The honey bees’ ability to learn faces is unexpected. –  Scientific American

Older beekeepers often tell me that their honey bees recognise them – now there’s research to support this. Honey bees’ brains are the size of a sesame seed with only 1 million neurons (we have 100 billion!) but bees can learn patterns, navigate, communicate, count, tell time, measure, and memorize.  They can also recognise human faces. Honey bees don’t have distinctive ‘faces’ so this ability is more about their pattern-recognition skills (I wonder if it’s also about their close relationship with humans). Here’s how I might look to a bee with it’s many-faceted compound eyes (squint to see my face!):

The life of the bee is like a magic well: the more we draw from it, the more there is to draw.’ — Karl von Frisch

The Nativity, illustrated by Julie Vivas, is my favourite children’s Christmas book. The pictures convey the humanity of the story by showing the love between Mary and Joseph, the pregnancy and birth, within a rustic setting. Oddly, it all sits well with the poetic language of the 17th century King James version of the Bible. Vivas also illustrated the wonderful book for babies,  I Went Walking.

Everything in the tales appears to happen by chance – and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated. – A. S. Byatt

One of the appeals of the 200 year old tales of the Brothers’ Grimm is how random events seem connected (read Byatt’s essay here). They are stories of generic princesses, simpletons, brothers and sisters who meet with good or bad ‘luck’ on their quest, yet are bound by the rules of the fairy tale world – life has a kind of guided randomness, but usually with a happy ending. Perhaps this is the way children see the world: capricious, a little scary, but ultimately, a hopeful place.

When I was a child I loved how the Grimm’s characters met the forces of their fickle world with kindness and cunning. I’d lay in bed and delight in Danny Kaye’s reading of Clever Gretel on Sunday morning radio. The illustration above is by the great Arthur Rackham (see more on Brain Pickings).

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.– G.K. Chesterton

• Plant a lot of flowers – a bee can visit thousands a day
• Plant flowers that bloom at different times in a year
• Bees like blue and purple flowers
• Include flowering trees – one big tree is like a meadow for bees
• Let parts of your lawn grow long – bees love dandelions
• Avoid using pesticides – especially near flowers
• Put out water for bees – use shallow containers

Read: Planting for Honeybees by Sarah Lewis

Dae they no ken that Tintin’s in danger?

The Derk Isle is the first Tintin book to be translated into the Scots language (which is over 1000 years old and is still spoken) and it works a wee treat. Familiarity with the original, The Black Island (1938), adds to the fun but most readers will easily understand the Scots (it’s best read aloud). Among the delightful phrases: ‘dinna fash’ (don’t worry), ‘whit a scunner’ (what a nuisance), and ‘blackbelickit’ (drat). Snowy becomes Tarrie (terrier) and the Thompson twins are Nesbit and Nesbit.

“He’s a fair wunner, is wee Tarrie. There’s no a dug like him for snowkin efter crooks!”

“Oot ye get! An nae joukery-pawkery, mind!”

Twenty-Three Tales by Tolstoy

There is only one time that is important – Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.

Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson

Moominpappa had no idea what to do with himself, because it seemed everything there was to be done had already been done.

The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

  If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.

Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

 I wouldn’t have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must without knowing it, and no doubt it was there, sweating away diligently at the old stand, all the while the corporeal Wooster was getting his eight hours.

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury

And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig is a picture book about a child’s fear of separation; it won the Caldecott Medal in 1969. The brilliantly absurd plot has Sylvester the young donkey trapped inside a rock while his parents search frantically for him. It’s Steig’s version of his favourite book, Pinocchio, about a boy trapped inside a piece of wood. The ending is typical Steig: the child reunited with loved ones in with hugs and tears – when he was 15 years old, young William ran away to sea after an argument with his father:

When I finally got home, my mom and dad hugged and kissed me and we all cried. We were a very emotional family.

Read more about Steig and his life-affirming books.

Far from being a means to escape the social world, reading stories can actually improve your social skills by helping you better understand other human beings. – Keith Oatley (The Psychology of Fiction)

That master of imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, said that fantasy “offers not an escape away from reality, but an escape to a heightened reality”. When we read any fiction we enter an imaginary world, but it’s the characters that we attach to most of all. When our emotions are triggered by the characters, that’s when we get an understanding of real life relationships. Children develop empathy for others from about 4 years old – and hearing and reading fiction enables them to walk in another’s shoes. Another great reason for reading to children!

