A quick note to let you know I’m going to be doing a bit of spring cleaning behind the scenes on this blog (which means rooting out bad PHP, changing themes, and converting to https).
Hopefully things will continue working without too much interruption. In the meanwhile, enjoy this photograph from the Insects Unlocked Public Domain photostream.
As you know, sometimes we let bees creep in here at Wild About Ants.
The Bee Diaries Project is a short series of popular science podcasts about bees in Great Britain.
Prof Dave Goulson talks about the waggle dance in honey bees and bee communication in general.
They left me wishing there were more in the series.
How well do you know bees?
http://beediaries.co.uk/take-the-quiz/
How very far we have come in the last 100 years or so. If you haven’t thought about that fact lately, compare Anatomy of the Honey Bee by R.E. Snodgrass (1910) (or Cornell University Press, 1985), – parts of which are available at Extension.org – with the ultra-modern Bee
Featuring an outstanding series of scanning electron microscope photos, Bee is a visual treat. As you can see from Fisher’s examples on her website, this is a mite’s view of a honey bee where eye hairs look like forests and pollen grains resemble boulders. It is a world Snodgrass could only dream of glimpsing.
The text that accompanies the photographs is sparse, but to the point, which is direct contrast to the text-heavy Anatomy of the Honey Bee.
Anatomy of the Honey Bee, however, still remains relevant. It covers far more than just external structures, including development and internal anatomy. Carefully labelled cut-away and exploded views make identification of individual structures much easier.
In fact, these two books complement each other nicely. A serious student of honey bees will want to look at them both ways.
Bees Collecting Pollen 2004-08-14” by Jon Sullivan – Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Doesn’t comparing these two books make you wonder what the next 100 years will bring?
You might have noticed that we’ve done a bit of spring housecleaning here at Wild About Ants. Mostly, it was because of issues on the editorial side with the old theme. The old theme was clunky to upgrade and had a few eccentricities. This one is much better.
If you have a minute, would you take a look at the background color? I tried to match the yellow in the flowers, but I’m not sure it is a very attractive color. Please let me know what you think.
Thanks!
