The More You Know!

From the beginning, my goal for this blog was to entertain AND inform. Why not occasionally dedicate an entry to a fascinating new fact I've stumbled across? It's a brilliant idea. For over 35 years, I've compiled a list of evidence to support the argument that I'm a genius, and this idea gets me to seven. I believe the genius designation is merited once the list reaches 100. 

But I digress. 

When I checked the levels of our hummingbird feeders this morning, I discovered a large-ish mound of honeybees swarming the base of one of them. The clever bastards had figured out how to remove one of the flower-shaped feeding stems to get at the sugar water. Naturally, I consulted the World Wide Internet to find out what I could do about the problem.* In the process, I uncovered this fun fact:

A large mound of bees swarming outside the entrance to a hive is known as a beard of bees. I was well aware of the term beard of bees. Still, until I read this, I assumed it referred only to the act of attracting thousands of honeybees to one's face to emulate a beard (many of my generation likely learned about this from a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records ordered from the Scholastic Book Club in elementary school).

In case you're wondering, the former definition far pre-dates the latter.

Golly, what a world! Learning is a life-long process. 

* As it turns out, not a whole hell of a lot.