Hummingbird nectar is sugar and water with red dye added. There is evidence that he has been drinking it himself.
Yes, billybob has it. I thought this might show up here. Thank goodness the colorist did it correctly.
The Machines are revolting and set his pace-maker to hummingbird mode!
Necter Necter! Must have Necter!
This would seem to be a gag that won’t work if you’re seeing the strip in black and white in a deadtree paper. (Does F MINUS appear in newspapers? It vaguely seems to me that I’ve seen it thus somewhere in the past.) Since I do read most of the comics I follow in b&w form in the local paper, I’m always slightly irritated by such. I suppose I’d be even more grumpy if I were color-blind.
Yeah, yeah, I know; I should cancel the paper and read everything online, yadda yadda. But I’m old and set in my ways, and a high point of each day is sitting on the couch in the morning with a paper newspaper and a thermos of coffee, preparing as Linus (?) once said “to cower from another day.” (And anyway, this specific strip isn’t nearly funny enough to encourage me to change my Luddite ways.) . .
I also prefer a physical newspaper, but I couldn’t justify it anymore when the price rose to $700 a year.
Also, according to Wikipedia, F Minus is syndicated by United Features Syndicate and started in 75 papers in 2006.
Yes, not knowing the color of nectar, I assumed the guy had eaten the hummingbirds, and was telling her to get more hummingbirds.Which is pretty unsettling.
My paper prints F Minus, but has done so in color for that entire time (except those odd days when the color comics get printed in grayscale).
There shouldn’t be dye in there . . . just to be pedantic.
Just curious – Is the color of hummingbird nectar common knowledge? I didn’t know it, and like some above, I assumed something more violent. I wonder how many other people read the strip and got it wrong.
@shrug, my daily paper has F Minus but I always see it online before I read it in the paper. I’d stop getting the physical paper but I need the old issues to line my pet dinosaur’s cage.
I was among those sending this in, and most of what I didn’t understand has been answered — for me, the red spots were very alarming as a possible indication of bloody violence. If the man had been using the feeder as a way of capturing hummingbirds for improper consumption, no wonder the woman looks at least a little disgruntled! Indeed, she should be very alarmed. But if it’s just the normal feeding juice, that changes the picture.
I’m with Andréa — we’ve never colored the nectar in our hummingbird feeder, and the birds still like it just fine. The feeder itself it red, and that seems to be enough. Total CIDU for me too.
Okaaaaaay…. but no-one is explaining why he is consuming the nectar or why this is funny.
Frankly, if he were eating the hummingbirds it’d be funnier. Equally inexplicable but funnier.
“Just curious – Is the color of hummingbird nectar common knowledge? I didn’t know it, and like some above, I assumed something more violent. I wonder how many other people read the strip and got it wrong.”
There was a common but incorrect belief that hummingbirds were attracted to the color red and we started dying the sugar water red. There is now a growing belief, maybe correct maybe not, that the red dye is toxic and we shouldn’t use. We probably shouldn’t anyway as the color of the nectar won’t attract them.
“Just curious – Is the color of hummingbird nectar common knowledge?”
Maybe. It’s not always red. The reason it’s colored at all is so that you can tell from a distance whether or not there’s any left. A neighbor has one, and I’m looking at it from across the yard, and it’s more orange than red.
Yes, it is common knowledge in cartoon land that you fill the feeder with red juice. Just like bags of money have dollar signs on them, prisoners wear stripes, old people have gray hair and glasses, you always wrap a towel around your waist when you get out of the tub to answer the phone or door (even if you normally don’t wear pants), etc.
Re cartoon common knowledge — there’s actually a recent (and very much fun) book that’s an encyclopedia of comic conventions/tropes of that sort: AMERICAN CORNBALL by Christopher Miller (2015). Highly recommended to my fellow comics musers and snarkers.
In light of the Sequins strip a few weeks ago, I guess F- just thinks people doing things for the sake of doing things is funny. A guy could wear a shirt with sequins so he does. A person can drink humming bird nectar so he does. And F- thinks that is funny for some reason…..
Woozy — he’s probably drinking it because it’s delicious, and he doesn’t want people know he drinks sugar water, so he doesn’t buy soda. Hummingbird nectar is sugar water and food coloring.
Actually my hummingbird feeder is red and the nectar I put in it is pretty much clear. I think maybe red is supposed to help attract the hummingbirds.
I thought differently than most people here. I assumed the hummingbird(s) had done something violent, resulting in the splatter all over the guy’s face. It needs to be refilled…fast…because otherwise the hummingbirds will do something more violent. But now that I look at it again, I see that the woman is not splattered with liquid, only the man, so either the aforementioned violence happened while she was gone, or the theory that he drank the liquid is correct.
