There wasn’t an explicit comment stating they would charge for pirated copies, but it was inferred from their initial statements that their tracking didn’t give them any information other than that the game was installed. When people brought up pirated copies and people purposely uninstalling and reinstalling the games to force the developer to pay outrageous amounts, Unity backtracked and said that their tracking DID give them enough info to identify and exclude pirated copies and reinstallations, but this was only after the backlash began.

There is a contingent of people who believe that Unity intentionally marked out this stark change with extremely unclear requirements so they could “listen to the community” and partially revert the changes to their original goal plan (possibly removing the lowest license tier and requiring Unity ads for this license, plus Unity taking lots of tracking info about your computer that they can sell on to 3rd parties) as a way to make everyone accept the changes more easily, in a similar method as what WOTC tried to do with their OGL changes last year.

I’ll have a look into this! I’ve been playing solo OPR to get the wargaming itch, but I haven’t found anything for TTRPGs so Ironsworn might fill that hole nicely.

The outbreak we have of varroa is being contained but it looks like we may have it spreading to the larger apis community of Australia now as it has been found many kms away from the initial outbreak. Unfortunately, the baits used are just sugar syrup laced with insecticide, so this is currently wiping out stingless bees alongside the varroa infected apis hives. Many stingless beekeepers have started moving their hives out of the containment zone and giving them to friends and family until the baiting process is complete.

If you have any social bees in your area, consider getting yourself a hive! As said its a bit more work than apis bees, but that’s because the community for non-apis beekeeping is much smaller. The more people in the community, the more knowledge and the more native beekeeping will advance!

Honestly, they are extremely different, and while there are transferable skills from apis beekeeping to stingless beekeeping, it is different enough to be a separate hobby entirely.

Apis bees use a wax based honeycomb structure for brood, pollen and honey, whereas stingless bees around the world use tree or plant resins based structures for brood and different resin structures for honey/pollen, and keep them totally separated. As these structures are not as orderly as apis bee frames tend to be, it is much harder to harvest the honey from stingless bees (in Brazil where the honey pots are larger, they use a syringe system to vacuum the honey out of the pots. In Australia where the pots are much smaller, we use a piece of wood with nails sticking out of it to smash all the pots and drain the honey). It is also harder to clone hives due to these structures, as in apis bees you can just take some frames with a queen cell or two and put them in an empty hive and they will hatch into a new hive. In Australia, the most popular method is to literally rip the hive in half and hope both halves survive. You also have to monitor the temperature, because stingless bees have less bees to cool or warm up the hive, and may need help during heat waves or cold snaps to survive.

Having said this, stingless bees are great pollinators, and are totally immune to varroa mites. Their honey is totally different to apis honey due to the flavour contributed by the resin pots the bees store it in and it is extremely interesting (totally worth the extra work to get at). The hives are also much smaller in comparison to an apis hive, so combining their stingless nature into the mix you have a perfect beehive for beekeepers in more urban areas or with younger families.

If you are interested in beekeeping, but not fussed with honey or monitoring for varroa or are worried about getting yourself or people nearby stung by bees, stingless bees native to your region might be be best thing - if maintained, their hives can live longer than we do, and will make you and everyone within half a km of you have great gardens as they go around pollinating everything nearby. Once you have the first hive, you can easily make a second one (the Australian hive design is the OATH and designs for this and upgrades to the standard can be found easily online) and start making your one hive into a ton of hives.

Honestly I can’t narrow it down to less than 2:

• Australian Stingless Bee “farming”: as the hobby is niche, even in Australia, there isn’t much publicly available advancement in hive designs, propogation methods and care techniques for native bees. This makes the barrier for entry high, and the chances of losing a hive when inexperienced is moderately high too. More people in the hobby would hopefully bring in more discussion and experimentation, and make the hobby more accessible to others by hopefully bringing the price of hives down.

• TTRPGs/Wargaming outside of the big 2 games: if its not 40k or D&D, you are unlikely to find anyone that knows of alternate systems, let alone wants to play them. Makes it a lot harder to find a group outside of a game over discord or similar