Talk:Bee

Larvae

Should a page be made for bee larvae? On the larvae page there is a link to this non-existant page. Or should information on larvae be added and the link come back to this page instead? (ApostleJoe (talk) 13:32, 4 January 2008 (UTC))

There is nothing unusual or different about bee larvae, and no reason to create a separate page; the non-existent link was to a word not used in English, and has been corrected. Bee larvae are called either "grubs" or "larvae" in English, as are ant larvae, wasp larvae, and beetle larvae. Dyanega (talk) 21:28, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Oh, alright. I don't know anything about bees, which is why I checked. Thanks for responding! :) (ApostleJoe (talk) 23:25, 4 January 2008 (UTC))

Pictures

These are some amazing photos. I'd like to congratulate all the people who worked on making this such a vivid article. Especially on a HiDef monitor :). Phillip Shaw (talk) 05:59, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Vandalisim

Can you protect this page please?

Or my enemies will continue to vandalise. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.1.104.29 (talk) 13:38, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

"Your enemies"? There doesn't seem to be too much vandalism going on at the moment, from the page history. --McGeddon (talk) 14:07, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Taxobox

Is there any way to list the superfamily Apoidea above the Anthophila in the bee taxobox? Presently, I think the listing implies that Apoidea is included within Anthophila and is as such misleading. I tried playing around with "unranked_something" parameter, but nothing else than unranked_superfamilia works. --Yerpo (talk) 08:13, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Sections

Needs a "lifecycle" section — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.172.244.110 (talk • contribs)

I'm not sure how you would do that since the lifecycle of different kinds of bees are often so radically different. If you're thinking just of the honeybee, you might want this or even this. It depends on which species you are considering. Rossami (talk) 21:40, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Honey bee decline

The honey bee decline seems to me a massive enough problem with such significant consequences for agriculture (and thus human existence) that it deserves mention here, though this page is about bees generally. Do people agree? I have added the Bee#Pollination#Depopulation section; I encourage others to help with this.

The danger of extinction in the USA and Europe seems significant and I have added this back in specifying that the problem is severe in those two areas. Hgilbert (talk) 10:39, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

No. That problem is unique to the honeybee and even more specifically, to the Western honey bee, only one of the roughly 20,000 species that are covered in this article. You also have your facts wrong. While there has been a reported decline in some commercial beekeepers' operations, there is nothing in the scientific literature to suggest that there is any realistic danger of extinction of even the one species, much less of all of them. Rossami (talk) 13:31, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Not only domesticated bees: wild bees are also in severe decline. World-wide extinction is unlikely but I have provided two citations expressing the level of concern about the USA and Britain. These are from notable newspapers that should be acceptable as sources, especially as there is certainly nothing in the scientific literature that contradicts the noted decline. Hgilbert (talk) 13:55, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

The general decline that you talk about is already better discussed in Pollinator decline where you will find that there are scientific studies which refute the inflammatory claims made by those newspapers. (They may be notable but they are not especially reliable on topics outside their area of expertise.) According to the actual literature, the dominant reasons for the decline are thought to be the introduction by man of foreign pests and diseases to populations without existing immunity, habitat loss and pesticide misuse (that is, spraying by individual farmers against label instructions, not the approved use via the seed coatings). Toxic side-effects of approved chemicals used in accordance with the label instructions has not been substantiated as more than mere speculation in any study to date. If you want an authoritative and very up-to-date discussion of the specifics around those two pesticides, I suggest you look up some of the recent postings of Dr James Fischer on BEE-L. Rossami (talk) 15:26, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate your efforts towards accuracy and avoiding an inflammatory tone. Note that one newspaper report cites a Minister of Agriculture, the other a Professor at the Universität Würzburg specializing in bee research: both of these are quoted referring to the danger that the bee will be extirpated. Both gentlemen cited are well within their areas of expertise. Hgilbert (talk) 17:30, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

