Bees That Live on Human Tears

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/18/the-bees-that-live-on-human-tears/

42 7 7 years ago

Is the author suggesting that bees have been inhabiting tear ducts for thousands of years, or have they just scanned across thousands of death-related cultural artifacts in order to find a few that involved bees?

codycraven• 7 years ago

This article seems to really be stretching to hopefully hop on the hype train of a recent newsworthy event without any citations that are actually similar.

Tears turning to bees is far different than bees entering an eye socket and feeding on tears.

notfed• 7 years ago

"Once I began looking for tears linked with bees, I found them everywhere"

I suspect this to be a case of confirmation bias. Besides, bee stings hurt, which I would suspect is why there are so many hits.

gwern• 7 years ago

If you want to be further creeped out, check out the photos in https://www.gwern.net/docs/biology/2018-banziger.pdf

basetop• 7 years ago

It's interesting how 3 of the top articles are essentially stories I read on social media before.

This and "Was There a Civilization on Earth Before Humans?" and "Surprisingly little evidence for usual wisdom about teeth" are all stories I read on reddit or watched on youtube before.

It seems like traditional media and social media are "merging".

startedYearsAgo• 7 years ago

You aren't imagining things. Pseudonymous and anonymous channels have actually been lagging behind the large walled garden corporate social media platforms for about two years now. Maybe more.

It used to be that the unfiltered image boards were at the forefront of emerging trends and defining or producing cultural shifts.

What happened is that the sheer volume of the walled gardens has grown each year as older people who know better have aged out. The replacements from younger age brackets are all piling into corporate social platforms. Kids have developed tactics to deal with close quarter snooping from parents and immediate authority figures.

Large platforms now inflate as the volume of internet users drains out of participating with offbeat services.

Also Trump and the alt-right have had chilling effects of the reputation of using random websites and anonymous participation. It now feels very wrong to more people. Whereas previously it felt neither right nor wrong to lurk as a spectator and cheer or boo as desired.

This affects places like HN which will become stale as younger users gloss over the glory of koans about the AI lab that never really produced AI.

HN activity will decay even if money will keep HN alive as a startup investor corner. But the winds are blowing. Kids aren't leaving corporate platforms as predicted. They don't know how create competitors or whether that's possible.

RandomInteger4• 7 years ago

This reminds me of when I was like 10-12 years old or so and woke up to a bee biting around my tear duct. I thought it stung me. I remember I was dreaming about taking off my shirt for some reason and then feeling some sort of pain, which woke me up. Couldn't open my eye until they gave me antihistamines or something at the hospital where they told me it wasn't a sting, but it was a bite.

The source was from holes we had in the walls where the cable came in from outside (My dad isn't an expert, so he just drilled a hole in the wall). They ate through the caulk and got into my room. Guessing they were attracted to all the cologne I was spraying, because I was entering that phase of life and just sort of overusing it.

All that being said, I think they were yellow jackets rather than bees, so feel free to throw my story in the story basket.

Bees That Live on Human Tears

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