I’ve seen it shared a few times recently that you should not use the red hummingbird nectar – something about the dye in it being bad for the birds?
The hummingbird nectar is probably red because that is off the visible spectrum for insects, but not for birds. Insects attracted to, say, poppies, recognize an UV pattern humans cannot see, not the red colour. Something to do with the (rods and) cones.
You should not feed the hummingbirds red nectar because hummingbirds need to be able to find their own food. Keep giving them free handouts, and they’ll stop doing that, and then, if you leave the feeder empty for a few days, they all starve dead because they need so many calories and only know where to find your feeder. See also trash-cans and raccoons, and bears and pick-a-nick baskets, boo-boo!
Re avoiding handouts — So it’s like the old saying has it: “give a hummingbird a fish, and it will not eat for a day because hummingbirds do not eat fish; but teach a hummingbird how to fish, and it will not eat for all its life because hummingbirds do not eat fish, and even worse you’ll have uneaten fish stinking up the yard”?
Shrug: I thought it was “teach a hummingbird to fish, and watch the food chain go all to h-ll”
So if we leave food out for the raccoons every day, and then stop for a week, the raccoons will all die?
“if we leave food out for the raccoons every day, and then stop for a week, the raccoons will all die?”
Where did you get that idea? Hummingbirds have ridiculously fast metabolism. Withdraw their food supply, and they die of starvation rather rapidly. Raccoons, on the other hand, just get nasty. But, if you take away the fun of spreading the contents of your trash can all over your yard, they’ll die of boredom. If you’re really lucky, they die of boredom right there, at the top of your empty garbage can, and fall inside. A word of caution, though: If they don’t die right away, but are merely stunned, your garbage hauler may decline to take the little fella away, and he might be waiting there next time you open the can. I think the die right away/don’t die right away thing depends on cellular Internet coverage.
And THIS is why I return to CIDU’s website several times a day . . . voices of sanity in all the craziness of today’s world ‘-). Yes, why WOULD anyone put out food for raccoons? (Of course, here in FL, I understand one can attract rats with bird food, so I haven’t bothered. With bird feeders, I mean.)
I was at a park where people had been clearly been feeding the raccoons, because they would come up and beg for food. It was amazing how adorable they could make themselves look, given that they were raccoons.
Is this a problem for ducks? I seem to remember in my hometown when I was a kid there was a big initiative about not feeding the ducks in the local parks because they would stop flying south for the winter as their food supply was plentiful right where they were, then they’d freeze and die.
Maybe I’m thinking of grandma.
@ Stan – In addition to the potential for discouraging migration (later), there is the immediate problem that feeding the ducks encourages a greater number of birds to congregate in a body of water that cannot (otherwise) support so many. In addition, when bread is thrown into the water, the ducks end up eating only a fraction of it, and the rest of the detritus sinks to the bottom, encouraging the growth of algae, which causes problems for fish and other creatures.
P.S. If you (or your kids) still want to feed them, throw the bread on the shore, not in the water.
BREAD cannot be metabolized by ducks, geese, birds, etc. DO NOT FEED IT TO THEM. Canada geese have been known to stop migrating from WI, which is why our ponds are such a mess now. And raccoons carry rabies; if you see one out at daytime, beware. It usually means it is ill and/or will attack. I know someone who was attacked by one, in her garage, from under her car. The rabies treatment was NOT FUN.
“And raccoons carry rabies; if you see one out at daytime, beware. It usually means it is ill and/or will attack.”
Or it might just be on a mission for the Guardians of the Galaxy. The secret is to look closely enough to see if it’s carrying an adorable little ray gun.
(Of course, if you happen to be Thanos or some other bad guy, it STILL might attack. So try not be a supervillain if you wish to avoid this.)
People who have large numbers of ducks and geese want to control the number of ducks and geese because they leave a godawful mess wherever they congregate. Nobody wants to visit a park that is covered in duck poops.
Powers (February 28, 2018 at 7:41 am),
Like you, we prefer a physical newspaper, and we even paid the $400 a year, but we quit it when the carrier was only delivering about two-thirds of the issues and the complaint line was pretty useless. Since we quit paying for it, though, they keep delivering it and hardly ever miss a day. Go figure.
And as for WordPress, I fill in the form as “Boise Ed” but WP seems to think it should be “Boiseed.” And yet I see other people here with spaces. (Now watch: this one will be correct.)
Yup.
