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Blue Banded Bees are amongst our most beautiful Australian native bees. They are about 11 mm long and have bands of metallic blue fur across their black abdomens.

Blue Banded Bees are solitary bees. This means that each female bee mates and then builds a solitary nest by herself. She builds her nest in a shallow burrow in clay soil or sometimes in mudbricks. Many Blue Banded Bees may build their nest burrows in the same spot, close to one another, like neighbouring houses in a village.

Blue Banded Bees can perform a special type of pollination called 'buzz pollination'. Some flowers hide their pollen inside tiny capsules. A Blue Banded Bee can grasp a flower of this type and shiver her flight muscles, causing the pollen to shoot out of the capsule. She can then collect the pollen for her nest and carry it from flower to flower, pollinating the flowers. Quite a few of our native Australian flowers require buzz pollination eg Hibbertia, Senna.

Tomato flowers are also pollinated better when visited by a buzz pollinating bee. Researchers at the University of Adelaide made substantial progress in developing native Blue Banded Bees for greenhouse tomato pollination.

It would be much better for our environment to use our native Blue Banded Bees for this purpose rather than introducing European Bumblebees to Australia! (European Bumble Bees are not found on mainland Australia. Instead, native Blue Banded Bees and Carpenter Bees fill the niche of buzz pollinators on the mainland.)

Source: https://www.aussiebee.com.au/blue-banded-bee-information.html

[Content Warning: Transphobia] From the very same people who tell us to "boycott Wayland" in c/linux@lemmy.ml

[–] Dirt_Owl@hexbear.net 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good job reinforcing the fact that transphobes are dumb as shit

1

Tyrannosaurus rex is overrated (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Dirt_Owl@hexbear.net to c/earth@hexbear.net

0 comments fedilink

Tyrant lizard king? No thanks, fuck the monarchy. Spinosaurus is cooler anyway (the modern depictions of him, not the terrible Jurassic Park version). hell yeah, look at that crocoduck and his powerful tail, I bet he could just smack T. rex with that tail and it would be over.

Did you know a crocodiles tail is just as dangerous at its jaws? That shit is pure muscle for swimming, it can break bones. Big heavy theropods like T. rex are fucked if they get a broken leg.

I prefer herbivorous dinosaurs though. Therozinosaurus is hilarious and I love him. BEHOLD