While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture. – Maryanne Wolf

Picture from a book about feelings: Bravo by Philip Waechter

Insect reality is more outlandish than any fantasy:

• The snowy tree cricket is also a thermometer. Its rate of chirping will tell you the air temperature: count the number of chirps in 7 seconds and add 4˚C.
• The silk moth wraps itself in a single thread up to 2 kilometres long.
• Cicada membranes produce sound louder than lawnmowers with their amplifying air sacs.
• The wings of a biting midge beat at 1,046 strokes  per second.
• The tiny minim ants ride on top of leaves carried by their big sister leaf-cutter ants, protecting them from parasitic flies.

Read Extreme Insects, by Richard Jones (photo gallery.)

This extremely beautiful stick insect visited our house:

We fill our lives with honey and wax.. giving  humans the two noblest things, which are sweetness and light. – Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’sTravels) 1773

Honey bees give us golden gifts as well as honey: wax, propolis, and pollen. Beeswax (made inside bees’ bodies) has oodles of uses, including in food-wrap (goodbye plastic!), polish, jelly beans, artists’ media, dental floss and cleaning up oil spills. It’s a best for candles because it gives a sweet scent and a lustrous, smokefree light. Propolis is the bee’s cleaning product – a sticky, germ-killing resin they collect from plants. It’s used to plug cracks and keep the hive healthy. Propolis fights infection in humans, especially in the mouth. Pollen is rich in protein and vitamins for the bees; but humans eat it too. The boxer, Muhammad Ali, ate pollen, which may explain his motto: ‘I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s, Strength To Love, was written during the Civil Rights struggle in the early 1960s. King’s stirring style was aimed at a live church audience and you can almost hear the “Amens” after some sentences. Many of his political statements were censored by the publisher at the time, but almost 60 years later his words remain powerful and relevant. King encourages people to be forgiving, non-violent, non-conformists; and to confront militarism and inequality in society.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together.

Expenditures for defence have risen to mountainous proportions. The nations have believed that greater armaments will cast out fear, but they have produced greater fear.

Through non-violent resistance we shall be able to oppose the unjust system and at the same time love the perpetrators of the system. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Capitalism must undergo continual change if our great national wealth is to be more equitably distributed.

All life is interrelated. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.

Ferdinand (1936) by Munro Leaf is one of the most influential children’s books because of its simple but powerful theme. The tale of a bull who likes to smell flowers instead of fighting was seen as a pacifist text at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Ferdinand chooses to be himself rather than follow the aggressive crowd. No wonder the book was:

• banned by Franco
• burned by Hitler
• a favourite of Gandhi
• made into an Oscar-winning film.

Read the true story of the bull who inspired it: The Marginalian.

Munro Leaf also wrote books which reflected the stricter child-raising style of his time. 3 and 30 Watchbirds (1941) condemns children’s behaviours such as shoe-scuffing, mumbling, moaning, fidgeting, and wasting food. Some of it’s in the spirit of war-time frugality, but some is just plain excessive:

Grammar Can Be Fun is slightly more tongue-in-cheek and warns children against slack language such as “gimme, wanna, gonna, and ain’t”.

Hergé was a master of evoking atmosphere. Think of Professor Tarragon’s house in The Seven Crystal Balls: the building storm, the heat leading to the burst tyre, the gust of wind as depicted by a slender tree against a slate-grey sky, the sinister mummy in his cabinet, the ball lightning, Tintin’s nightmare – such a feeling of supernatural dread evoked by a confluence of natural events.

Despite the cinematic quality of Hergé’s stories, Tintin’s true home is in the comic book medium. He occupies a space at a perfect level of abstraction, real enough to evoke our world, pared back enough to activate the imagination. – Hugh Todd

Read the whole the interview with comic artist, Hugh Todd: My Dinner With Herge

1. Have plenty of books available.
Access to books is the key – books help children learn. Love your local library!

2. Read aloud.

• start a book together and let the child finish it,
•  children read to a pet,
•  have a family read-athon.

The amount of time the child spends listening to parents and other loved ones read continues to be one of the best predictors of later reading. – Maryanne Wolf

3. Find the best books.
Children can’t resist great books, such as:

• Millions of Cats by Wanda G’ag,
• Shrek by William Steig,
• Moomin books by Tove Jansson,

4. Match books to children’s interests.
Whatever they want to read – comic books, science, or monsters – they probably need it. Librarians love to help you find the right book.

