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tanarillSo today I went to talk to Awesome Stella about a thing. As I was returning, I noticed a bee on the floor.
See, bees are not very good at controlling body temperature. They are tiny and have a lot of surface area in comparison, so they loose heat fast. The thing is, they cannot fly unless their wing muscles are above a certain temperature. In order to overcome the issue of loosing heat and being thus unable to fly, they have evolved a way to decouple said muscles from wing movement, which acts like an internal shiver and heat them up.
But the way the building is laid out, there is this hallway which is open to the ocean breeze and mostly in shadow, which is to say, always cold. The little girl was lying on the (concrete) floor right in the middle, trying to heat herself back up. I saw this and noted she'd die of hypothermia if she stayed where she was, and offered my finger to taxi her over to the sunny table area instead. She was most grateful, standing on my finger and grooming off dust and tickling a little. So cute!
See, bees are not very good at controlling body temperature. They are tiny and have a lot of surface area in comparison, so they loose heat fast. The thing is, they cannot fly unless their wing muscles are above a certain temperature. In order to overcome the issue of loosing heat and being thus unable to fly, they have evolved a way to decouple said muscles from wing movement, which acts like an internal shiver and heat them up.
But the way the building is laid out, there is this hallway which is open to the ocean breeze and mostly in shadow, which is to say, always cold. The little girl was lying on the (concrete) floor right in the middle, trying to heat herself back up. I saw this and noted she'd die of hypothermia if she stayed where she was, and offered my finger to taxi her over to the sunny table area instead. She was most grateful, standing on my finger and grooming off dust and tickling a little. So cute!
