Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea. They are currently considered a clade, called Anthophila. There are over 20,000 known species of bees in seven recognized biological families. Some species – including honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees – live socially in colonies while most species (>90%) – including mason bees, carpenter bees, leafcutter bees, and sweat bees – are solitary.
Bees are found on every continent except Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants. The most common bees in the Northern Hemisphere are the Halictidae, or sweat bees, but they are small and often mistaken for wasps or flies. Bees range in size from tiny stingless bee species, whose workers are less than 2 millimetres (0.08 in) long, to the leafcutter bee Megachile pluto, the largest species of bee, whose females can attain a length of 39 millimetres (1.54 in).
Bees feed on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used as food for their larvae. Vertebrate predators of bees include primates and birds such as bee-eaters; insect predators include beewolves and dragonflies.
Bee pollination is important both ecologically and commercially, and the decline in wild bees has increased the value of pollination by commercially managed hives of honey bees. The analysis of 353 wild bee and hoverfly species across Britain from 1980 to 2013 found the insects have been lost from a quarter of the places they inhabited in 1980.
Human beekeeping or apiculture (meliponiculture for stingless bees) has been practised for millennia, since at least the times of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Bees have appeared in mythology and folklore, through all phases of art and literature from ancient times to the present day, although primarily focused in the Northern Hemisphere where beekeeping is far more common. In Mesoamerica, the Mayans have practiced large-scale intensive meliponiculture since pre-Columbian times
Bees may be solitary or may live in various types of communities. Eusociality appears to have originated from at least three independent origins in halictid bees. The most advanced of these are species with eusocial colonies; these are characterised by cooperative brood care and a division of labour into reproductive and non-reproductive adults, plus overlapping generations. This division of labour creates specialized groups within eusocial societies which are called castes. In some species, groups of cohabiting females may be sisters, and if there is a division of labour within the group, they are considered semisocial. The group is called eusocial if, in addition, the group consists of a mother (the queen) and her daughters (workers). When the castes are purely behavioural alternatives, with no morphological differentiation other than size, the system is considered primitively eusocial, as in many paper wasps; when the castes are morphologically discrete, the system is considered highly eusocial.
True honey bees (genus Apis, of which eight species are currently recognized) are highly eusocial, and are among the best known insects. Their colonies are established by swarms, consisting of a queen and several thousand workers. Africanized bees are a hybrid strain of A. mellifera that escaped from experiments involving crossing European and African subspecies; they are extremely defensive.
Many bumblebees are eusocial, similar to the eusocial Vespidae such as hornets in that the queen initiates a nest on her own rather than by swarming.
Most other bees, including familiar insects such as carpenter bees, leafcutter bees and mason bees are solitary in the sense that every female is fertile, and typically inhabits a nest she constructs herself. There is no division of labor so these nests lack queens and worker bees for these species. Solitary bees typically produce neither honey nor beeswax. Bees collect pollen to feed their young, and have the necessary adaptations to do this. Solitary bees are important pollinators; they gather pollen to provision their nests with food for their brood. Often it is mixed with nectar to form a paste-like consistency.
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Cut my work coffee consumption in half and found a way to keep eating at work even if it's too busy to blast a quick meal. Instead of coffee I'm drinking fucking SOUP. Gonna bring a big mug in tomorrow and fill er up, keep it under a heat lamp and be the cook who is eating soup all shift
That's how I Soup on company time.
It is a bit of a compromise for me cause I smoke. Others will take like 20 minutes (paid) half way through or as close as possible and eat food. I work a longer day so I do 3-4 ten minute smoke breaks instead depending on my day length. You're legally entitled to 15 minutes paid break for every 3 hours you work where I am and if you don't stretch another 5 minutes out you're a fool and also cause of my start time when I get hungry again at work is when it's busy AF most of the time so soup solves it
While I support your anti-coffee campaign, I also feel like you may have opened a pandora’s box of “see, my employees don’t need any meal breaks!”
I understand your concern, where I am it's safe. In the wider perspective of where I am being the country, by law everyone gets 15 minutes paid breaks for every 3 hours and we're cooks, if you don't let cooks make food.for.themselves we'll fuck up orders on purpose to get food and just steal good anyway, there's no accurately accounting for waste unless a manager stands by the trash all day. The chef himself is lifelong dishwasher who was a punk rocker himself like me and then had a family and came across a grant program for getting chef papers and we have non smokers who it's hard to get to take their darn legally mandated breaks and he was quite on board with me making them mandatory. I'm weirdly on the same side with my manager that everyone is good at their job and should relax more.
Based and soup-pilled
Once did something similar with a thermos of soup doing landscaping
I am in the anti bowl and spoon camp and pro mug and thermos when it comes to soup. Stew is for bowls, soup should be poured directly into your mouth
I think I might just have to try this myself as a soup enjoyer and someone that wants to cut down a bit on their coffee consumption.
It hits that warm beverage that does something for you thing. It's also my replacement flavor drink at work so it's not just water and black coffee, it's sometimes water and soup