You need a top story. You need a subject that interests a child. And you need something that they can read. – Paul Jennings

5. Interact with books.

• write to the author,
•  dress up as characters,
•  create book artwork,
•  write a book.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched…

So begins The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, but some did believe it 80 years ago on Halloween in 1938. Orson Welles’ fake news report based on the 1898 novel tricked many people into thinking it was a real invasion, if not by the Martians then by the Germans. The radio broadcast was scarily realistic (listen to a clip here).  The 120 year old novel is hugely influential  in giving the world extraterrestrial consciousness and opening narrative wells that produced countless sci-fi stories (although it does have a few racist attitudes of its time). H.G.Wells once met Orson Welles in this interview. 

Picture by Alvim Corréa, 1906 edition.

The second most complex language on the planet. – Professor James Gould

We communicate with the alphabet; honey bees are the only other creatures we know of that use symbols: their dance movements. When a bee finds a patch of flowers she goes home and dances for her sister bees. The dance shows the other bees both the direction and the distance to the flowers.

Direction: told by the angle of the dance. For example, if the bee dances straight up the honeycomb it means ‘fly straight towards the sun’.
Distance: told by waggling. Each waggle of the bee’s body means a set distance: eg. one waggle might mean 50 metres, so 10 waggles = 500 metres to fly. A faster waggle dance means the flowers have plenty of nectar.
Remember that bees dance in the dark! The audience gets the message through touch, sound, smell, and taste.

Stories tend to get out of hand– Tolkien

Reading Humphrey Carpenter’s wonderful J.R.R. Tolkien – A Biography.  The story of his early life and evolution of his stories is fascinating. Some quirky influences on Tolkien’s writing:

• The toddler Tolkien attacked by a terrifying tarantula in South Africa (1895)
• Tolkien’s teacher trained his dog to lick its lips with the command “smakka bagms”
• His fellowship of young writers which is broken by the Great War
• The inspiration of the Kalevala mythology of Finland
• A ‘nasty’ holiday on which he wrote a poem about a slimy cave creature named ‘Glip’
• His friendship with C.S.Lewis, on whom he based Treebeard’s ‘hrooming’ voice

Link to all the Lord of the Rings covers.

Iona and Peter Opie were like the Brothers’ Grimm of the 1950s. Their fabulous book was The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, an epic collection of children’s rhymes, riddles, superstitions, jeers, and customs, garnered from interviews with thousands of English children in the 1950s. Many of these rhymes and tricks persist in the playground today. Here are some gems from the Opie’s collection:

Pinch-me, Punch-me, and Steponmytoes,
Went down to the river to swim,
Two of the three were drowned,
Who do you think was saved?

Old Mr Kelly,
Had a pimple on his belly;
His wife cut it off,
It tasted like jelly.

When the war is over Hitler will be dead,
He hopes to go to heaven with a crown upon his head.
But the Lord said, No! You’ll have to go below,
There’s only room for Churchill, so cheery, cheery oh.

God made the bees
The bees make the honey;
We do the work,
The teacher gets the money.

Scab and matter custard,
Green snot pies,
Dead dog’s giblets
Dead cat’s eyes.
Hard boiled snails, Spread it thick
Wash it down with a cup of cold sick!

 

It’s really, really heartbreaking. But for some reason you want to read it again and again. It’s an extraordinary love story.– Michael Morpurgo

Almost every Sunday morning as a child  I’d listen to Oscar Wilde’s short story, The Happy Prince (1888), on the radio and cry into my pillow so my brother nearby wouldn’t hear. A statue being stripped of his gold to feed the poor seems an unlikely plot for children. I didn’t understand all of Wilde’s lyrical language back then but the story shaped my values concerning wealth, poverty, and authority figures:

“The living always think that gold can make them happy.”

Listen to that radio version read by Robert Morley.

That touch of reality in a child’s life is a child’s comfort. The child gets the sense that this person who wrote this book knows about me and knows the world can be a troubling, incomprehensible place. Maurice Sendak

Outside Over There is my favourite Maurice Sendak picture book –  –  nobody else combined the real and the unreal so well. It’s a  tale of separation and siblings (that features a creepy ice baby) and is both haunting and comforting.

Sendak’s books can be exuberant (In the Night Kitchen), spiritual (Dear Mili), and funny (Pierre, a cautionary tale). I like his vision of atoms dancing to form molecules from the first book he illustrated (when 19 years old), Atomics for the Millions:

Pollination: ‘a love story that feeds the Earth.’ – Louie Schwartzberg

We can’t survive without bees and bees won’t survive unless we love them. It’s a unique partnership between ‘wild’ creatures and humans: honey bees give us fruit, vegetables, and pastures – we must make sure they have a variety of flowering plants and clean habitats (avoid pesticides, especially neonicotinoids).

