As Busy as... You Know What

Melissographia (1625)

Our contemporary academic fields chop our one world into many pieces.  We classify a matter as falling within the area of history or biology or religion.  But such categorization can obscure the wholeness of our complex lives.  I was reminded of that drawback when I read the news story about three beehives of honeybees having survived the terrible fire in Notre-dame Cathedral in 2019. As the beehives on the roof had been part of a project to restore Paris's  population of critical pollinators, was the news story about environmentalism?  Or was it a story about biology because it testified to bees' natural durability?  Or, given the centuries-long history of that cathedral -- involving religious, political, and secular events -- does the bee story fall within the category of "history"?

Even within our category of "history," we create sub-categories.  And textbooks on the history of Christianity will be employed more often by religion professors than by the history department.  That sidelining of church history in our secular age means that the historical contributions of the church to preserving bees might go overlooked.  But monks and other church employees whose names have been forgotten cultivated bees for both tasty honey and the tallow to make church candles.  The environmental writer Paul Shepard informs us that:

"In Wittenburg, Germany, before the [Protestant] Reformation, some churches used 35,000 pounds of wax a year. On Candlemas Eve, hives were decked with ribbon and a song...beginning, ' Bees awake.' [was] sung as people carried wax candles,"

Bees have also navigated their way into the field of literary lore.  Many a Sherlockian enthusiast knows that Sherlock Holmes dreamed of eventually leaving stimulating London to retire to the English countryside -- where he would enjoy taking care of honeybee hives.

We also need to reserve a page in the mathematics textbook for bee geometry.  That is because the distinctive six-sided perimeter around each cell of honeycomb fits the greatest number of those tiny compartments into a hive.  It requires some higher mathematics to prove that an equivalent number of eight-sided cells would require greater space.  How do the bees "know" to go for hexagons? What pressures drive them?  To answer that puzzle, we would also need specialists in animal behavior.  And maybe a physicist too.

Bees also show up in the field of genetics.  Forget the familiar picture of two sexes coming together to create offspring with a 50-50 chance of being male or female.  In the peculiar world of honeybees, only the queen lays eggs, the numerous worker bees are undeveloped females, and the very few males that exist come from unfertilized eggs!

Bees have also buzzed their way into art books.  The complicated clash of circumstances and
personalities that occurred between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII is too often misrepresented

 as a stereotyped battle of truth vs. ignorance.  But if we follow the path of bees, we would find that before their conflict, Urban had praised Galileo's scientific writings and was a promoter of the arts and architecture.  Urban was from the Barberini family, whose signature symbol was bees.  A triad of bees mark many buildings in Roman built under that Pope's patronage; and golden bees grace Urban's tomb.

So numerous have been bees interconnections with the human race that we could develop a course titled "Honeybee History."  But then we'd have to argue over whether it should be handled by the history, biology, or environmental studies department.  Any professors up for co-teaching an interdisciplinary course?

~ ~ ~

Specialization suits bees quite well. Do you think it suits humans?

(The Paul Shepard quotation is from his book The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, © 1996, p. 124.)

Waste Not, Want Not

It's hard not to make jokes about it . But many of the jokes cannot be repeated on this website, given the respectful tone toward readers it aims to maintain.  We do have a high-sounding word for those low jokes: "scatological."  Yes, I'm talking about feces, manure, dung.

Perhaps a courteous way to begin to talk about it—especially in a website about Nature—is to talk about dung beetles.  When observing them, the comedy, instead of being scatological, can become lighthearted.  And, indeed, it is hard not to make jokes about dung beetles once you know that the oversized ball they comically struggle to take home is made out of manure.  When the manure the dung beetle locates is rolled in the usually sandy soil in which the beetle lives, it usually becomes a perfect sphere, sometimes larger in diameter than the beetle in length. As if to add another gag to its comic act, the beetle will often walk on its forelimbs, pushing the ball backwards with its rear legs.

There is, however, a seriousness of purpose behind the act.  The aim of the beetle's often difficult struggle is to get the ball into a burrow, where the beetle's eggs laid into the sphere will incubate in the decomposing heat of the manure. That choice of a material for a nursery also means that there will be ready-made food right at the mouths of the larvae once they hatch.

It is so fascinating for naturalists (or Nature lovers) to watch the dung beetle's maneuvering that they inspired the classic opening essay in Jean-Henri Fabre's ten-volume book on entomology, the study of insects.  He wrote of a group of them:

"What excitement over a single patch of Cow-dung! 
Never did adventurers hurrying from
the four corners of the earth
display such eagerness
in working a Californian claim."