What sources have demonstrated that wild bees (other than feral exotic Apis mellifera and bumblebees) are in "severe decline"? I see no quotes from any Ministers of Agriculture in the articles you cite, and the actual comment from the professor in Würzburg was "It is not a sudden problem, I has been happening for a few years now. Five years ago in Germany there were a million hives, now there are less than 800,000. If that continues there will eventually be no bees." - and all that is referring to is managed honey bees, not WILD honey bees, nor any other bee species (note that even if the rate is constant, we still have at least 20 more years to go). I note also that you have suddenly switched from using the word "extinct" to using the word "extirpated" - they are very different terms. The decline of feral exotic Apis populations is - in the New World, an ecologically beneficial thing, as it should reduce the pressure on native pollinators (the concern people have is not ecological, it is over the impact on agriculture, which is a different matter entirely). In the Old World, I'm not aware of documented declines outside of managed beekeeping operations (i.e., decline of wild Old World Apis). Can you cite any sources showing this? The decline of bumblebees, on the other hand, is a real phenomenon and a legitimate concern, but much of it (if not all) appears to be traceable to the commercial movement of diseased bumblebees from one continent to another, transmitting those diseases to wild populations when the bees are released - it evidently has nothing to do with GMO's, pesticides, or cell phones. Aside from those two phenomena, there are no "severe declines" that I'm aware of - and given that I'm a world authority on "wild bees", if anything else were happening, I honestly expect I would have heard about it by now from one of my colleagues. Has it never occurred to you that none of the people making these dire statements in front of the press are actual bee biologists? Dyanega (talk) 17:38, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Bees

Wow the testmaster learned alot about bees by reading this article. I am very allergic to bees so this topic of bees is important to me. I had a bees nest in my car and got stung so i'm surprised to learn that bees are non aggressive in most times. I am still very afraid of bees though. But good work, the testmaster highly likes this article Testmasterflex (talk) 04:04, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

BEE FLIGHT. I'm new here so I don't know how to post a new discussion topic. And I can't edit this article. What I would like to add (below the 1930's calculations) is:

In fact the equations used to calculate if bees can fly only proof that bees can't hang glide. Bee wings work more like the propeller on a helicopter. And it's no surprise that using equations to calculate if something can hang glide and applying that to a helicopter shows that the helicopter-like object will fail to fly. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Aru05001 (talk • contribs) 00:56, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Douglas Altshuler, a researcher at California Institute of Technology is supposed to have figured out how bees fly. http://www.livescience.com/animals/060110_bee_fight.html

If anyone can refer people to his report submitted to a peer-review science journal and published, that should be most useful to readers keenly interested in genuine documentation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pachomius2000 (talk • contribs) 02:36, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Bees and humans and the soda can image

Bees in soda can image

Rossami said: " removing the image of a soda can. That image does not really illustrate the main topic of this section."

I feel it does; soda cans are synthetic products and the image illustrates that bees interact with the human world via its output. WhisperToMe (talk) 02:19, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

As currently worded, I believe that section focuses more on the mythological and social connections or analogies between bee and human behavior. Certainly, that's the thrust of the first two paragraphs. The picture, on the other hand, brings to my mind only the connotation of fear of being stung. While true that many humans do fear being stung, that's only a very small part of the section.
It's also remarkably rare. Honey bees will forage almost anywhere before they will start in on processed soda. There needs to be a near-complete nectar drought. Honey bees much prefer floral sources if any are available. Yellowjackets, on the other hand, are very commonly seen foraging around soda cans in the fall. The connection to the main thesis of the section seems too tenuous to me. Rossami (talk) 15:15, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

The fear of being stung isn't the intention - the intention is to show that bees interact with the "human" environment (such as the soda cans) - Is there a reliable source that states that it is rare for a honey bee to soda cans? I read this from a California fire department http://www.ci.manteca.ca.us/fire/bees.html and it actively instructs people to remove old soda cans as Africanized honey bees may nest in them. These links (from reliable sources) also say the same thing [1] [2] - Even though I doubt the bees pictured in this photo are Africanized, the fact that honeybees interact with soda cans should be more than enough of a rationale. WhisperToMe (talk) 16:52, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

