Nick Howard

Mildly global.

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@archer_rs My point. Nor is it an indication of the lack thereof, although some would argue an inverse proportion rule.

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@colinrtalbot @maitlis Trump via FIFA

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@elonmusk Only fuck off Elon will save our democracy.

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

If the US can ban the Somali ref, undermining FIFA’s position, then FIFA can disqualify the US team. But they won’t, will they? Infantino is so far up Trump’s arse he now looks the same colour.

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@archer_rs Good luck going through the metal detector.

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@KMFollett Happy birthday!

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

Don’t know if this persistent loss of sound and occasionally vision is HBS’s fault or ITV’s but it doesn’t augur well for the tournament.

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@sophielouisecc No gunners.

[Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam]

Learned something about Bees Today.

A male bee mates for less than 5 seconds in midair.

The ejaculation is so explosive you can hear it pop from a few feet away.

His body rips in half.

He falls dead before hitting the ground.

And he is one of the lucky males in the hive. When a male bee, called a drone, chases down a queen mid-flight at speeds of 22 miles per hour, his entire reproductive organ turns inside out.

The pressure required for this comes from nearly all the blood in his body, which rushes downward to force the organ outward like a spring. The semen fires into the queen with so much force it makes the audible pop.

The organ then snaps off and stays lodged inside her like a cork. As he flips backward off her body, his abdomen rips open. The next drone waiting his turn has to physically yank out the dead male's cork before he can mate. The same thing then happens to him.

The queen does this 12 to 20 times in a single afternoon. She flies up to a spot in the sky that beekeepers call a drone congregation area.

Picture an invisible meeting point about 50 to 130 feet above the ground where up to 11,000 male bees from as many as 240 different hives are hovering, waiting for her.

These spots stay in the exact same locations year after year, sometimes for over a decade. No one fully understands how brand new drones, born only weeks earlier, find them.

By the end of her mating run, the queen has collected around 100 million sperm cells. She keeps only 5 to 6 million in a tiny internal storage organ that keeps them alive for years.

From that supply, she uses just two sperm cells per egg for the rest of her life, laying up to 2,000 eggs a day for 2 to 7 years. After that one afternoon in the sky, she will never mate again.

A 2019 study from UC Riverside, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Western Australia found that bee semen contains toxic proteins that temporarily blind the queen by interfering with how vision genes function in her brain.

If she can't see well, she can't fly out again to mate with more males. Their semen also carries a separate protein that attacks and kills sperm cells from rival drones still inside her. The males keep competing long after every one of them is dead.

The 99.9% of drones who never get to mate have it worse.

As autumn arrives, the female worker bees in the hive stop feeding their brothers, then drag them out of the entrance after biting off their wings.

The drones can't fly back in.

They starve or freeze in the grass within days.

The colony raises a fresh batch of disposable males the next spring, and the whole cycle starts over.

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@gamray Oh you poor thing.

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@Arsenal

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

I assume Gary Nipples will be commentating on the Arsenal game, fully aroused.

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

Cry me a river of plastic

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@LNER 🥱

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

Come on, @LNER it’s mid-May, by no conceivable reckoning winter. Passengers want palatable produce, not pre-packaged parodies of past times.

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@BenGoldsmith @DeeWardRottal Grouse on

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@Poppy_yyyyyyyy @MysteriosoX Always carry a Lymes leaflet

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@DAaronovitch That’s just what I want rid of. But you’re being ironic, aren’t you, you crafty old journo-weasel?

[Will Self @wself]

https://t.co/AJCrWLS9Kb

[Nick Howard @TheNickHoward]

@LNER You said “later this month” 2 weeks ago. Now it’s the end of the month. Can we realistically expect a summer menu by July?