Now that I've coyly talked about insects, I can return to my more delicate subject.  Viewed from a wider perspective than the several square yards a dung beetle inhabits, the matter of manure takes on larger implications.  Life on this finite planet could not exist if one species' waste did not become another species' raw material.  Moreover, the long-term quality of human civilization will depend in part upon how adept we become at recycling what we would have otherwise considered to be just trash or waste.

Given the critical nature of caring about where things go once we think we have gotten rid of them, the content of that beetle's prized ball might not be a bad place to begin our reflections. We humans, for good reason, do not talk too much about what we flush down the toilet. (One TV talk-show host in the early days of television even got disciplined for making a joke about what was demurely called a "water closet.")  Nevertheless, much could be revealed about the practical challenges of building a human civilization if we examined how humans have dealt with such waste.  Although I've never encountered a copy of the book, I do know that the nonfiction writer Lawrence Wright has written a book titled Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water Closet.

house in Tibet with manure-brick wall

People who have economically poorer lives in traditional cultures live out the meaning of "Waste not, want not."  In some societies, animal dung is even shaped into bricks, dried in the sun, and used as fuel.  Or even to make houses!  Mind you, I'm not suggesting that such a method of house-construction be widely adopted.  But such ingenious uses of even the most distasteful waste (as that little beetle knows) can help remind us that Nature is the Great Recycler. And it must be.

~ ~ ~

Have these reflections lead you to any thoughts about life?

(The quotation by Fabre is from his Souvenirs Entomologiques.)

Obliging Animals

As I drove home, I was debating in my head what I was going to do to resolve a problem I had encountered upon leaving home a few hours earlier.  Quite soon after exiting my driveway in the morning, I had noticed a dead opossum in the middle of the street.  It had most likely been struck by a car the night before, because its lifeless body was still intact even though surrounded by a swarm of flies.  And so, as I drove back home after running my errands, I wondered what I was going to do about that unpleasant dead animal on my suburban street. Trying to shovel it up to put it in the trash would be difficult by myself, especially given all the flies.  I had a vague recollection that one of the city's many phone numbers was listed as "Dead Animals," but in a sprawling city of a few million people, how long would it take for the overburdened city servants to respond to one small, dead animal?  What was I going to do?

As I turned the corner onto the street where I live, I was pleased to see that the problem had been taken care of by some obliging, non-human animals: Four vultures were by the street's curb, two of them picking at what little was left of the corpse.  The nicely-designed hooks on the tips of their beaks enabled them to easily tear off bite-sized pieces of meat.

I was struck by the contrast between my previously anxious mind about how to solve a problem and the relaxed casualness of the vultures.  They reminded me of a group of human diners at a Chinese restaurant who, after sharing a large meal, are in no hurry to leave, and so enjoy lingering together.  Two of them were still nibbling, while the other two lingered with the nibblers.

I do not know where the four vultures had been residing before they spotted the dead opossum.  But my appreciating how obliging they were in solving my clean-up problem led to my recalling the mob of flies that had been swarming around the corpse a few hours earlier.  Although distasteful to me, they too had been beginning Nature's disposal of the dead animal, even if in a much slower fashion.

How numerous are the species of animals that obligingly help us humans! (And here I am thinking of animals other than those who are coerced into becoming meat on our dinner plates.)  Such animals as bees that make honey, some of which we snitch.  And the many kinds of other insects that pollinate our fruit and nut trees.  Also, the earthworms that help rejuvenate the life-giving soil.  The list goes on at length.

Flies.  Vultures.  Bees.  Insects.  Worms.  These are all among the "Living Things We Love to Hate," as Des Kennedy expresses it in his book's title.  Nevertheless, such obliging animals, going about their own business, make our human work, recreation, and even lives possible.  We can be thankful for that.

~ ~ ~

Can you think of any other animals that help us in easily overlooked ways?

(The book mentioned is Living Things We Love to Hate: Facts, Fantasies & Fallacies by Des Kennedy, © 1992, 2002.)

Winged Flashes of Light and Insight

I can't remember the first time I saw a butterfly, but I do remember what my earliest impressions of them were.  Over the years, I have gradually learned more about butterflies, and with each step in learning, my thoughts about them have changed.  So also have butterflies been part of my changed thoughts about life itself.

A flash of bright, moving color in the sun.  That is my earliest recollection of a butterfly.  Even today, in the latter years of my adulthood, that is what first catches my eye.  It does seem to be an experience tuned to capture the interest of a young child:  The movement. The bright colors, something little kids seem to enjoy no matter whether it comes in butterflies or a box of crayons.  But nothing can quite duplicate a butterfly's tantalizing lure.  "Come and see me up close," it seems to say as it pauses on a flower not so far away.  But then it is off again, the direction it takes shifting unpredictably.  A beautiful combination of fragility and energy, a butterfly seems to be perfectly designed to encourage children to delight in life.

