Recent research has revealed more amazing honey bee abilities:

• Bee-Sweet: Bees detect electrical signals from flowers which help identify flowers with the best nectar.
• Bee-Spresso: Many flowers have caffeine in their nectar which attracts bees.
• Bee-Tox: When bees eat their own honey it detoxifies them with antibiotics.
• Bee-Friend: Bees use their right-side antenna to tell friend from foe – it has more hairs on it.
• Bee-Still: Even small amounts of pesticides will destroy a beehive. Don’t spray near flowers!

Photo: Brittany bee

• A tower of 10 million atoms would only be as tall as a grain of sand.
• Picture a walnut sitting in the palm of your hand – if the walnut was an atom then your hand would have to be the size of the Earth.
• Seven octillion atoms [7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000] make up your body.

Atoms are held together by electromagnetic forces and they are mostly empty inside. You are made of atoms, so you’re mostly empty space too. Atoms have smaller particles inside them. There’s a nucleus in the centre with a cloud of electrons around it.  Deeper inside are even smaller particles named gluons, muons, strange quarks, and charm quarks. We live inside a vast universe, but there’s also universe inside us

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. – Graham Greene

In a world that offers children so many digital delights, why bother with books?

1. Books help children understand the world

Books expose children to new ideas and help shape their world view – reading is a meeting of minds.

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

2. Books help children understand themselves

Stories give a frame of reference by which they can measure their experiences and feelings.

We read books to find out who we are. – Ursula K Le Guin

3. Books develop children’s imagination

Reading is imagination, and imagination enriches the real world.

Children do not despise real woods because they have read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all woods a little enchanted. – C.S. Lewis

4. Books develop children’s brains

Books boost a child’s intellectual development. The brain changes when children learn to read: it creates new neural pathways….reading and thinking enhance each other.

5. Books are enjoyable.

Ultimately a child must want to read. The child who reads for pleasure is forming a wonderful habit – and there’s also pleasure for parents in reading aloud.

See also: Guide To Best Books For Children

Tell all the truth but tell it slant – Emily Dickinson

Science can be difficult to describe: all the maths, jargon, and slippery quantum physics. That’s why analogies and metaphors are so useful in science. And so comforting:

We find it easier to reason by comparing unfamiliar with familiar, falling back on experience, looking for links between things, and seeking out pattern and meaning.  – Joel Levy, A Bee in a Cathedral

Science abounds in comparisons: a greenhouse to explain global warming; a cat in a box to illustrate a paradox; and Kepler’s clockwork solar system. One of my favourites compares quantum physics to jazz and general relativety to a waltz:

General relativity is like Strauss — deep, dignified and graceful. Quantum theory, like jazz, is disconnected, syncopated, and dazzlingly modern. – Margaret Wertheim, Physics’s Pangolin

Photo: Shrödinger’s Cat in a super position

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.– Ray Bradbury

The human brain:

• 85 billion neurons (nerve cells)
• Each neuron is unique
• Each neuron connects to 10,000 other neurons
• That’s up to 1,000 trillion connections possible

The universe is not composed of mere matter, but of mind stuff. – Charles Birch

Photo: ‘Facebook’, my limestone bookends inspired by a Polynesian mask.

It’s the most important relationship on Earth – everything in Nature depends on pollinators and flowers getting together.

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

For a flower to make seeds and fruit, its pollen (male) must move to an egg (female), usually in another flower – and bees do most of the pollen-moving. The result is a cornucopia of foods from cherries to cashews to coffee. Humans’ relationship with pollinators is also crucial, so let’s provide bees with a variety of flowers, clean water, and poison-free gardens.

Louie Schwatzberg’s Wings Of Life:

Nearly all of the atoms in your body were once cooked in the nuclear furnace of an ancient supernova. – Frances Collins

The story of us began in the stars. The universe expanded after the Big Bang, forming atoms of hydrogen and helium. The atoms gathered in galaxies where they came in handy as fuel for stars. When stars died (supernova) new atoms were released – including carbon and oxygen, happily for us. By and by, over 8 billion years, planets were formed and Earth’s story began.

Photo (NASA Images): Star that exploded in a supernova leaving a ring that’s rich in oxygen.

A beautiful star-metaphor appeals to my sense that our cosmic journey has meaning:

The universe is made of stars, not atoms – