.  What do honeybees get pissed about?  Lots of things, it turns out. 

They landed on you, and you went inside.  They wanted to hang out on a bag all day because it has a picture of a flower on it, and you need to throw the bag away before it gets blown all over your neighbor's yard.  They found a flower they liked, and then another bee came and tried to fit in the flower with them.  Just, you know, bee problems.

But a lot of the angry buzzing seemed to come for no real reason at all.  Just walk past a plant, hear angry buzzing, be vaguely miffed because the bee in question wouldn't have a flower to get territorial over if you hadn't planted it in the first place.


Turns out these little jerks just fly around making the same buzz as an angry honeybee.  They're not mad about anything, that's just how they sound.  So, mystery solved.  My flowers haven't been visited by particularly irritable honeybees, they're being made use of by native sweat bees with resting bitch buzz.

There are spiders that like to pretend they're ants for the purpose of not getting their faces eaten off, right?  Right.  A lot of them, like the lady Myrmarachne plataleoides up there, run around holding their front legs like antennae to make the illusion extra realistic.

There are also spiders that run around looking like ants specifically for the purpose of eating ants' faces off*.  The idea behind that one is that they can sort of sneak around ants' nests and work columns and just pick up their dinner and make off with it.  The thing is that a) some of them (most Zodariids, for example) don't look a whole lot like ants and b) ants generally aren't going off looks anyway.

Like, this is why we bust out the borax and shit when we find ants in our house, right?  Ants lay down and follow chemical trails.  Chemicals are how they communicate.  Ants don't really care how another bug looks.  So there's this sort of assumption that "inaccurate" (translation: crap at their jobs) ant mimics must have some sort of chemical thing going on that lets them skate.  There are certain poisonous animals or lure-using animals that sequester useful chemicals from their prey, and one of the original hypotheses involved inaccurate mimics sequestering chemicals from ant prey to give off the right smell for an individual colony.  So far, they haven't found anything conclusive, but hope springs eternal.

Of course, a lot of Zodariids operate by sneaking in, killing an ant, and then slipping back out, no extraneous ant-contact required.  If they get busted, they slap the ants' antennae with their forelegs like they're trying to communicate, shove the dead ant in their faces, and basically play it off like they're hauling the corpse to the ant graveyard.  And if you're sitting there thinking "Pfft, that's not going to work, ants are smarter than that," well.  You're probably right about ants being smarter than that, but the thing is this is basically like some freaky-looking dude carrying a dead human running into you, shouting Sim-speak, and wandering off in the vague direction of a cemetery.  How likely are you to get in that guy's grill?  Honestly, here.  I'm guessing there are a lot of ant conversations that basically go like "What the fuck was that, Sheila?" "I don't know, Jill, but there's not enough sugar on the planet to make me look into it."

*There are even spiders that don't really pick one or the other.  Hell, there's a spider out there that looks like an ant to scare away other ant-mimicking spiders from their communal nests so that they can eat their young.  Spiders: shady as hell.