I get the local (Long Island wide) paper. Husband thinks it is a waste of money as it has gotten so thin (52 pages one day recently including all sections and ads). There was a scandal with false circulation figures awhile back and they lost a lot of ads. The paper has changed hands several times since then – now partially owned by our local cable co (something I thought was illegal). The paper seems to keep winning awards – not sure how as it has very poor journalism including extensive use of slang, inability to write a correct headline, articles next to photos that have nothing to do with them – but the headline sort of goes – in a negative way – with the photo, grammar worse than mine, and the same article in two different places in the same edition. Latest thing that annoys me is that they have taken to referring to something that is to happen on the day it is issued with the name of the day instead of “today” – as in “There will be a show on Monday” – in Monday’s paper, instead of “There will be a show today.” which makes it sound as if the show will be the following Monday.
Several years ago they raised the price and it was more than I felt I could spend on it (especially since I get it free online as we use the cable co). So I called up and canceled. I got a call back from the head of circulation – a very nice lady, who when she heard why I canceled, offered to give it to me for the old rate. OK. Every time it goes up, I call to cancel and she keeps the old price ($24+change a month for 7 days). Then they announced (sort of, it was listed in the paper) that they were going to charge extra for “special editions” . All of their special editions are when they add advertisements to the paper – such as Thanksgiving day with all the ads is a special edition and costs more. Then they came up with – if you put a temporary stop on the paper (aka vacation hold) they will not deliver the papers, but will charge you for them. I called up both times to cancel,but, well,I don’t pay extra for the special editions and I get credited for when I put a temporary stop. (There is charge for starting a subscription – so, no, one can’t really cancel completely and restart.)
In the colonial period newspapers were weekly at best in the colonies and, other than local news, the news was reprinted from other papers received by the printer – and it took awhile for the news to travel from place to place. One had to be able to afford a newspaper or read it at a local tavern, coffeehouse, etc.
@ Shrug – A recent post led me to search CIDU for hummingbirds, but then I was captured by your quote. The actual phrase was “Time to cringe from another day“, and was spoken by Sally to Charlie Brown.
P.S. A later Peanuts strip” has a similar setup, but in it Sally uses the word “duck”, which is very close to “cower”.
P.P.S. Now that I think of it, the juxtaposition of “duck” and “cower” sound just like the campaign in the early fifties to get kids to “duck and cover“, but that’s just a coincidence.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Hummingbird nectar is sugar and water with red dye added. There is evidence that he has been drinking it himself.
Yes, billybob has it. I thought this might show up here. Thank goodness the colorist did it correctly.
The Machines are revolting and set his pace-maker to hummingbird mode!
Necter Necter! Must have Necter!
This would seem to be a gag that won’t work if you’re seeing the strip in black and white in a deadtree paper. (Does F MINUS appear in newspapers? It vaguely seems to me that I’ve seen it thus somewhere in the past.) Since I do read most of the comics I follow in b&w form in the local paper, I’m always slightly irritated by such. I suppose I’d be even more grumpy if I were color-blind.
Yeah, yeah, I know; I should cancel the paper and read everything online, yadda yadda. But I’m old and set in my ways, and a high point of each day is sitting on the couch in the morning with a paper newspaper and a thermos of coffee, preparing as Linus (?) once said “to cower from another day.” (And anyway, this specific strip isn’t nearly funny enough to encourage me to change my Luddite ways.) . .
I also prefer a physical newspaper, but I couldn’t justify it anymore when the price rose to $700 a year.
Also, according to Wikipedia, F Minus is syndicated by United Features Syndicate and started in 75 papers in 2006.
Yes, not knowing the color of nectar, I assumed the guy had eaten the hummingbirds, and was telling her to get more hummingbirds.Which is pretty unsettling.
My paper prints F Minus, but has done so in color for that entire time (except those odd days when the color comics get printed in grayscale).
There shouldn’t be dye in there . . . just to be pedantic.
Just curious – Is the color of hummingbird nectar common knowledge? I didn’t know it, and like some above, I assumed something more violent. I wonder how many other people read the strip and got it wrong.
@shrug, my daily paper has F Minus but I always see it online before I read it in the paper. I’d stop getting the physical paper but I need the old issues to line my pet dinosaur’s cage.
I was among those sending this in, and most of what I didn’t understand has been answered — for me, the red spots were very alarming as a possible indication of bloody violence. If the man had been using the feeder as a way of capturing hummingbirds for improper consumption, no wonder the woman looks at least a little disgruntled! Indeed, she should be very alarmed. But if it’s just the normal feeding juice, that changes the picture.
I’m with Andréa — we’ve never colored the nectar in our hummingbird feeder, and the birds still like it just fine. The feeder itself it red, and that seems to be enough. Total CIDU for me too.
Okaaaaaay…. but no-one is explaining why he is consuming the nectar or why this is funny.
