this noise is to mimic the 'piping' of young queen honeybees, as Acherontia spp. (deaths head hawkmoths) post up in honey bees colonies to take a smol sip-sip of honey and have to disguise themselves
it's objectively hilarious that the queen of the goth-moths squeaks like this
This is something many beekeepers still do, especially following the death of the bees' keeper. I have been present for more than 'telling of the bees' following a death.
A symbol of mourning was to βtell the beesβ about the loved oneβs passing. Someone from the house would have the chore of informing the bees kept on the property of the death and sometimes the hives were even draped with black to show their mourning.
My dream when I am finally a PI is to advertise for postdocs using witheringly plain language instead of the normalised false exceptionalism.
Not soon enough can I tweet 'looking for serviceable postdocs of modest talent and existent motivation levels'. It's what keeps me going.
3 months of demanding experimental bee work summed up in the very first analysis I did tonight!
lmaoooo I'm having a glass of wine. my collaborators are going to have a shit fit.
I know this is a ridiculous pet peeve to have and this is peak unreasonable entomologist... but
I cannot stand,
cannot abide,
cannot suffer,
people referring to 'mosquito stings'.
She bit you, ok? The bitch BIT you.
@Realkidcool97
@JBranscome72
@BillyArmagh
All workers female. Boys just semi-sentient flying sperm packets. Queen only mates at very start of life & stored sperm lasts whole life :)
Days in and I am still struggling to come to terms with the fact
@Pornhub
has an entire event and website supporting honeybee science.
Also, desperate to find out if I can apply for grant money from this bit so I can put 'pornhub' in future scientific publication acknowledgments.
A reminder of something I told myself in my PhD but works more generally:-
A day of doubt where you decide to continue is more evidence that you're on the right path than if you had never had that day of doubt at all.
Hello my name is Lewis and I like bees I am Dr. of bees now please listen to me talk about them they are cute and embattled.πππ
cc
@berkeleyIB
#Bees
#Beekeeping
#ECRChat
Being stung by bees was like a weekly occurrence for child-me and my mum once said 'If you dont want to be stung you need to stop catching them' - I looked her in the eye and just opened up a jar of live bees in the kitchen
Rare it is that your heroes only increase in greatness as their lives and careers are brought more fully to light.
The only person I have yet met in front of whom I struggled to speak due to overwhelming reverence and awe - feelings that were apparently not misplaced!
Let's all take a moment to appreciate that is was a cis-het, professional-account woman and NOT someone of gay science twitter who first caused a sci-twit scandal by posting hole pics to main.
I cannot abide the American infatuation with leafblowers, and frankly any other large/loud groundskeeping equipment. There is no fucking point having nice outside spaces if you're going to have screaming machinery polluting the place 24/7, let alone disrupting offices/homes.
@JasonSynaptic
@Barr_lab
@ValerieJHorsley
@ctmurphy1
@eLife
Y'all are absolutely tapped. Are you new here? Do you know twitter is supposed to be fun? That not everything is deathly serious? That we make jokes? Like normal humans do?
I beg y'all, think about how ECRs will perceive your field(s) for taking themselves quite this seriously.
As the WHO announces that we should prepare for a pandemic, a rare bit of political commentary from me, a disease biologist who moved from the UK to the USA.
Universal healthcare is the single greatest thing the US could do to improve its pandemic preparedness.
#MedicareForAll
Subtly hidden in this extremely real and bleak tweet is also the admission that it took a whole pandemic for them to finally ask postdocs 'how's life'?
Eight out of ten postdoctoral researchers say that the global coronavirus pandemic has hampered their ability to conduct experiments or collect data, according to Natureβs first-ever survey of postdocs.
Having to pay *hundreds* of dollars for some agency to tell me that my ~mysterious~ 'PhD' from a UK university is equivalent to a 'Ph.D.' from a U.S. university is testing my patience today.
Since I've been seeing this repeatedly pop up, and disputes about honey bees are a favourite of mine: a small thread.
*wildly* there is a LEGAL PRECEDENT that the aggrieved party here is owed honey from their neighbour, having seen the bees on their land.
Y'all bee shook.
paper accepted π₯² that's 6 down, 1(? maybe 2 we'll see if it gets split) remaining as far as PhD research chapters are concerned. For any grad students watching at home, I started that PhD in 2014 π
It surprises me how often scientists I interview will later ask to "approve" things. I get the scariness of ceding your words to a non-expert who can mess up or misrepresent you, but independence is the selling point of journalism. How is this not widely known?
β¨pro tipβ¨ for advancing your career with a PhD - just commit fraud! Just lie and say you had a title and rank above your actual positionπit's that easy babesπ€ͺ
Pro resume tip for grad students & post-docs: change your academic job titles.