Human beings have fabricated the illusion that they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature’s services. – Achim Steiner

 Watch a sweet little film, Dance of the Honey Bee’ (Vimeo).

Everyone loves honey bees…even Daleks:

E.B. White wrote only three children’s books and two are America’s top books (Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little). What was his secret? Imagination, yes, but he also took his time and revised a lot to refine his style. Charlotte’s Web is a short book but it took two years to write the first draft, then another year to rewrite it. It has the best opening line of any children’s book  – “Where’s Papa going with that axe?”; and perhaps the finest ending (certainly the most heart-rending).

The ending is as beautiful, bold and full of integrity as Charlotte herself.– Guardian

In a Paris Review interview, White puts a witty spin on procrastination (which writers are good at):

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.

My recent essays:

Moomintrolls For Life, from Saplings magazine.

These books by Tove Jansson are the perfect children’s stories – thrilling, comforting, funny, profound…

The Presence of Trees, from Down In Edin magazine.

Trees are not only smart but are vital to the functioning of the planet’s natural cycles. Trees are also one of our few natural allies in the daunting fight against global warming.

Tane Mahuta, 2000 year old kauri

Books are sensory – they have a pleasing look, a comforting smell, a grainy feel, a satisfying weight. You can lend a book, read it everywhere, stow it anywhere, hide treasures in it.  The best-loved books are dog-eared, coffee-stained, and inscribed: carrying memories locked into untold brain networks by all the experiences you had when reading it.

And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words…― Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

A book works at my speed, comfortable and slow, faster when I want it to be, then slow again. Many of my books are old friends.– Jack Lasenby (interview here).

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it….And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.– Julian Barnes

A honeycomb is made from wax produced by bees, and shaped into near perfect hexagons. The comb is not only a pantry for storing honey, it’s also the bee’s kitchen, nursery, bedroom and dance floor. This photo shows cells in the comb used to store honey – the bees put a layer of white wax ‘capping’ over the honey to preserve it.

This next photo shows cells used to raise baby bees (the white larvae are visible in some cells). These larval cells are then capped so the bee can develop into an adult. Lovely photos by artist Claire Beynon (click to enlarge).

My new Nature Stroybook, Gecko, is about a day in the life of a gecko, as he hunts for food in the jungle and is himself hunted by deadly predators. With stunning illustrations by Brian Lovelock and published internationally by Walker Books. Learn more about Geckos.

Reading a book leaves us with new neural pathways. Gail Rebuck (Humans Have the Need To Read)

Reading can be learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed. Maryanne Wolf

Readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative… using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities. Washington University

We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically. – Gregory Berns (Emory University)

Photo: My grandson, Spencer, 5 months old

Jane Goodall’s memoir, Reason For Hope, is certainly that – her life in an inspiration in difficult times. The book covers her childhood in WW2; her studies of chimpanzees which revolutionised biology; and her development work via the Goodall Institute. The writing is honest and poetic, and I like the way she integrates science with her beliefs (which embrace several traditions). Here’s a link to an interview with Jane Goodall; and quotes from the book:

Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference.

We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a ‘tale told by an idiot’, a purposeless emergence of life-forms…or we believe that, as Teilhard de Chardin put it, ‘There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.’

Yes, my child, go out into the world; walk slow
And silent, comprehending all, and by and by
Your soul, the Universe, will know
Itself: the Eternal I.

Honey bees have a body clock to keep track of time – this is vital because flowers produce nectar at different hours of the day – eg. dandelions at about 9AM. We have a similar inner clock but most of us rely on outer clocks to tell the time. If our devices were removed we’d probably revive our body clock. Bees learn very quickly: scientists trained some bees to feed (on sugar water) at 10.30AM, and after that the bees turned up at exactly that time to be fed every day.

Not another pirate picture book! Yes, but a beautifully offbeat one. Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939) is a masterpiece of illustration by the artist/novelist Mervyn Peake (author of the intricate Gormenghast trilogy). His pirate Captain has a mid-life crisis on a weird pink island where he discovers ‘a creature as bright as butter’ who inspires him to ‘drop out’ (the creature looks ‘like Bob Dylan with cocker-spaniel ears’ – NY Times.) Peake’s son, Fabian, says his father always wanted to live on an island ‘living a bohemian life free from the pressures of modern society’. See more of Peake’s incredible illustrations.