Frankly, if he were eating the hummingbirds it’d be funnier. Equally inexplicable but funnier.
“Just curious – Is the color of hummingbird nectar common knowledge? I didn’t know it, and like some above, I assumed something more violent. I wonder how many other people read the strip and got it wrong.”
There was a common but incorrect belief that hummingbirds were attracted to the color red and we started dying the sugar water red. There is now a growing belief, maybe correct maybe not, that the red dye is toxic and we shouldn’t use. We probably shouldn’t anyway as the color of the nectar won’t attract them.
“Just curious – Is the color of hummingbird nectar common knowledge?”
Maybe. It’s not always red. The reason it’s colored at all is so that you can tell from a distance whether or not there’s any left. A neighbor has one, and I’m looking at it from across the yard, and it’s more orange than red.
Yes, it is common knowledge in cartoon land that you fill the feeder with red juice. Just like bags of money have dollar signs on them, prisoners wear stripes, old people have gray hair and glasses, you always wrap a towel around your waist when you get out of the tub to answer the phone or door (even if you normally don’t wear pants), etc.
Re cartoon common knowledge — there’s actually a recent (and very much fun) book that’s an encyclopedia of comic conventions/tropes of that sort: AMERICAN CORNBALL by Christopher Miller (2015). Highly recommended to my fellow comics musers and snarkers.
In light of the Sequins strip a few weeks ago, I guess F- just thinks people doing things for the sake of doing things is funny. A guy could wear a shirt with sequins so he does. A person can drink humming bird nectar so he does. And F- thinks that is funny for some reason…..
Woozy — he’s probably drinking it because it’s delicious, and he doesn’t want people know he drinks sugar water, so he doesn’t buy soda. Hummingbird nectar is sugar water and food coloring.
Actually my hummingbird feeder is red and the nectar I put in it is pretty much clear. I think maybe red is supposed to help attract the hummingbirds.
I thought differently than most people here. I assumed the hummingbird(s) had done something violent, resulting in the splatter all over the guy’s face. It needs to be refilled…fast…because otherwise the hummingbirds will do something more violent. But now that I look at it again, I see that the woman is not splattered with liquid, only the man, so either the aforementioned violence happened while she was gone, or the theory that he drank the liquid is correct.
I’ve seen it shared a few times recently that you should not use the red hummingbird nectar – something about the dye in it being bad for the birds?
The hummingbird nectar is probably red because that is off the visible spectrum for insects, but not for birds. Insects attracted to, say, poppies, recognize an UV pattern humans cannot see, not the red colour. Something to do with the (rods and) cones.
You should not feed the hummingbirds red nectar because hummingbirds need to be able to find their own food. Keep giving them free handouts, and they’ll stop doing that, and then, if you leave the feeder empty for a few days, they all starve dead because they need so many calories and only know where to find your feeder. See also trash-cans and raccoons, and bears and pick-a-nick baskets, boo-boo!
Re avoiding handouts — So it’s like the old saying has it: “give a hummingbird a fish, and it will not eat for a day because hummingbirds do not eat fish; but teach a hummingbird how to fish, and it will not eat for all its life because hummingbirds do not eat fish, and even worse you’ll have uneaten fish stinking up the yard”?
Shrug: I thought it was “teach a hummingbird to fish, and watch the food chain go all to h-ll”
So if we leave food out for the raccoons every day, and then stop for a week, the raccoons will all die?
“if we leave food out for the raccoons every day, and then stop for a week, the raccoons will all die?”
Where did you get that idea? Hummingbirds have ridiculously fast metabolism. Withdraw their food supply, and they die of starvation rather rapidly. Raccoons, on the other hand, just get nasty. But, if you take away the fun of spreading the contents of your trash can all over your yard, they’ll die of boredom. If you’re really lucky, they die of boredom right there, at the top of your empty garbage can, and fall inside. A word of caution, though: If they don’t die right away, but are merely stunned, your garbage hauler may decline to take the little fella away, and he might be waiting there next time you open the can. I think the die right away/don’t die right away thing depends on cellular Internet coverage.
And THIS is why I return to CIDU’s website several times a day . . . voices of sanity in all the craziness of today’s world ‘-). Yes, why WOULD anyone put out food for raccoons? (Of course, here in FL, I understand one can attract rats with bird food, so I haven’t bothered. With bird feeders, I mean.)
I was at a park where people had been clearly been feeding the raccoons, because they would come up and beg for food. It was amazing how adorable they could make themselves look, given that they were raccoons.
