/sci/ - Science & Math

they do it in nests/hives?

insert penis into vagina

some form of insemination, some toads dribble semen down a crease which enters the vagina, some lizards deposit blobs of semen encased in mucus which females pick up

I've heard ducks have a 42cm long schlong.

Bees have a queen. Basically there are worker bees who do all the work (cleaning the hive, feeding the larvae). The male bees mate with the queen and die from snoo snoo. The queen shits out thousands of larvae daily.

>>3229335
mechanics man.

do they face each other? away? where is the bird schlong? how long is it?

Birds? The male mounts the female from behind, leaning a bit to the side to get clear of her tail feathers. It's over in maybe two seconds.

You can't really see anything, and in fact it's very difficult to determine the gender of birds by their genitalia. Normally you tell males and females apart by looking at other dimorphic qualities instead.

>>3229376
Google "explosive duck penis".

>>3229445
oh god, why did I do this
I don't want to see a duck ever again

>>3229306
Birds do it super super fast (like in a split second). Have to catch them in the act during mating season.

Three types of bees (Queen, Drone, Worker).

Workers are sterile females that do all the work. Drones fly out of hive and fuck Queens from other hives, really high in mid-air. Its hard to spot two black specs very high up in the air. The Drone dies immediately after mating. If the Drone does not mate before winter, he is shoved out of the nest to die from exposure. The Queen leaves the hive when she is young and fucks a drone and returns to the Hive and never leaves because she has a life time supply of sperm inside a sac which is located inside of her body.

She has an organ that controls whether or not she laws sterile or fertilized eggs.

There you go.

>>3229523
>She has an organ that controls whether or not she laws sterile or fertilized eggs.

that's awesome

can anybody explain how the bees differentiate drone from worker? how do they know who to shove out? anybody who's not working? do retarded bees get removed at the same time? the drones do no "worker" work?

>>3229544

Pheromones.

They're also slightly dissimilar physically, but the bees don't rely on sight.

>>3229306

My body is ready.wmv

>>3229581

>>3229581

uh doggy style
they lift like that back part up
flutter around for like 10 seconds

Okay, I'm a hobbyist beekeeper and I know these things. My apologies in advance for the TL;DR.
>>3229544
Honeybees use a haplodiploid sex-determination system; that is, females are diploid (two of each chromosome) and males are haploid (one of each chromosome). Phenotypic gender is a function of gene dosage, not the presence or absence of a certain gene (as in mammals).
The queen, while laying, can choose whether or not an egg is fertilized (becoming diploid, and thus female) or not (remaining haploid, and thus male) by contracting or relaxing a muscle that opens the mouth of the spermatheca, allowing stored sperm to swim into the oviduct and fertilize the egg. The queen decides whether to lay a female egg or a male egg by examining the cell she is laying the egg in; since drones are somewhat larger than workers, bees build some cells slightly larger than others to accommodate them, and it is in these larger cells that the queen lays unfertilized eggs.
Drones have rather different anatomy than workers, lacking the brood food glands necessary to work as nurse bees, the wax glands necessary to build up the hive, the pollen baskets necessary to forage, and the stinger (actually a highly-modified egg-laying organ) necessary to protect the hive. Drones cannot serve any function beyond mating with a new queen.

>>3229656, contindruid
(It is worth mentioning that all female bees have the potential to become queens or workers. All larvae are fed royal jelly for the first three days of their existence before being switched to a lesser sort of brood food. Female larvae destined to become queens, however, are fed royal jelly throughout their entire childhood, and the protein-rich food [containing a protein called royalactin that induces development into a queen] allows them to grow to a larger size and better-developed form [particularly with regard to their reproductive system] than their lesser sisters. Worker bees, however, can act as queens under certain circumstances. A queen produces a pheromone that keeps the workers' genitalia from developing, but in her absence, one or more workers may begin laying eggs, producing some queen pheromones, and collecting flocks of attendants who believe they are a queen. However, workers differ from queens in that they lack spermathecae, and hence cannot lay fertilized eggs, causing a hive infested with laying workers to quickly become filled with drones before dying off.)
>>3229523
A new queen typically mates with ten or so drones in quick succession during her mating flight. One thing I bet you didn't know is that her lady bits sever the drone's dude bits as part of copulation.
>>3229548
Drones also have a very distinctive begging behavior, so I'm told. They try to mooch off the workers in a way that other workers just don't do.

>>3229445

Jesus fucking christ

I've seen shit in my days, but not that shit

>>3229581

WHAT.

Was the whole thing the duck shlong, or is that just the sperm?

WHAT THE FUCK /SCI/.

>>3229445

>>3229656
>>3229658
this is awesome. thanks for the thorough reply.

the only thing i'm left wondering is, do birth defects ever happen? and like what?

>>3229672
there so much weird about this

>>3229699
Glad you enjoyed reading my answer. Birth defects are fairly common among bees; they go for a quantity over quality approach after all. (At her peak in May, the queen is laying one or two thousand eggs per day.) A feeble queen may have offspring that are malformed because her body cannot properly produce eggs, but the most common cause of birth defects among bees would be parasitic infection.
There are some bee diseases that kill the larvae outright (such bacteria as foulbrood and viruses as chalkbrood and sacbrood), but more common pests are things like the Varroa mite, which sucks hemolymph ("blood") from larvae and from adult bees, stunting their growth and weakening them unduly to the point of shortening their lifespan. Affected bees commonly have small, misshapen abdomens (the vital organs of insects are mostly in the abdomen), but I've seen interference with the wings as well. Tracheal mites can also cause deformation; they are similar in modus operandi to Varroa mites, but are much smaller and suck blood from within the tracheae (airways) of adult bees, rather than sitting on the exteriors of larvae and adults as do Varroa. A fungal protozoan known as nosema infests adult bees as well, causing intestinal problems and interfering with muscle control. (However, since tracheal mites and nosema disease affect adult bees rather than larvae, they do not cause birth defects per se, but rather developmental defects.)