First, please toss those references out. Most of their facts are right but some are way off. Both European and Africanized honeybees need a minimum cavity size before they will establish a colony. Seeley is the most reliable source I know [3] and while he only measured European colonies, the lowest observed cavity size was 12 liters. Subsequent studies, including those assessing Africanized colonies, have validated his observed ranges. Africanized honeybees are a bit more tolerant of different cavity types (including a greater tolerance for ground cavities) but you're not going to see a jump from 12 liters to 12 ounces. There simply isn't room in that small a cavity. Biologically, it can't work.
The wording on those different sites are close enough that I strongly suspect that they all copied from the same wrong source.
Note: Yellow jackets and certain other wasp species will happily nest in cavities of that size but I don't believe they'd ever nest in that material. The painted metal and lack of ventilation would make it inhospitable in the summer. As I said above, though, you will definitely see yellow jackets foraging in soda cans in the fall.
To your question about forage preferences, my source is a lecture by K Flottum (Editor of BeeCulture magazine and one of the preeminent US lecturers on honeybees). Unfortunately, I don't have a good written source for that information. Rossami (talk) 21:26, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Bees nesting in soda cans?? All I can say is OMG! - is that ever a case of ridiculous misinformation! Someone in the California fire department really, really has no idea what they're talking about. Furthermore (and yes, there is a "furthermore") even if we could agree that there is some use in talking about how honey bees will exploit artificial food sources provided by humans, such as soda cans and hummingbird feeders, that information would NOT belong in this article. It would belong in the European honey bee article, and nowhere else, since it applies to only this ONE species. Dyanega (talk) 23:25, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Dyanega, Rossami said that yellowjackets also exploit artificial food sources such as soda cans, so this behavior would be practiced by more than one species of bee, correct? If this was something only the European honey bee did, then I could understand excluding it. WhisperToMe (talk) 00:22, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Ummm...yellowjackets are only distantly related to bees - I doubt you'd use an example of how dogs behave to illustrate a point in an article about cats. So no, that's not correct. There are over 20,000 species of bees which act nothing at all like honey bees, so it's best to keep as much information as possible about the European honey bee in its own article where it belongs. Dyanega (talk) 00:02, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Gallery

I'm pretty sure the gallery should be removed, the link to the Commons is an adequate resource for images. Cheers, Jack (talk) 23:27, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Pollination

In the Pollination section, seems like the last paragraph should start "The pollination value..." rather than "The population value..." -- very small edit. Agapostemon (talk) 00:05, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Bee species

Not sure whether the (latin) equivalents of following groups were already mentioned in article: 1. Stingless Bees 2. Yellow & Black Carpenter Bees 3. Green Carpenter Bees 4. Reed Bees 5. Blue Banded Bees 6. Teddy Bear Bees 7. Leafcutter Bees 8. Resin Bees 9. Homalictus Bees 10. Masked Bees —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.245.81.115 (talk) 13:24, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

I would like to identify the species of bee that moved into an abandoned mole hole in my back yard. How would I go about doing that? These are long and skinny bees. Although this kind of bee produces an awful bee sting (since I got stung yesterday), it doesn't seem to be as potent a sting as other bees (my bee sting is almost gone the next day). Rather than me attempting to shoot a picture of the bee, maybe someone else could post a whole bunch of authoritative pictures here. The bee I am curious about, is long and skinny, as opposed to the roundish honey bee. If the color of its body is useful, it has the same kind of color as a European honeybee.

Is there any formal way of figuring out the species of a bee, short of an expensive DNA test? 216.99.198.8 (talk) 20:21, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Interwiki

Please someone put the interwiki [[eu:Erle]], thanks. 200.81.121.30 (talk) 16:47, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Grammar

This protected article has quite a few grammatical mistakes in it. Perhaps the author should go over it more thoroughly and correct those. Take the closing sentence, for instance:

"In Indonesia bee larvae are eaten as accompanion to rice, after mixed with shredded coconut "meat", wrapped in banana leaves, and steamed."

