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Can you “build colonies” for native species?

Yes, though you need to know what sort of nesting sites they like, and what sources of food they need. Many native bees need certain plants to get the nutritional profile they are adapted for, and don’t do so well on nothing but dandelions and typical ornamental flowers. They also need food sources throughout their active time.

For mason and leaf cutter bees, a box sheltered from rain and filled with Japanese knotweed tubes (don’t grow it yourself, it’s highly invasive) works well for “I like seeing solitary bees around, but want minimum efforts”. There are tons of videos you can find on the subject.

Drilling various sized holes in wood blocks also often works. The nice thing about “solitary” bees (which are often quite communal), is they don’t have much of a drive to defend a nest, and would much rather fly away than bite/poke you. I’ve walked alfalfa fields full of them, and while the loud buzzing was a bit disconcerting, they couldn’t care less about me. Leafcutter bees are used for alfalfa because they don’t mind how alfalfa flowers work mechanically. European Honeybees will just chew through the base of the flower to get the nectar, avoiding pollination.

For other bees, there is highly likely to be a native bee enthusiast group in your local area that can give guidance on native flower mixes and possible setups for habitat.

Here in western Oregon, the hazelnut orchards on the sandy soil near rivers have actually become a great nesting place for multiple species of beautiful green metallic “sweat” bees: https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/gardenecologylab/2017/11/13/po...

They like the semi-compacted neutral to slightly alkaline sandy soil that’s clear of weeds, hence a long term orchard is perfect, especially as we’ve moved to softer insecticide chemistries that generally preserve beneficial insects. Offhand I think I start seeing them filling the ground with little holes in may when I start monitoring for Filbertworm moths.

And don’t forget bumblebees. While it’s a hated introduced weed for growers, it turns out that Sharppoint Fluvellen in the fescue grass fields is loved by bumblebees because it happily continues to flower in the late summer/fall when everything else has dried up or run it’s course.


> Japanese knotweed tubes (don’t grow it yourself, it’s highly invasive)

Last year I was lamenting to a neighbor that bamboo doesn't survive the harsh winters where we live. He disputed that.

"There's some growing down the road, next to the ditch," he said. "It comes back every year. It's everywhere."

I was wondering what the heck he was talking about and then I realized it was Japanese knotweed. The segmented branches do look like thin bamboo, and he claimed that at one time it was sold at the local garden center as "bamboo."


You just need to supply the native plants they prefer to pollinate, they’ll do the rest. If you’re wondering about whether you can harvest honey from them, I don’t think so. Most native pollinator species don’t produce honey.

Bumblebees do produce a kind of honey, but it’s much thinner and less concentrated than proper honey (which has had most of the water evaporated off by the wing beats of the bees).


A thousand years of effort might be able to "domesticate" the bumblebee and make it produce something akin to usable amounts of honey - but unlikely to be worth it.

Someone domesticated foxes in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox , so perhaps it's possible to domesticate bumblebee in a few decades - but unlikely to be worth it.

Bumblebees are being "domesticated" to some extent, for pollinating greenhouses, but they're used as labor animals rather than food.

Most of the native bees/wasps/flies that are important for pollination are solitary, but you can still help them with nesting areas.

Mason bees can be relatively easy: drill some small holes in a post and let it be. You can also get way more complicated with it.

https://colinpurrington.com/2019/05/guide-to-diy-mason-bee-h...

Bumblebee make nests for breeding, you can sometimes find nests in birdhouses or in gaps of buildings, but they apparently usually go for old mouse burrows. I've seen guides similar to the following, but covering a nest of dried grass with a clay pot, with a buried hose connecting the inside of the nest to the outside.

https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/20800500/BumbleBeeRear...

Planting native flowers and shrubs can also provide habitat for many insects.


Doesn’t Boxing use weight classes?

Weight classes within gender classes. Women would have no chance to compete against men of identical weight, all else equal. Men have more lean mass.

Sounds like lean mass would be the right way to structure divisions then.

Men are stronger, faster, have more dense bones, have bigger lungs, bigger hands, etc, etc, etc. Men and women are different in hundreds of ways it's not just 'lean body mass'. Men are better at sports than women. Do you even live in reality? Have you ever completed in anything in your life?

Then create those divisions. Please be rational.

For what conceivable reason would you want to recreate the male and female division using a dozen or more proxies for sex instead of just using sex, to wind up with people being placed into the same buckets they would have been if you just went by sex in the first place? This seems ideologically motivated.

The controversy in these comments answers that question nicely. It seems likely that such a change would obviate these edge cases, though they may introduce their own; that seems worthy of consideration.

Really, the question seems better turned around: why use a known bad proxy for physical ability when another one might be better?


Those divisions already exists. Most sports have different leagues. There are international leagues, national leagues, regional leagues, all the way down to hobby leagues or beer leagues. If we assign everyone into a league independent of gender, the highest leagues (the most popular and most lucrative ones) will be exclusively men and women will only be present in the lower leagues. No one can want this outcome.

