08.06.03
In brief
Why schizophrenics don’t catch yawns
N.B. The Eliot article ends with this fine non sequitur:
Eliot came to enjoy alcohol after his second marriage in 1957, but was notorious for much of his life for his single dry sherries at literary gatherings. However, he always enjoyed crossword puzzles.
Matt Webb points to information on anarchist bees
Review of TypePad (paying version of Movable Type used to run this blog)
Other blogging moves: “Atom” 0.2 snapshot
How ever did ’siren’ (the creatures that lured sailors onto the rocks with their seductive songs) come to refer to blaring klaxons that warn us to keep away. I wonder, are we assumed to have learnt from Odysseus? Perhaps the superstition of turning your collar up when an ambulance passes is some distant echo of the sailors plugging their ears against the siren’s song.
Oh, and just because I covered the curate’s egg recently, Private Eye this week has one of the great Colemanballs:
“That was a sort of a parson’s nose innings - good in parts.”
Blue Witch said,
August 6, 2003 at 11:44 am
Sorry, but… that piece on bees is total fabrication. The email from a new beekeeper quoted at the end is correct though (but doesn’t go far enough IMHO), although the mouseover text on the link isn’t.
The drone (male) bee’s *sole* purpose in the hive is to mate with the queen. This happens outside the hive and, once he has had his wicked way, he dies (because his genitalia separate from his body in the mating process), and never returns to the hive.
Queens only mate on a couple of occasions, at the beginning of their lives, but do so repeatedly (5-20 times is the current thinking),with different drones. A queen bee’s spermatheca (where she stores the sperm) is then filled with enough sperm to last for the whole of her reproductive life (around 3 years). She can lay 2000 eggs per day in the summer - fertilised ones become worker bees (females) and unfertilised ones drones (males).
There are only drones in the hive during the summer months (the queen only lays unfertilsied eggs - which turn into drones - at times when they are potentially useful to the survival of the colony).
Anything about: “There’s a particular genetic mutation in honeybees that switches the drones from policing and destroying one another’s eggs, to a situation in which egg-laying becomes more common and is not punished” as the article says is complete and utter buncumbe.
Sorry to be so blunt, but a lot of my spare time goes into attempting to educate the public about bees and the kind of rubbish in the original article on the net doesn’t help the cause at all.
It isn’t April Fools day is it?
I haven’t just fallen into a set trap?