Like all children of elementary-school age, I soon learned about the connection between caterpillar and butterfly.  Even though the transitional state between the two was first described to me as a "cocoon," rather than the technically precise name of "chrysalis," I learned about the marvelous life cycles of these most beautiful insects:  Egg, larva (caterpillar), chrysalis, winged adult.  At some point I encountered how this almost unbelievable metamorphosis out of a dead-looking chrysalis has been a ready-made symbol for resurrection and rebirth.  The promise of new life and possibilities, even when death seems to have brought everything to an end.

In more recent years, I have become intrigued by some additional scientific facts about these insects. Specifically, that the winged butterfly -- which we tend to think of as being the point of all this metamorphosis -- actually lives an average of only two weeks.  Moreover, in the wild, only one percent of individuals make it through the whole cycle in all its stages.  I remember a man whose son was born with a genetic illness that meant the boy was destined to live only into latter teens unless he could get successful marrow and liver transplants.  The family struggled over the course of years, stretching out the life of a boy whose biological life did not naturally stretch into adulthood.  After the son died at college age, the father said that the most comforting words any person said to him were, "Your son's life was not wasted."  This, then is the latest lesson the butterflies carry for me, if I remember how short the lives of all winged butterflies actually are. Who would want to declare their lives a waste?

Perhaps a butterfly in flight can lead us to even another insight.  Eighty years before the theologian Paul Tillich's book titled The Eternal Now made that phrase famous, the nature-mystic Richard Jefferies described an experience he had outdoors:

"It is eternity now.  I am in the midst of it.  It is about me in the sunshine;

 I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air.

  Nothing has to come; it is now.  Now is eternity."

~~~

Do you have any special recollection about butterflies?  What do you like about them?

(The Jefferies quote is from his book The Story of My Heart [1883].  Chap. 3.)
(The photo of the chrysalis is by "Pollinator at the English language Wikipedia,"
 and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Tiny Tanks

Tiny army tanks -- that's what they often look like.  Beetles, that is.  The way these particular insects, often with bulky bodies, plow ahead over rough terrain can easily remind a child of army tanks they've seen on TV.  (One subgroup is even called "soldier beetles.")

One 20th-century evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, suggested that a different type of mindset might lie behind this Coleoptera category of insects, and his comment has entered the canon of science-humor stories.  After a distinguished career in biology, a reporter asked Haldane what conclusion about the mind of the Maker he had drawn from his vast, scientific knowledge of Nature.  Haldane replied, "an inordinate fondness for beetles."

Indeed, there are over 400,000 species of these little creatures (almost half of all insect species), identifiable by their pair of hard forewings serving as armor.  Some beetles click; some emit blinking light; some are like whirligigs.  Although the word "beetle" derives from the Old English "bitela," meaning "biting," very few would bite you.

 I know God did not invent beetles just to entertain us.  (They and many other insects were, after all, around for at least 50 million years before hominids came along.) Nevertheless, more than one science-humor story revolves around them.

A frequently repeated anecdote is about the young Charles Darwin when he was alone, collecting beetles (one of his favorite hobbies).  Spotting an unusual beetle, he picked it up, but then spotted one of a different species, which he picked up with his other hand.  But then he spotted a third beetle, and so popped the second beetle into his mouth to quickly free a hand.  As Darwin later recalled, "Alas, [the beetle in my mouth] ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out."  The author of a juvenile-level biography concludes this story with the straight-faced comment, "Bugs don't always do what you want them to, and not all beetles want to be caught."

It would be fun to think that God had invented Darwin's squirting beetle so that writers of biographies for youth would have a funny story to insert into their manuscript.  But I expect God has larger concerns in mind than the entertainment of readers.  (Even if the 19th-century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray was able to wittily turn "beetle" into a verb by saying in Vanity Fair that "Chambermaids... beetled from bedroom to bedroom loaded with... champagne.")

No, my hunch is that the plenitude of beetle species has more to do with the strength of their body type and its adaptability to many different environments.  Hopefully, our human sense of humor will remain just as strong and adaptable.

~~~

Even if you don't know what type they were, have you ever noticed any insects around the entrance to where you live?

(The Haldane quote was in an article by G. Evelyn Hutchinson

 in The American Naturalist in 1959 [93, 870]: 145-159.)

(The Darwin remembrance, originally in Life and Letters, Vol. 1, p. 43, and comment about it

 are from Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman, © 2009.  p. 24.)