There is no such word as "accompanion" in the English language: a simpler, more grammatically correct clause would read: "bee larvae are eaten with rice dishes" or even simply "with rice".

Also, "after mixed with shredded coconut meat" should be either "after being mixed with coconut meat" or "after they are mixed with coconut meat..." There's obviously an ellipse in the original, and the word "meat" after coconut should not have quotes around it for any reason. The flesh of the coconut is simply called its meat; there's nothing unique or peculiar about that.

These are just examples from one sentence. In other words the article probably ought to be flagged for clean-up.

domain change

please change site sankey.ws to www.johnsankey.ca

filenames remain the same under the new domain John Sankey —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.119.243.113 (talk) 13:59, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

BEE COMMUNICATION, KARL von FRISCH

ABOUT 1945 AN AUSTRIAN ENTOMOLOGIST(SP?)NAMED KARL von FRISCH STUDIED BEE COMMUNICATION. HE SHOWED BEES COMMINICATE BY A "WIGGLE" DANCE TO SHOW DISTANCE TO A SOURCE OF POLLEN, AND A POLARIZATION EFFECT TO COMMUNICATE DIRECTION WITH RESPECT TO SUN. UV LIGHT ALSO INVOLVED. THIS WAS HISTORIC, GROUND-BREAKING RESEARCH INTO INSECT SCIENCE. I SUGGEST THESE TOPICS SHOULD BE TO THE BEE SECTION OF THIS VERY GOOD ARTICLE. SmJOE (talk) 07:49, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Honey bees in science fiction literature

There are probably some pretty good reasons for not taking bee hives into outer space, but be that as it may, I would like to read about honey bees in science fiction. The main article would have been a lot more helpful if it had had a link to an article about honey bees in science fiction literature. Surely there are a lot of science fiction authors who have dealt with the practical benefits of raising bee hives in outer space. Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 06:30, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

• Are there secondary sources that discuss this topic? Abductive (reasoning) 06:47, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

I was thinking of writing a science fiction story myself about domed habitats on the moon, and bee farmers raising honey as a product suitable for trade or export. (No, I would not cross the obvious line between science fiction and horror). It ought to be easy enough to have flowering plants from which the bees could collect nectar. But I am limited by my ignorance of bee raising in low gravity habitats. Like you, I can only speculate. Yes, I am somewhat familiar with the basic stuff, like bees navigating by the position of the sun in the sky, and how they ventilate their hives by beating their wings. I am not sure if bees can endure 14 days of night, or whether they can navigate by earthshine instead of (or in addition to) sunshine. But low gravity combined with low atmospheric pressure shouldn't be an obstacle to this sort of thing. Availability of flowers is probably the biggest obstacle (but I'd be glad to be corrected).

I was hoping that the issue of bees in science fiction literature would already have covered these things well in advance, so I could just come along later and read it at my own leisure and convenience. Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 22:46, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Interesting. It was tried; read about it by clicking here. Abductive (reasoning) 23:43, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

The book review in your link indicates that none of the queen bee's eggs hatched on returning from space? Did the queen bee live its entire life after returning? Now I am worried it is harder to raise bees in a low gravity environment than I first thought. Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 00:22, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Many embryos need a graviational cue to know which way is up (and therefore where to put the head). From what I have heard, insects don't need a gravitiational cue, so the failure to hatch could be related to something else. Perhaps the "bee enclosure module" didn't keep them warm enough, as can be read between the lines in the primary source here. The article has pictures, by the way. I'd say that the experimenters killed the developing young; they tried to transfer the comb upon return to Earth. Abductive (reasoning) 01:05, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

"Weasel Words"

So from what I gather, changing the wording in article to indicate that biologists have educated guesses about bee phylogenies and the like is unacceptable. Well, according to User:Fences_and_windows, that is. His/her own words:

"the hedging and weasel words add nothing to the article. If there's doubt over all this, present sources.."

