Not all spiders have venom. The spiders of the clade Uloboridae have lost their venom glands and the reasoning behind this is due to the success of and reliance on their webs to not only capture but to also subdue prey. Once a prey item makes its way into the web the spiders will quickly wrap the prey in such a way that it actually compresses them. Once secure they then spit up digestive enzymes to turn them into a drinkable soup.
Most audio equiptment produces voltage via squeezing crystals, this pressure causes the voltage in these crystals to move reapidly from one side to another and create current.
Bees aren't the only animals that make honey. A distant relative of theirs in the Mexican Honey Wasp also makes a kind of honey. These wasps are more closely related to the terrors known as yellowjackets or hornets than they are to any bee. Despite that they've converged on a similar appearance and the production of honey.
Some kinds of wasps also exhibit a kind of behavior known as "drumming", namely the group known as "drumming wasps" or also as "warrior wasps". This behavior is a rhythmatic beating of their wings. It's a threat display; a warning to any approaching animals to stay away from their hive. Warrior wasps also have a notoriously painful sting, although they have barbed stingers just like honeybees and so stinging a person often leads to the death of the wasp.
There is a park (it's actually a Middle School baseball field) in SF that is named after a elderly Chinese lady that was beaten to death. Yik Oi Haung park.
I imagine it might bee because honeybees never really established themselves in the arid places where the ancestors to honey wasps were and so the niche was left open. Honey being mostly sugar can even bee seen as a way to store water as sugar is metabolized into water and CO2. The water activity of honey can also draw in some water in drier places just from some slightly humid air so there's a number of benefits to it. Deserts also have a kind of seasonality with their flowers based on available rain so it helps to have stores of energy, which is similar enough to the more temperate pressure of winter honeybees would've faced in their evolutionary histories in less arid places.
Another example of an arid hymenopteran using honey kind of like a water store though is in the Honeypot Ants. They're in quite a few areas, like in North America, Africa and Australia and I imagine they've convergently evolved this method of honey sequestration within specialized workers. For the Honeypot Ants though their honey, which isn't exposed to air, has a higher water content than that of bee honey. Their "honey" is also pretty contaminated with digested material from elsewhere, so it's more of a nutritional soup than the more sugary honey of bees and wasps.
As to why so many groups of ants might've convergently evolved this instead of external honey, I imagine it's because of their subterranean lifestyle and a lack of using any kind of impermeable materials to store liquids. Whilst ants can and do make kinds of larders(stores of food), like in Harvester Ants where those stores are called granaries and are filled with collected seeds, they always store solids in them or harvestable fungi. Their main option for a means of liquid storage is effectively just their bodies. But all it might take is for some madman to engineer some ant species to produce waxy secretions to line parts of an ants' nest with and we may see a species of ant that produces genuine, harvestable ant honey...
But all it might take is for some madman to engineer some ant species to produce waxy secretions to line parts of an ants' nest with and we may see a species of ant that produces genuine, harvestable ant honey...
You know, you reminded me of the mythical ants who would heap up gold around their nests. The "gold-digging ants" were a staple of older bestiaries and they were claimed to reside in India of all places. However, as much of a shithole as India is, it lacks fox-sized ants and the article goes into detail about how the "ants" may have actually been marmots that people do actually harvest gold dust from the burrows of. Although there is an interesting excerpt from the article relating to gold and termites...
A 2011 study by Australian scientists found that termites have been found to excrete trace deposits of gold. According to the CSIRO, the termites burrow beneath eroded subterranean material which typically masks human attempts to find gold, and ingest and bring the new deposits to the surface. They believe that studying termite nests may lead to less invasive methods of finding gold deposits.
I think a better option than ants or termites to harvest gold from the ground would be with gold cyanidation and earthworms though. You just engineer the worms to have a special organ that accumulates gold and silver from the cyanidation process in a special organ and make the worms live very long lives. If they're naturally very laden with cyanide then predation won't be an issue. It may cost the lives of many moles though. I did cover gold cyanidation and using coral as a means to harvest gold and silver from the ocean in an earlier post in this thread.
The reason to use earthworms over ants or termites though is their wet nature and that they would ingest vast amounts of material over the course of their life. Gold and silver cyanidation works best in capturing lots of individual gold and silver atoms from a medium but it needs to be in water(that if I remember correctly is oxygenated and slightly basic or preferably not acidic). You could then harvest worms that you gather from traps and you could use a simple metal detector to find which ones have golden nuggets or "pickers" in them.
It can also be incredibly strong in the right circumstances. Prince Rupert's Drops, which are made from normal glass that when molten is dropped into water, show immense durability on the face of their drop, enough to even resist being shot. Their tails however are incredibly fragile and will cause them to explode into a cloud of glass if snipped. Here's a video clip of one being shot with a .38.
The reason for the strength of the drop and weakness of the tail has to do with internal stresses. The conflicting stresses of the rapidly cooled glass makes the drop very tough, but the tail being so thin means that a chain reaction can occur when it's damaged(and it's easier to damage). This is also why these drops will also explode when hit well enough on their drop end, it causes an explosive chain reaction where all of the internal stresses rip it apart. Here's a diagram showing that off.
This kind of stressing of materials to make them stronger is something that's actually done in construction, mostly in prestressed concrete. This is done by pulling on steel rebar within the concrete as it cures. The stressed steel retains this strain once the concrete has solidified and then the ends sticking out of the concrete(that were being pulled on to stretch the steel) can be cut off with no ill effect.
Birmingham, for being such a famous city, is so young that it came along after the Civil War. Its whole existence (spawned by the iron and coal industry of North Alabama) is purely New South.
Edit: Here's some others:
Cincinnati was, for a time in the early-mid 1800s, one of the largest cities in America.
Philadelphia was, for a time in the early 1900s, one of the largest cities in the civilized world.
Dallas is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. If it doesn't seem so, thats because it sprawls into numerous large cities (Plano, Fort Worth), but as a cohesive expansion of the original, it is up there with NYC and Chicago.
Speaking about The South and resource extraction, in 1894 a German immigrant to Louisiana invented a process that revolutionized sulfur mining and broke the Sicilian hegemony on sulfur. The process was named after him and is known as the "Frasch Process" and is a form of leach mining. His invention led to the US being the largest producer of sulfur for quite some time and brought in a substantial amount of wealth, as sulfur was incredibly valuable during that point of time for a massive variety of industrial applications. Even today sulfuric acid production is one way economists measure the industrial capabilities/activity of a nation. Here's a diagram showing off the process.
It's only in the latter portion of the 20th century that sulfur extraction was then dominated by sulfur extracted from crude oil and other fossil fuels as a waste product. Many refining facilities will actually have large mounds of elemental sulfur awaiting to be sold or transported.
Confederate General Simon Bolivar Buckner, was named after The Great Liberator Simon Bolivar, because their parents were fans of the Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Bolivia and co-Liberator of Perú.