The Restraint of Insects

Most people in the U.S., I would guess, have heard of the cartoonist Charles Schulz, creator of "Peanuts."  A fair number of people have heard of Pogo's creator Walt Kelly.  Few people, however, know the name Don Marquis, who, in the first part of the 20th century, created the serialized humor of "Archy and Mehitabel."  In its time, that series provided witty comment on the human condition, usually through the eyes of an otherwise harmless cockroach named Archy.  I was struck by the perceptiveness of one of Archy's observations I recently came across in an anthology:

"if all the bugs

in all the worlds...

should sharpen up

their little stings

and turn their feelings loose

they soon would show

all human beans...

their relative significance

among the spinning stars."

green damselfly

Indeed, if human beings ("beans," as Archy pronounces it) could actually experience firsthand the bottled-up energy of every single insect in the world, we would quickly know we are outnumbered.  The best calculations are that insects outnumber the human population a million to one, and in total body mass outweigh the human population twelve times over. Moreover, what an enduring as well as versatile form evolution found when it developed the insect structure. We human beings walking upright are only one species; but the basic insect structure (3-sectioned body & 6 legs) comes in a fantastic array of a million species.  Some are as delicate as a damselfly.  Others, such as Goliath beetles, look like army tanks in comparison. Still others, such as walking sticks, are camouflaged as twigs.

ladybug

Given the incomprehensible number of insects worldwide, and the versatility of the class Insecta to evolve in almost any condition, the "if" that introduces Archy's poem is significant: Archy's scenario is imaginary. Insects are, for the greater part, much more concerned with leading their own lives than they are with harassing humans. Moreover, a mindless desire on our part to indiscriminately rid our planet of insects would mean the loss of bees and other insects that pollinate fruit and nut trees, and help pollinate other crops. Their roles as pollinators only hint at the vital links insects serve overall, being food for birds, some fishes, and many mammals.  Those animals in turn nurture the many cycles of air and soil. Not to mention the delight many children can get as they discover the animated wonders of usually harmless insects.

Archy, in his own restraint, merely implied another point.  Namely that, on the whole, the class Insecta has demonstrated more restraint in its behavior than has Homo sapiens.  Although we do need to find better ways to regulate the dangerous effects of certain insects, maybe we can add to our more restrained behavior a greater appreciation of the benefits of insects.

~~~

Have you every imagined what it would be like to be a certain insect?  Which one?

(The poem of Archy is from

  The Lives and Times of Arch & Mehitabel by Don Marquis, © 1935.)
(The photo of the damselfly by JDP90 [Joydeep] used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

The “Seven-Year” Insect Itch

Of all non-human forms of Nature that many people in the U.S. encounter, there is one form that may be the oddest.  Some people consider the species to be just noisemakers.  Other people find the "background music" they make somehow relaxing.  (Maybe they're an acquired taste.) Whatever you think of them, they are the Cicadidae family, or cicadas.

When I first moved to the southern U.S. and encountered these insects, a few southerners called them "locusts." But that is a misnomer.  Cicadas do not come in Biblical-type plagues sweeping across the sky.  Cicadas don't congregate in those kind of numbers, nor do they travel far.  In fact, they are more of home-bodies, their entire life journey extending not much further than down the height of tree and back up again.

The adult form, which makes that controversial drone, looks like a giant green fly that has bulked up.  However, despite the inescapable summer sound of cicadas in the South, we humans rarely get a close look at the adults with their large delicate wings folded back over the body.  What we can get a close look at is the shell-like remnant of the nymphs that preceded the adults.  Rather than emerging from a cocoon, the adult emerges out of the exoskeleton of a wingless kind of brown "bug," which is left behind on the bark of a tree.

When several such remnants are on a single tree, they demonstrate visually the life story of the cicada.  All the nymphs' empty shells will be oriented away from the ground they left behind and will be marching upward (where the adults went to mate and lay eggs).  The nymphs make this short trek partway toward the treetops after having lived underground, frequently for 13 years.  (Sometimes the cicadas are called "seven-year cicadas," but that number "7" probably comes form our biblical heritage, seven being in the Bible a symbol of completion.)

It is this long life underground that makes the cicadas so odd.  We may think that a cicada population is being reborn every summer, but what we see are in most species the offspring of adults who laid eggs several years ago. There are actually multiple synchronized populations of cicadas, each set waiting for its turn to appear.

This could be real inspiration for a science-fiction story.  Imagine a planet on which there are ten sets of people -- each set looking exactly like each other set.  Only one set at a time appears out of a subterranean hiding place.  But our Star Trek crew who has landed on the planet does not know there are multiple sets of people.  As a result, the Star Trek crew becomes totally baffled in trying to deal with the planet's inhabitants.  It would be bizarre, and yet this is happening with the cicadas on our planet Earth!

~~~

Looking back upon your own life, is there something you now see as having taken years to come to fruition and completion?