And then you get a situation with as many divisions as there are people and everyone get a gold medal, everyone is a winner. The true woke paradise.

Fortunately, most people don't like to live in this hell and are against clear attempts to destroy women's sports by the clueless and/or purposefully malicious activists.


Good lord. Absolutely nobody is going to watch boxing divisions based on lung size and bone density.

Did you actually think that lean mass would be a sensible way to separate divisions in a gender neutral fashion? That would, again, just result in women being unable to compete professionally in virtually any sport. They would be relegated to Division N, for some very large value of N. Competing alongside multitudes of biologically male amateurs, where nobody cares and nobody pays to watch. To even entertain this idea betrays a total lack of understanding of the matter at hand.

Right now you are acting like Elon Musk storming into the government and having 20 year olds cut everybody's budget. You may think you're coming in with fresh outsider perspective and an open minded way to look at things and improve them, but everyone actually involved in the domain can see a trainwreck in progress. It's not a good look.

I am quite certain it's not your intention, but you're really coming across as someone who hates women's sports, and doesn't want them to exist. On behalf of my wife and sister and a lot of the women I've known in a lifetime of playing sports - kindly keep your awful ideas to yourself. Women fought tooth and nail for the right to have their own professional sporting opportunities. Don't you dare try to take it away from them.


I had a hard time but I didn’t start with the tutorial first.

But once I saw their “philosophy” as it were, everything became so much easier.


Did not know about this. How do you see all the properties?

Just click the varset in the tree view and it lists them in the properties pane

Not if the charger doesn’t work.

What’s a cheap but ok thermal printer? The brand mentioned in this repo?

I wanted to setup https://www.colonnes.com but their recommendations were quite expensive.


I bought a Zapos ZA-E200L in South-Africa for $65 [0]

It was configured with a fixed IP/subnet/gateway and no DHCP, which took an hour or two to debug and reconfigure. Been a dream since then: prints really fast and cuts properly. OP's project works well to print todo's.

[0] https://alcell.co.za/product/zapos-za-e200l-thermal-receipt-...


I recently got the YHD-8390 on Aliexpress for around 100$, works pretty well. Connects by Ethernet, USB and Wifi. Having plenty of fun with it.

I got an Epson TM-T88IIIP for about 40 bucks used. The whole line seems to have decent Linux drivers

For labels I use Phomomo. Quite cheap. I wrote some python code to drive it.

I like my Rongta POS Printer, under $100

Comfort issues aside, these are still stupid expensive.

I can buy a laptop for that money.

It’s strange to me that they haven’t introduced a more budget friendly line to serve different segments, like most of their product categories. Headphones aren’t an experimental hobby product.

Where are my $200 budget pair?


You want Beats, which is owned by Apple. Your $200 budget pair is the Beats Solo 4: https://www.beatsbydre.com/headphones/solo4-wireless/MUW43/s...

There’s a lot more going on there than AI …

Not really, this is exactly what I expect due to baseless lies from the AI companies and a disdain for employee payroll by the C-suite.

they fantasize about unpaid interns writing specs and nobody ever needed to look at the code in a few years

I like iPhones because they are a little bit restricted.

But let’s be real here. They should have unified everything 5 years ago. Your phone should plugin to a screen and be a “netbook” level device and anything 13 inches and up should be running MacOS. The iPad should have a real affordable keyboard.

These limitations are no longer designed to make the product better.


I moved to a beach town and found out the tides app only exists on my Apple Watch. I went through 10 iOS apps that didn’t work properly or wanted me to pay subscription before giving up. I just don’t understand… do they not use their own products or something?


It does have a “real affordable keyboard” - any BT keyboard and mouse. My wife uses both that came from Amazon for $30 bucks each


This is clearly sub-optimal for a tablet. And worse, they are supposed to be a company that has good taste and design.

I bought a knock off cantilever keyboard cover. This is clearly the way to go. Very clever design from Apple. The knockoff works almost as well for 25% of the price.


How is it “suboptimal”?

My wife has this

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4KH2GH3?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar...

And uses a wireless keyboard and mouse. I use an Apple keyboard and mouse and have this for my MacBook

https://www.therooststand.com/


Stop thinking voters are rational.

I remember the pro Palestine groups were threatening to not vote for Kamala if the Dems didn’t push for a cease fire or whatever. All while the other side was Trump.

They didn’t go, “maybe we should do our best to prevent a worse situation“.

Even back then I had a gut feeling something like this would have cost the Dems the election.


People really need to stop saying Trump is worse than Kamala/Biden on Palestine.

Biden and the Democrats erased Palestine. There is nothing anymore that Trump could do about it. He can't resurrect the dead. Everything happened because of Democrats, not Trump.

Voters are very rational. They know that Democrats were the bad guys. It's why they currently have a 17% approval rating.

Let's all focus on removing the rest of the Democrats from power and replace them with true anti-Israel candidates. That's the only hope for a modern society.


I'm very confused by this comment. It sounds like satire, mixed with a few poll results (that lack context).


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