I don't know about you, but I refuse to list "Postdoctoral Trainee" as my job title.
I was not a trainee. I was a "Research Scientist."
ya girl's first (moderately sized) competitive (& solo!) grant submission as faculty came back with the little 'congratulations' email opener π₯²
beer time
Please reply or like to say if you think
@Pornhub
should invite me to give a seminar / short course on current honeybee science!! I have no qualms about adding Pornhub HQ to the invited lecture part of my CV
I can see we're on the 'what time of day is it ok to send emails' discourse again and honestly y'all need to grow up. Let folk send emails whenever. Stop policing when other people work. Remember time zones and parenting are both things. I can't believe we're on this again.
Every single ecologist / conservation biologist should be absolutely disgusted with the ongoing colonial, white supremist attacks on Mi'kmaq assets and leadership in Canada; under some bullshit guise of 'agroecological / conservation concern'.
Every day is
#LGBTQSTEMDay
π³οΈβπππ¬ in my world but if we get to talk about it yes hello everyone I am Lewis I do bee science and infectious disease biology and evolutionary biology & ecology. Gay & queer as all hell from the field to the lab to the lecture stage to the drag stage.
Hello twitter - it's the anniversary of my birth so please send pictures of bees, suitable roasts, or moderately kind well wishes my way, depending on your mood and means.
I will not be disclosing my age as the inexorable march of time is a sensitive topic during isolation.
something especially disappointing about someone with "ecologist" in their bio complaining about harmless carpenter bees sharing their outdoor space, and then spraying to get rid of them
Any thoughts/ advice on how to take back my pergola/ summer dining room from Carpenter Bees π (I assume)
I didnβt mind one + one nest but now thereβs at least 1/2 dozen and 3 active nests
#GettingAggressive
In the space of twelve hours I have gone from Polly performing a bee-themed drag routine to Abba's 'Honey Honey' to driving through the snowy GA mountains to lecture new beekeepers on bee diseases and pest management ππ
I honour St Valentine, patron saint of beekeepers and beekeeping, every day. I cure his bees. I train his keepers. And yet ONCE AGAIN I am SINGLE and ALONE on this DAMNED day.
How many more hours of my life upon your alter, big St. V., before you pay your debts to me?? bitch.
A preview* of tonight's community service activities. All in a days work as a bee biologist, extension researcher, and drag queen x
*I shall be scouring the press for better shots during, prior, and post parade
Scrolling down my twitter feed daydreaming about makeup and thinking this was a new eye-shadow range
nah boy just the Wyoming soil scientists at it again
Who knew thereβd be such diversity in soil color and texture across just one town in Wyoming? Brought in by Intro Soils students from their own yards. Prep for P-XRF!
#soildiversity
I give it maximum one (1) more week of this before I snap and organise a broadcast event where I get mildly drunk, do drag makeup on camera, and shit talk every other annoying gay-science-twitter-gobshite on here.
"How many more boys do we need to kill & harvest to have enough semen?"
Something I said not two months ago.
#SerialKillerOrScientist
[Context: honeybee artificial insemination experiment] πππ
The number of people tagging me in
@SirPatStew
's announcement that he's finally a beekeeper is the best testament to how well curated my brand is π.
(and congrats Captain! If you want to get involved in beekeeping research & honeybee science, hit me up)
ππ―π
Robin (
@CanopyRobin
) is on
@realscientists
doing a
#LGBTQScience
celebration so - here I am. Evolutionary ecologist, Dr. of Bees and Diseases, makeup enthusiast, amateur drag queen, gay and queer as all hell.
some of y'all 'StOp thE WIldLIFe trADE iTs a ZOonoTIc rIsK' types want to maybe say something about this sort of shit? or y'all going to stay silent because it's a white man in the global north?
Me, overcaffeinated and sat in Starbucks reading through my submitted thesis and finding approximately 2,147 mistakes -
'I wonder how everyone here would react if I just balls-to-the-wall SCREAMED'
Louder for the people in the back!!
Traditionallyπ feminineπ interestsπ dontπ diminish πyourπ abilityπ orπ potentialπ asπ aπ scientist
I will never forget when I was explaining to a member of the public that the first bumbles always seem massive because they're all queens and *are* huge and she (middle aged, at the train station) went "Aye well I saw one t'other day and it was like a creme egg with wings" π
I DO NOT feel old enough to be finding amazing postdoc fellowships to apply for this year only to find out I got my PhD too! long! ago! to! apply!
y'all need to settle down like ????? I haven't even had the title 18 fucking months π I am TWENTY EIGHT and y'all like 'nah sorry'
Me and drag mum are hungoverly bingewatching all three extended LOTR films today so expect me to tweet takes over the next 12 hours.
fuck I love these films
These are all City of Manchester honeybee symbol tattoos and many will have been done after the terrorist attacks there so kindly, shut up. Bees are a symbol of Manchester's industrious history.
