[321/366] adopt a bee

[cosmolinguist]

Nothing else happens to me, so have another work anecdote.

Today L told us about a local honey seller that has an adopt-a-bee program. You can adopt a single bee for 99p, you get a certificate of adoption (no photo, sadly! The WWF gives you a photo of the tiger or whatever, at least! and I'm sure they go take an individual photo of a new tiger for each kid who gets told that they've adopted a tiger!), you can choose whether you want a worker, drone or queen bee (or "the three genders of bee"), and you can name the bee.

This led J to speculate on the drones and workers being drag queens. He was imagining a sort of pantomime-dame situation. So pretty soon we'd invented a bee, Arnold the Bee, who's friends with Crimedog (a character from some of of J's drawings, made after someone tried to say "Crimewatch" and "Watchdog" at the same time and got them mixed up) and who is also a drag queen called Beeyoncé.

Comments

[jack]

I feel like if I was a professional tigerologist I would at least tell the tigers apart. Can the apiarodist really really match up the bees to the donors?

It's like those "have a star named after you" scams, and people keep saying, "oh well, it's a nice idea, isn't it? who can tell if it's real or not", if no-one uses the name and they don't even match uniquely, is it really naming? Which is a shame because real astronomers do have pages of catalog numbers and they totally could pull them from a user-sponsored database instead of a collection of letters and it would be more memorable AND give human interest to the person who got lucky and their star had life discovered :) Except that, a bee COULD have multiple adoptive parents, a star can't have more than one official name.

Footnote: Not actually science names.

[cosmolinguist]

I don't get the impression that anyone believes they'd be getting a specific unique bee. You can also adopt a whole hive for £30, which is a pretty good deal since there's a lot more than thirty bees in a hive! I really like the idea of bees having lots of adoptive parents. And yeah it's a lot nicer as well as less territorial than the star-naming idea would be even if it weren't a scam.

[otter]

I like your story.

[cosmolinguist]

Thank you. :)

[gender_euphoric]

Beeyoncé just caught me off guard. 😂

[cosmolinguist]

I just cracked up when J said that.