Is this a problem for ducks? I seem to remember in my hometown when I was a kid there was a big initiative about not feeding the ducks in the local parks because they would stop flying south for the winter as their food supply was plentiful right where they were, then they’d freeze and die.
Maybe I’m thinking of grandma.
@ Stan – In addition to the potential for discouraging migration (later), there is the immediate problem that feeding the ducks encourages a greater number of birds to congregate in a body of water that cannot (otherwise) support so many. In addition, when bread is thrown into the water, the ducks end up eating only a fraction of it, and the rest of the detritus sinks to the bottom, encouraging the growth of algae, which causes problems for fish and other creatures.
P.S. If you (or your kids) still want to feed them, throw the bread on the shore, not in the water.
BREAD cannot be metabolized by ducks, geese, birds, etc. DO NOT FEED IT TO THEM. Canada geese have been known to stop migrating from WI, which is why our ponds are such a mess now. And raccoons carry rabies; if you see one out at daytime, beware. It usually means it is ill and/or will attack. I know someone who was attacked by one, in her garage, from under her car. The rabies treatment was NOT FUN.
Thanks to children’s TV programs and despite regular warnings from my American cousins, I can’t think of raccoons as anything other than cuddly animals: http://www.lulu-berlu.com/candy-verre-a-moutarde-candy-gronde-capucin-a11851.html
“And raccoons carry rabies; if you see one out at daytime, beware. It usually means it is ill and/or will attack.”
Or it might just be on a mission for the Guardians of the Galaxy. The secret is to look closely enough to see if it’s carrying an adorable little ray gun.
(Of course, if you happen to be Thanos or some other bad guy, it STILL might attack. So try not be a supervillain if you wish to avoid this.)
People who have large numbers of ducks and geese want to control the number of ducks and geese because they leave a godawful mess wherever they congregate. Nobody wants to visit a park that is covered in duck poops.
Powers (February 28, 2018 at 7:41 am),
Like you, we prefer a physical newspaper, and we even paid the $400 a year, but we quit it when the carrier was only delivering about two-thirds of the issues and the complaint line was pretty useless. Since we quit paying for it, though, they keep delivering it and hardly ever miss a day. Go figure.
And as for WordPress, I fill in the form as “Boise Ed” but WP seems to think it should be “Boiseed.” And yet I see other people here with spaces. (Now watch: this one will be correct.)
Yup.
I get the local (Long Island wide) paper. Husband thinks it is a waste of money as it has gotten so thin (52 pages one day recently including all sections and ads). There was a scandal with false circulation figures awhile back and they lost a lot of ads. The paper has changed hands several times since then – now partially owned by our local cable co (something I thought was illegal). The paper seems to keep winning awards – not sure how as it has very poor journalism including extensive use of slang, inability to write a correct headline, articles next to photos that have nothing to do with them – but the headline sort of goes – in a negative way – with the photo, grammar worse than mine, and the same article in two different places in the same edition. Latest thing that annoys me is that they have taken to referring to something that is to happen on the day it is issued with the name of the day instead of “today” – as in “There will be a show on Monday” – in Monday’s paper, instead of “There will be a show today.” which makes it sound as if the show will be the following Monday.
Several years ago they raised the price and it was more than I felt I could spend on it (especially since I get it free online as we use the cable co). So I called up and canceled. I got a call back from the head of circulation – a very nice lady, who when she heard why I canceled, offered to give it to me for the old rate. OK. Every time it goes up, I call to cancel and she keeps the old price ($24+change a month for 7 days). Then they announced (sort of, it was listed in the paper) that they were going to charge extra for “special editions” . All of their special editions are when they add advertisements to the paper – such as Thanksgiving day with all the ads is a special edition and costs more. Then they came up with – if you put a temporary stop on the paper (aka vacation hold) they will not deliver the papers, but will charge you for them. I called up both times to cancel,but, well,I don’t pay extra for the special editions and I get credited for when I put a temporary stop. (There is charge for starting a subscription – so, no, one can’t really cancel completely and restart.)
In the colonial period newspapers were weekly at best in the colonies and, other than local news, the news was reprinted from other papers received by the printer – and it took awhile for the news to travel from place to place. One had to be able to afford a newspaper or read it at a local tavern, coffeehouse, etc.
@ Shrug – A recent post led me to search CIDU for hummingbirds, but then I was captured by your quote. The actual phrase was “Time to cringe from another day“, and was spoken by Sally to Charlie Brown.
P.S. A later Peanuts strip” has a similar setup, but in it Sally uses the word “duck”, which is very close to “cower”.
P.P.S. Now that I think of it, the juxtaposition of “duck” and “cower” sound just like the campaign in the early fifties to get kids to “duck and cover“, but that’s just a coincidence.