So, not omitting any of the actual material in the article, but simply changing the iron-tight declarations of "an absolute phylogeny" to (what in reality is) "biologists think" or "it is thought that", etc - this is apparently hedging and weasel wording... I see.

Fair enough if you think it "adds nothing to the article" - indeed, nothing was taken out as far as content when I edited. Simply changed what I thought were a dogmatic set of statements to a bit more sober wording: "Evolutionary biologists *think*...", etc. (Yes, they think! They guess! They conclude! Terrible, isn't it?...)

Because that's really what one is left with when speaking about many (not all) of these proposals - they're educated guesses concerning phylogenies and past events that we aren't privy to - nor can we ever be - and as such aren't observable in the strictest operational scientific sense. Is that terrible? No; evolutionary biology has operated just fine under that premise for the past 150 years - even Darwin and Dawkins readily admit that much of what they purport is unobservable to modern day scientists, and the field has survived and flourished nevertheless. To say that the conclusions in this article are derived from an evolutionary model is I think fine and reasonable; but to say otherwise is... well, not hedging, and not even weasel-wording... it'd be misleading.

"You should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist... I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen... The idea is to try to give *all* of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another." -Richard Feynman

In any case, I'm assuming (and maybe I'm wrong) that User:Fences_and_windows could care less, sources provided or not, since they rushed to reinclude those "iron tight" statements about "the absolute fact of". But as any student or practitioner of science knows - there are no truly "absolute facts" or dogma in science (at least there ought not to be if science is healthy); there are only tentative statements - based on real-time observations - that can either pass or fail the falsifiability criterion. Everything else is philosophy.

Kh123 —Preceding undated comment added 10:40, 30 December 2009 (UTC).

• Your comments are pretty much philosophical, and not of much import to what actually happens (and what HAS to happen) when scientists communicate to laymen. Taken at face value, you are claiming that nothing is knowable, nothing is fact, everything is relative and/or hypothetical. But realistically there is no point in pretending that scientists are in doubt about basic facts, be they evolution or gravity, simply because there is always a chance (sometimes infinitely small) for falsification; NPOV and other Wikipedia policies make it clear that if the recognized authorities on a subject all agree on something, that editing articles to make it appear otherwise is inappropriate. Here's a test you can try: go to all of the other articles dealing with science in Wikipedia, and just try to edit them all so that every time something is presented as an undisputed fact, you insert the words "Scientists believe that..." (e.g., "Scientists believe that the earth orbits the sun") - and see how many times people object to your edits and revert them. That bees evolved from sphecoid wasps is, for example, just as undisputed a fact as the orbit of the earth around the sun (not a single authority claims anything to the contrary in either case), so if the latter is treated here as fact, without weasel words, then the former MUST be, as well. If it's only articles or statements dealing with evolution that you object to, then your arguments are not a matter of philosophy OR science, but theology, and that cannot be used as a basis for editing in Wikipedia at all. Dyanega (talk) 23:12, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

To be fair and democratic, I do want to point out that the evidence at present, and at best, might follow along the lines of what Gould used as examples in his phonebook tome to evolution ("Structure of Evolutionary Theory") - the underlying architecture of genetics - namely Hox genes - and how this seems to show how, for instance, segments may be repeated or omitted through mutation. And I'm sure this can be plugged into the bee evolution scenario (much like how it was sold in Drosophila scenarios) showing how leg segments or antennae can be swapped, duplicated, Frankensteined, etc.

And this at best shows that previous complexity in a proposed (believed in) ancestral line may have led to further descendant line with additional (and previously existent) appendages, only rearranged. I can even buy this for certain limited phylogenies, even with what's proposed here - from Wasp A, for instance, into Wasp B; from Bee A into Bee.... you get the idea. Some of this can be observed today in modern day breeding populations well beyond bees: Natural selection, mutation, and even a bit of Hox gene malfunction affecting morphology.

But even discussing the idea of "rearranging", "coopting", etc, only underlies the whole point in the post above: The previous complexity required to go from putative Point A to Point B in an evolutionary scenario.

