Garbage Burglar

deer are smaller than you think

raccoons are bigger than you think

bears are smaller than you think but you were pretty close

otters are bigger than you think no even bigger than that

wolves are bigger than you think

wild cats are smaller than you think but hopefully you’ll never see one

chipmunks are smaller than you think

so are mice but you’ve seen a mouse right

you were right about the size of moose, mostly

pigs are bigger than you think

coyotes are that size

so are foxes

woops bears are bigger than you think but only that one type

“Whether the Andrea Gail rolls, pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a position from which she cannot recover. Among marine architects this is known as the zero-moment point – the point of no return.” –Sebastian Junger, “The Perfect Storm”

Posts like this aren’t my usual fare, but there’s a lot of readers on Tumblr. So y’all might be interested – or, if not, you really should be.

On Monday, this went down:

That’s the bloodless, matter-of-fact, ho-hum business event way of describing it. Let me paint you a different picture.

On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location – that’s 781 stores – told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should), the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their receiving managers, but not many.

Just about everyone lost between 3 and 7 employees. The unofficial numbers put the total around 1,800 people.

People.

We’re not talking post-holiday culling of seasonal workers. This was the Red Wedding. Every person laid off was a full-time employee. These were people for whom Barnes & Noble was a career. Most of them had given 5, 10, 20 years to the company. In most cases it was their sole source of income.

There was no warning.

But it gets worse.

this is the masked bee! she has no friends and hates everyone. Sometimes when she has kids she raises them alone and doesn’t let the father come for day trips. she loves pollen but does not like waiting for it so she chews flowers open which is essentially stealing. we love her anyway.

these bees are homalictus bees! they are the rainbow gay bees. Females tend to live together in one nest and guard the entrance. one time we found 160 gay girls bunking together. They’re so irridescent and small that they might look like flies but they are really just tiny lesbians.

and this is the blue banded bee! she may look like she’s wacked out, but really she is pretty chill. she just wants to live independently (or with some friends) in a nest or burrow and look after tomatoes.

This is a tree bumblebee- they’re pretty similar to honeybees in that they have big nests with a polyandrous queen. However, these guys love to be around humans and in gardens, and are super resilient- there are now large populations in Iceland. They have a more complex social hierarchy than most bees, with multiple worker castes. If a worker gets close with the queen she can mate with a drone and lay her own eggs in with the big pile, but eat the eggs of any workers beneath her that try to do so.

This is a valley carpenter bee- the only bee that can thermoregulate and had a circulatory system complete with aortic arch. Carpenter bees are good because they are too big to get into many flowers and have to be extra hairy to get pollen. They live in raw wood in small family units of all females (mothers and daughters or sisters) and are excellent cooks and workers. Males cruise around mating with multiple females and then leave.

Coming at you with another Australian native bee; tetragonula carbonaria or the sugarbag bee. They are a stingless species instead using resin to trap and entomb invaders that get into their hive as shown below (which doesn’t happen often because these bees are tiny and the entrances to their hives are also just as tiny). 

Like honey bees they are eusocial. Meaning they live in hives with a queen, drones and worker bees that create these complex hives that are completely different to honey bee hives. With honey and pollen pots built on the outside of the hive and the spiral structure in the middle made up of brood cells, where in the centre the queen sits.