>>3229445
already seen. not that special

>>3229747
wow thanks. great posts.

>>3229767
No problem. As long as I'm here, does anyone else want to know any particular stuff about bees?

>birds
For species with no penis, they rub cloaca's together until some semen gets passed over

>>3229773
Are there any particular plant species facing extinction from honeybee colony collapse? Or will other insects/bee species be able to pick up the slack"

Here's a funny thing about animal mating habits.
There was a kind of ancient shark called Falcatus falcatus that lived during the Devonian and Carboniferous periods. It's sometimes known as the Unicorn Shark due to the large horn-like structure that the male had just behind the head (actually a heavily modified fin).
Now, there's a hilarious reconstruction of the female biting the male's "horn" as part of a mating ritual, but it's just a cool drawing someone made to explain why only the male had the horn, right?

>>3229785
...but that drawing was actually made from this fossil. THEY FOUND THESE SHARKS DOING THAT. (Whether or not they were getting ready to bone is a matter of some confusion.)

>>3229306
Behold, birds having sex.

>>3229789
>incoming meteor
Hey babe, you don't want to die a virgin, do you?

>>3229790
Behold, what some of them use to have that sex...

For a laugh, check this out:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWiqdlmsm4

>>3229790
Hawk sex almost looks as awkward as German sex in the missionary position

>>3229785
wow ancient sharks are pretty derp, huh?

>>3229445

>>3229782
Extinction? Not on this continent. (I'm an Amerifag, for context.)
See, honeybees are native to Eurasia, and so all the bee-pollinated American plants are handled by bumblebees or similar. (Most bumblebee-pollinated plants can't actually be visited by honeybees, since their tongues are somewhat shorter than bumblebees'.)
However, there are plenty of plant species that we brought over from Europe, and that ARE pollinated by honeybees. Citrus fruits, almonds, and alfalfa (an important source of cattle fodder), for example, are all pollinated by honeybees. They won't go extinct because of Colony Collapse Disorder in America, but they are economically important, and everyone will suffer if honeybees go down the tubes.
As long as I'm on this topic, I should mention a few things about CCD. Normally, when a hive dies, the dead bees are found in the hive, their bodies piled by the hundreds on the bottom board. However, colonies lost to CCD are nearly empty, indicating that the bees were not killed by some pathogen, but rather were rendered incapable of returning home. Some say it's caused by radio transmissions, but that's bullpucky; bees aren't terribly sensitive to RF radiation. Personally, I find the pesticide theory the most plausible; some pesticides used in the USA have been banned in France and other nations because they have been known to cause nervous system disruption in insects. A bee flies out, gets dosed with the pesticide, and can't find its way back home because its nervous system is so screwed up. So the bees slowly leak away from the hive, and those few that remain starve to death because nothing's bringing them nectar. This theory would certainly explain why environmentally-conscious states like Illinois have been relatively unscathed by CCD.

>>3229796
>german sex

>>3229791
>implying that all extinctions are caused by meteor impacts
>implying that catastrophic meteor impacts were somehow common back in the day
ALL OF MY HATRED

>>3229795
From the late Carboniferous, Helicoprion.

>>3229810
>pesticide
Interesting theory. I was under the impression that it was a rather sudden collapse, like all the bees deciding to abandon the nest within a single day. Then again, I only know what I hear from the now and again media scare pieces about it.
>Citrus fruits, almonds, and alfalfa
So significant decline in the production of these crops? Will other insects be able to make up for some of the loss from the lack of European Honeybees? Are there other species of domesticated bees which are immune to CCD?

>>3229827
>ALL OF MY HATRED
Hahaha wow.
It's a reference to the common trope of a young man trying to convince a girl to sleep with him because of impending doom. I thought it was funny that the species was caught in the middle of a mating ritual. I used a meteor because it's easily identifiable with the earlier trope and fits the fossil aspect.

Stop getting mad at everything you angry little man.

>>3229838
We're kind of screwed on those crops if we lose commercial beekeeping in this country. There's not really any other feasible way to pollinate them.
An entire colony will sometimes up and leave its hive to look for a new one. This is called absconding, and usually occurs when the hive is too small or otherwise undesirable. This is fairly rare. More common is swarming, in which the old queen and half the colony set off together to look for a new hive, leaving the other half of the colony to raise a new queen from a young larva. (This is how bee colonies make more bee colonies in the wild.) Neither of these are related to CCD, however.

>>3229851
If fossils and meteors fit together because they're both rocks, then mushrooms and your mother fit together because they are both eukaryotes.
I am a geology major, and I will get mad about this shit if I want to. Pic related.

>>3229857
Well, we could live without oranges I guess, but losing alfalfa would be bad.
Wish I could stay in this thread longer but I have to head to bed. Thanks for answering my questions!
>>3229870
The image for that post is a cartoon of a grinning chimpanzee saying "hot monkey dick" - clearly that's a sign that the accompanying text should be taken seriously and not in jest.

>This thread