The problem arises when you have to actually quantify specific complex features that weren't existent in previous proposed ancestor, as well as quantifying (rather than imagining through proposed phylogenies) how that feature came to be.

Entomologists can have a field day in detailing the features of their favorite Pokemo... I mean, species of choice. Impressive would be if they could quantitatively demonstrate and repeat in real-time just how exactly the actual feature in question arose from putative and ultimately de-novo states. (For at some point, the features that characterize even a generalized organism are complex, especially at the biochemical level, and require an origin all of their own...)

The latter assertion is critical, since this is the claim to fame that the Grand Unifying Hypothesis of Materialistic Darwinism has burdened itself with - that time, chance, and mechanism can literally engineer something (a complex something) from the Urslime of nothing.

And thus, it is the great hurdle which the hypothesis needs to ultimately overcome - as opposed to avoiding continually...kh123

"Your comments are pretty much philosophical, and not of much import to what actually happens (and what HAS to happen) when scientists communicate to laymen."

Ah, the eminence of high priest scientism. Just a suggestion, do find the spacebar key - paragraphing goes a long way when writing your contribution to the annals of apologia for materialism.

"Here's a test you can try: go to all of the other articles dealing with science..."

You mean those areas of operational science that deal with testable, repeatable, measurable phenomena, rather than "Hypothetically - and through tax funding - we believe that all life arose from Urslime over unobserved millions of years"? Dually noted...

"...and just try to edit them all so that every time something is presented as an undisputed fact, you insert the words "Scientists believe that..." (e.g., "Scientists believe that the earth orbits the sun") - and see how many times people object to your edits and revert them."

True enough, people have problems - emotionally most times - when their belief system is questioned. Or when it is, in fact, shown to be a belief system. Thus, censorship and the blessed method of Mr. Hugo Chavez towards any potential questioning of tax funded Onestate policy.

I supposed by the generous and unhedged yardstick you've provided, alchemists will be indignant when I point out to them (via democratic and uncensored Wikipedia) that the laws of known operational chemistry (much like the known operational laws of biochemistry) prevent the possibility of lead turning into gold (or, following this analogy, Dawkins' scenario of fish turning into philosophers - given enough time, chance, and conveniently unobservable millions of years, of course. If we're being strictly scientific on this front)...

"That bees evolved from sphecoid wasps is, for example, just as undisputed a fact as the orbit of the earth around the sun..."

Did I call the high priest critique or what? Wow... as undisputed as the orbiting of the earth around the sun... I don't even think most level headed evolutionists would entertain as Quixotic a statement as that. At best, they would (again) state: "We hypothesize", "We conjecture", "We strongly believe that the evidence supports", etc. (See post above.)

Such being the case, I can't wait until you can replicate the bee evolution scenario - as you've brilliantly laid out here - in an observable, real-time lab setting.

Which... oh, well, of course neither you nor anyone else can do, since it's a completely unrepeatable and unobservable proposal (as Gould and Dawkins have tacitly admitted).

And nevermind the fact that even if you had your biological equivalent of lead turning into gold, it would only point out that it requires an intelligent and purposeful agent to affect any of the grandiose changes required in your scenario. [Did that answer the question for you below, Mr. Fences?]

Which of course brings up the question I raised earlier - you know, the one about how exactly the grand macro evolutionary scenario regarding bees (or any other complex organism) can be in any way falsifiable... and hence strictly scientific.

But hey, when it's "undisputed fact"! Who'd want to challenge that (or have to give it up) when faced with inconvenient questions. Or potentially observable truths (such as that complexity in biochemistry requires preexistent complexity; that complexity requires minimal function, etc. These are observable and - as far as operational science is concerned - govern the basis for genetic mechanisms, such as autocatalytic functions, or anything requiring upstream/downstream events, etc...)