This kind of ignorant, pompous scientific pedantry drives me absolutely fucking mad.
If the introvert majority of academic science uses this pandemic as an excuse to normalise holding conferences online *instead of* in person I am leaving science. Guaranteed. Bitch I'm -gone-.
landing a faculty job means I finally get to ship things over to the US from storage back home. Opening up boxes of stuff that I haven't seen since I was 23 years old π₯² two down, ten more to ship and arrive.
I might be crying a tiny bit at the sense of completeness.
Hope you all like layered queer subversion of fascist iconography because it's
#LGBTWrathMonth
, we're fighting rising nazism, and your boy has a history of impulsive decisions
@Meng2Fu
@eLife
"Would it be acceptable to post βF*** [any country]β?"
Yes, next question.
"βF*** [any race/demographic]β?"
No, but that's not REMOTELY close to what happened here, is it?
So my reputation and presence in many facebook beekeeping groups [you can imagine] as their go-to infectious disease & epidemiology person is really useful in combating misinformation right now. Little bit of personalised trust goes a long way.
Extension work matters, folks.πβ£οΈ
Bitch I care. Someone just graduating? First in their family? Under-represented? Sense of accomplishment at attaining something they doubted they could do? Someone told them that it wasn't for their sort of person yet they did that anyway?
Shout out. I care. I'm happy for you.
Nobody on here cares that you graduated with a 2:1 in mathematics statistics biomedical science chemical psychology engineering. We really dont. Tell your mum.
fondly remembering when my PhD department formed an official interdisciplinary club of evolutionary biologists, behavioural ecologists, biological anthropologists and archaeologists for the express purpose of meeting once a month to mourn and mock the evo psych field & lit.
arrogant man sees a highly skilled woman doing something online and assumes it must be easy if she can do it and he can do the same no problem. Fucks around, finds out
Chris Pratt reveals he suffered from a painful bee sting on his left eye after attempting to βcontrol beesβ when seeing a beehive.
After viewing a popular TikTok beekeeperβs video, it βbuilt up this false sense of security in me. I think I can control bees too.β
ban sending work emails with the subject line 'Happy Hour' only to reveal it's actually just another Zoom meeting, except ~in the evening~. genuinely enraged. it's nae a fucking 'happy hour' is it, it's just a zoom work meeting outside of reasonable working hours????
I have an extremely long history of receiving editorial decisions while flying into San Francisco and today for the first time it was an acceptance π and also my first sole-author paper! An invited review!! Hire me
Students in an online class were told they had one of these 2 TAs. But behind the scenes,
@EmilyKhazan
, left, fulfilled TA duties for all 136 students. When student evaluations came in, though, guess which TA scored higher?
#WomeninScience
#womeninstem
We will be marching in
@PrideInLondon
tomorrow and our banner has just arrived! Weβre so excited itβs unreal β€οΈπ§‘ππππ
#LGBTSTEMday
Ok so I've just found out Screech Owls keep blindsnakes in their homes for the exact same reason we started keeping cats in ours.
Owls with pet snakes is today's favourite nature idea.
We're very much laughing about my housemate (Native American) and me (English) sitting down to have Thanksgiving dinner together lmao. 17th Century who?
As an NIH funded postdoc, if I found out my PI was paying another postdoc 1.5x my salary despite being at the same level in the same lab, purely because they had a family and I did not, I would be absolutely livid.
For my junior faculty friends: if a postdoc candidate came to you and said βIβd love to join your lab but you need to pay me 1.5x NIH minimum so I can afford a familyβ would you say:
my first paper, which was also my first first-author paper, apparently became my first to reach 100 citations today.
a small thing! but right now, I need any confidence boost I can get.
... although, the temptation to switch back to anthropocene extinction ecology only grows.
seeing tweets from people working on PhDs about how they should get the same breaks off as undergrads and how labs should be closed during that time and ????? absolutely tf not. what will it take for US-based postgraduate researchers to be treated like they are working a job?
occasionally I am reminded how totally unhinged US academia is when I get emails that say things like 'postdoc appreciation event: 8am-9am!'
...
do you know what I would appreciate? Some basic respect for when /reasonable work hours are/.
don't make me quote Dolly @ y'all
A preview* of tonight's community service activities. All in a days work as a bee biologist, extension researcher, and drag queen x
*I shall be scouring the press for better shots during, prior, and post parade