So to get to OP's point, I am assuming that if the hornets couldn't detoxify acetaldehyde, then they would exhibit some sort of "hangover" even if it didn't kill them. But even the 80% ABV hornets seemed totally unaffected.
Any chance scientists can make a drug for humans to have this benefit? This could help in tense relationship building/ repair. You get the social bonding of pounding alcohol w/o the negative effects of drunkeness.
If there was such a drug you wouldn't get the social effects: these hornets don't get drunk at all, they metabolize the alcohol too quickly for it to affect their brains. It's not like they get a euphoric buzz without the social impairment :)
I witnessed this when I spent a month inside the offices of a large Japanese company in Kyoto. In that month there were three different dinners out for the whole office, all of them involving alcohol.
One of the engineers told me as an aside, because Japanese culture frowns on contradicting or questioning one's superiors, social drinking was a tacit mechanism where people could express their doubts about project direction and such without repercussion, as another part of the tacit rules were that what someone said while drunk shouldn't be held too strongly against them. Even after a few sips people would get more boisterous and the buttoned-down civility would drop. I didn't speak much Japanese so I can only imagine what was being said, probably something like "Boss, I'm not too confident that spending so much time adding the suchandsuch feature is worth delaying the project, but I'm just a junior engineer so I don't know what I'm talking about, hah hah. Kampai!"
I've been on antibiotics for a week, so I haven't been drinking, but we had some alcohol-free beers left over from a party. They're all IPA-flavored, so they taste authentically awful!
Non-alcoholic beers have gotten really good in the last few years. In the US, Athletic Brewing Company is doing great stuff. I haven't tried their IPA, but their lagers and lighter beers are surprisingly good and an adequate substitute for the "ritual" of beer drinking.
I've tried their light beers, and didn't particularly like them.
Weirdly, even though I hate IPAs, I think I liked the alcohol-free IPA stuff better. It feels more "authentic", I think - likely because I don't drink IPAs, so I can't tell that something is off without the alcohol.
"IPA-flavoured" is a bit dismissive. Alcohol-free beer is not flavoured water, it's beer that's had its alcohol removed. Non-alc IPA is an IPA with extra steps!
I meant to be dismissive in a joking way - I dislike the taste of IPAs, but they definitely taste Like Beer to me, even once the alcohol removal process has taken place. Athletic's light beers, though, taste off in a way that really doesn't work for me when I'm in the mood for the social aspect of drinking a beer, but not for most of the mental and physical ffects.
FWIW, drinking alcohol won't interfere with most modern antibiotics. The exception is metronidazole and related compounds, because they interfere with aldehyde dehydrogenase (leading to a buildup of toxic aldehydes, an intermediate compound in alcohol metabolism).
So why have I always been told not to? I swear I remember reading that antibiotics and alcohol, combined, stress out the liver, but apparently that's not the case with Amoxycillin?
Anyway, I guess it's probably for the best to limit my drinking anyway. Except for Saturday at the party, which we shan't speak of, nor of Sunday morning.
There's Kava or Kratom - I've not tried them myself but I have heard good things about their ability to ease social situation like alcohol without alcohol's side effects.
I remember the way we built wasp/hornet traps in the french countryside. Take a plastic bottle of water, cut it in two (top vs bottom), invert the top so the bottle opening is pointing toward the bottom, and fill the bottom of the bottle with wine.
Wasps and hornets are attracted by the wine, get in easily, then get drunk and apparently can't find their way out through the narrow bottle opening and die drowning in the wine.
that works with water and sugar, I don't think that it's being drunk that's the problem, the liquid is just bait. It's probably just hard to get back to the hole? No space to fly, not easy to climb the inside of the bottle because of the shape (bottle top pointing down). Maybe being wet and sticky doesn't help either
34 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 86.6 ms ] threadSo to get to OP's point, I am assuming that if the hornets couldn't detoxify acetaldehyde, then they would exhibit some sort of "hangover" even if it didn't kill them. But even the 80% ABV hornets seemed totally unaffected.
One of the engineers told me as an aside, because Japanese culture frowns on contradicting or questioning one's superiors, social drinking was a tacit mechanism where people could express their doubts about project direction and such without repercussion, as another part of the tacit rules were that what someone said while drunk shouldn't be held too strongly against them. Even after a few sips people would get more boisterous and the buttoned-down civility would drop. I didn't speak much Japanese so I can only imagine what was being said, probably something like "Boss, I'm not too confident that spending so much time adding the suchandsuch feature is worth delaying the project, but I'm just a junior engineer so I don't know what I'm talking about, hah hah. Kampai!"
I've been on antibiotics for a week, so I haven't been drinking, but we had some alcohol-free beers left over from a party. They're all IPA-flavored, so they taste authentically awful!
Weirdly, even though I hate IPAs, I think I liked the alcohol-free IPA stuff better. It feels more "authentic", I think - likely because I don't drink IPAs, so I can't tell that something is off without the alcohol.
https://us.erdinger.de/beer/non-alcoholic.html
For good mouthfeel !
https://www.drugs.com/article/antibiotics-and-alcohol.html
Anyway, I guess it's probably for the best to limit my drinking anyway. Except for Saturday at the party, which we shan't speak of, nor of Sunday morning.
Wasps and hornets are attracted by the wine, get in easily, then get drunk and apparently can't find their way out through the narrow bottle opening and die drowning in the wine.
Well I guess not those ones.
Mosquito's are attracted to CO₂. Put ⅓ sugar, ⅔ water and yeast in the same container to lure them.
I'm a bit disappointed Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about this surprising physiological characteristic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_hornet