But again, why bother with all that, huh? It makes me feel that much better knowing that the high priest cadre is there to protect the layman (and Wikipedia!) from bothersome contrarians. Or pesky evidence. kh123

• Do you have sources that put into doubt the evolutionary classification of bees? If you do that'd be useful. Without that, your general musings on the certainty of knowledge are unhelpful. I see now that you did the same to Evolution of sirenians a while back,[4] and you've approvingly quoted Behe in Evolution of the eye.[5] You wouldn't happen to be a believer in intelligent design, by any chance? Fences&Windows 23:22, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

...Well, if I was looking for non censorship and an insatiable thirst to find the truth - no matter what the cost to gov't grant status - I surely came to the right place!

Can't help but make the comparison: Is like the Central Committee asking if a critic is an advocate of capitalism - with much the same comedic result. Quite unbiased questioning by Mr. Hugo Chavez, seems.

And good to know you've been watching me, comrade! Again, Mr. Chavez isn't sleeping on his Wikipedia editing job. Kudos to socialism for taking the initiative on that front. Cheers. kh123

Bee classification and evolution

I participated in the bee course of 2009. The instructors clearly stated that the study by Danforth et al., placing the Melittidae at the base of the bee tree, is highly controversial. There is no consensus that the Melittidae (sensu lato) is the most plesiomorphic family. Some researchers still think the Colettidae is the most plesiomorphic. Currently there is no unanimously accepted phylogeny for the bee families. I think the article should be corrected accordingly. Gidip (talk) 18:33, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

OK, but have you got a source for that? Here is the latest work in Google Scholar. Fences&Windows 23:42, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

There is no written "source" for that. The traditional view has always been that Colettidae is basal. In 2006 one article (Danforth et al.) claimed that Melittidae is basal. Now some of the major bee scientists disagree with this conclusion. There are many such cases in taxonomy. You don't publish an article stating that you disagree. You only publish when you perform a new analysis. The best "written evidence" that can be is the fact that some major internet sites dealing with bee taxonomy (such as Dicover Life and Atlas Hymenoptera) still use the old scheme, with Melittidae sensu lato as a single family. Also look at Michez et al. 2009 from the references you have given - they too refer to Melittidae sensu lato as a single monophyletic family, disregarding Danforth et al. 2006 (although they do mention the other view in the text). So the last published phylogeny is not automatically accepted by the entire scientific community as consensus. That's the best written proof you'll get. Gidip (talk) 04:51, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

From Michez et al. 2009: "Recent molecular studies at the family level (Danforth et al., 2006a, b) have found evidence that melittids form a paraphyletic grade at the base of the bees (with Dasypodainae sister to all other bees). However, the basal nodes of this phylogeny were not well supported and statistical tests using the Bayes Factor did not show strong statistical support for the paraphyly of the family." Gidip (talk) 20:57, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Excellent source. Fences&Windows 01:39, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

I hope you're not cynical. It's definitely not excellent, but it's what we've got. Gidip (talk) 04:43, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

I asked for a source, you provided one, I congratulated you on doing so. Fences&Windows 22:17, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

"Advanced Communties"

"Bees may be solitary or may live in various types of communities. The most advanced of these are eusocial colonies"

The "most advanced"? I think it can be argued that the more castes within a society and the stronger the delineations within these castes, the less capable (and therefore less complex) the individual members of a community (and potentially the less capable the community itself is when stressed). Given this, my question is why Eusocial social organizations are considered the "most advanced"? This seems obviously POV, though it may be considered consensus by socially driven scientists. Is it consensus among the broader group of scientists (whether socially driven and socially interested, or not) that, in the context of bees, a Eusocial organization is the most advanced?

And given this comment in the article Eusocial: "According to inclusive fitness theory, eusociality may be easier for species like ants to evolve, due to their haplodiploidy, which facilitates the operation of kin selection. Sisters are more related to each other than to their offspring. This mechanism of sex determination gives rise to what W. D. Hamilton first termed "supersisters" who share 75 per cent of their genes on average.", Why would a social structure which is *easier* for an organism to evolve be considered more "advanced"?

Someone is conflating complex, complicated, some other ideas, and a value judgement to define "advanced community" here. Either that, or I'm really off-base. --99.96.103.225 (talk) 17:05, 6 February 2010 (UTC)