Last week the climate sages of East Anglia released a “scientific study”—I have to put it in quotation marks—that claimed that because of “warming”—see how easily it slips out, now and then?—“male bees are more likely to copulate with female bees, rather than pollinating the orchids.”
Don’t these clowns know anything?
In the first place, “male bees” are more properly called “drones.” Like the climate scientists themselves, drones do no productive work. They never pollinate the flowers. Never. Their sole function is to mate with the queen bee. And then they die.
In the second place, the worker bees that do the pollinating are all female. They do not make whoopee with the drones. That’s because they’re sterile, totally incapable of reproducing. Their only function is to work. Only the queen lays eggs.
These are basic facts about bees that every child used to know, before our public schools were invaded by gender coaches. If the kids didn’t learn these facts in school, they picked them up from Mark Trail comics and Disney nature programs. Everybody knew these things.
So now we should all pay big fat carbon taxes because the “male bees” are partying with the females and none of the bees’ work is getting done? This is statist “science” with a vengeance.
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Jeff, you should be aware that the bee studied in the research was Andrena nigroaenea which does not have the same hive/drone/worker/queen hierarchy.
However, there is a still a problem taking such a specific example with one bee species and one flower species and claiming: “Professor Davy said not only could this have severe implications for crop productivity, it could also lead to the breakdown of inter-species interactions that have evolved over thousands of years to respond to the same seasonal cues.”
Here is the study abstract (paywalled): http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2814%2901342-6
These are awfully harsh words for someone who hasn’t fully thought through their points.
1. Correct, male bees do not work. However, they do travel from one flower to another and in doing so they move pollen between plants by the exact same mechanism that female workers do. The fact that one is working and the other is eating is irrelevant.
2. This article cited a 9 sentence long “article” (closer to a tweet) that did a poor job of interpreting the study. The actual study never suggested that males bees copulate with female worker bees. It stated that males are emerging earlier and therefore are out of sync with the flowers’ pollination needs. This article in Metro latched onto the ‘sex’ aspect to get clicks.
So what we have here is ignorance citing ignorance citing an actual study. As a scientist, it must be difficult to see your work mutilated to this extent for clicks and politics.