The Tags Are Everything I Know. I Am Sharing This With Every Single One To Try And Spread The Word.

hung out with my crush today and gave her a rose quartz necklace<3 now we both have one. she dyed her hair a beautiful wine-red color. aphrodite help me, im so in love with this girl

i have officially achieved my dream of becoming a home improvement butch

my ethereal darling <3

worlds cutest distraction <3

was looking through my old rock collection and found something interesting

a complete and intact clam fossil that i had found in my backyard. i live in a completely landlocked state.

my sweet baby <3

painted my nails for the first time in like two years. aphrodite is helping embrace my femininity without as much dysphoria. i definitely need more practice painting tho

goodgoodgood.co

First-of-its-kind lab breeds bumble bee babies to save species from extinction

A lab in Ontario, Canada is revolutionizing the “save the bees” campaign by being the first lab to successfully raise yellow-banded bumble b

"In 2021, scientists in Guelph, Ontario set out to accomplish something that had never been done before: open a lab specifically designed for raising bumble bees in captivity. 

Now, three years later, the scientists at the Bumble Bee Conservation Lab are celebrating a huge milestone. Over the course of 2024, they successfully pulled off what was once deemed impossible and raised a generation of yellow-banded bumble bees. 

The Bumble Bee Conservation Lab, which operates under the nonprofit Wildlife Preservation Canada, is the culmination of a decade-long mission to save the bee species, which is listed as endangered under the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation...

Although the efforts have been in motion for over a decade, the lab itself is a recent development that has rapidly accelerated conservation efforts. 

For bee scientists, the urgency was necessary. 

“We could see the major declines happening rapidly in Canada’s native bumble bees and knew we had to act, not just talk about the problem, but do something practical and immediate,” Woolaver said. 

Yellow-banded bumble bees, which live in southern Canada and across a huge swatch of the United States, were once a common species.

However, like many other bee species, their populations declined sharply in the mid-1990s from a litany of threats, including pathogens, pesticides, and dramatic habitat loss. 

Since the turn of the century, scientists have plunged in to give bees a helping hand. But it was only in the last decade that Woolaver and his team “identified a major gap” in bumble bee conservation and set out to solve it. 

“No one knew how to breed threatened species in captivity,” he explained. “This is critically important if assurance populations are needed to keep a species from going extinct and to assist with future reintroductions.”

To start their experiment, scientists hand-selected wild queen bees throughout Ontario and brought them to the temperature-controlled lab, where they were “treated like queens” and fed tiny balls of nectar and pollen. 

Then, with the help of Ontario’s African Lion Safari theme park, the queens were brought out to small, outdoor enclosures and paired with other bees with the hope that mating would occur. 

For some pairs, they had to play around with different environments to “set the mood,” swapping out spacious flight cages for cozier colony boxes. 

And it worked. 

“The two biggest success stories of 2024 were that we successfully bred our focal species, yellow-banded bumble bees, through their entire lifecycle for the first time,” Woolaver said. 

“[And] the first successful overwintering of yellow-banded bumble bees last winter allowed us to establish our first lab generation, doubling our mating successes and significantly increasing the number of young queens for overwintering to wake early spring and start their own colonies for future generations and future reintroductions.”

Although the first-of-its-kind experiment required careful planning, consideration, resources, and a decade of research, Woolaver hopes that their efforts inspire others to help bees in backyards across North America. 

“Be aware that our native bumble bees really are in serious decline,” Woolaver noted, “so when cottagers see bumble bees pollinating plants in their gardens, they really are seeing something special.”"

-via GoodGoodGood, December 9, 2024

A reminder: if you were taught that mosquitoes in general are useless to the environment and could be eliminated “without consequence”, then you were taught incorrectly. People still regularly comment this silly notion on my posts with absolute confidence. Our goal is reducing risk to humans, NOT eliminating the dangerous animal altogether.

You don’t have to like irritating, gross, or dangerous animals (most people do not), but if you are ever arguing for the extinction of an entire animal species try to remember the natural world is unfathomably complex in ways none of us can predict.

my chickens have learned how to perch on my shoulders. my neck is now scratched to hell.