SILLY NONHUMAN CHAIN TIME!

found my old ipod shuffle a few weeks ago when i was cleaning out the garage. now my mom just said that she has the charger. she kept it all these years knowing we’d find it someday lol. anyway i’ll update this in the morning if it still works

i don’t have anything to say today but still felt like posting. anyway here’s my cat

her name is abigail (my grandpa named her) i have no clue what breed she is

Hey guys be cool and normal but reblog this with the homemade meal that would get you the most hyped as a child. I need it for reasons.

btw terfs need to leave dianic Wicca alone. Like Wicca (at least in my tradition) is literally based on the idea that one infinite genderless being is split into male and female avatars. Even if you’re just in it for the Goddess, her origins are deeply connected to transfems based on how we perceive them both.

also the burning times didn’t exist and you need to stop harping on that.

signed, an nb witch

"Solarpunk will never happen!"

As if it's not already coming, already here and starting to bloom before our eyes.

Neighborhood cooking clubs and libraries lending out more then just books, it's the art club that the community garden started, it's the funky gardens my neighbors have.

It's the DIY projects ppl wear with pride and ones that hide in the back of their dresser drawer. It's in the magazines and podcasts and in passing hope forward.

Like gruella gardening alone is enough for proof of concept for me, but the rise in community events and potlucks and fighting for rent caps and UBI and decentalizing energy and gardening is happening now.

And yea I gotta fight nazis and dickwards daily for it, and I gotta spend the time to educate and build up as I take down, but they can't say this future isn't coming. I'm here with you right now in it.

currently having a mild allergic reaction to my makeup. to be fair, the foundation was pretty old, so i should’ve seen this coming. but the redness and bumps are a bit unnecessary if you ask me.

hey science side of tumblr, what the fuck is this? why is my sky cut in thirds?

it disappeared a minute later but ive never seen this before.

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

abigail has been on my lap for the last hour and my legs hurt so bad. she’s just happily snoring away while i suffer

insects ive seen this week

1: long tailed giant ichneumonid wasp

2: imperial moth

3: polyphemus moth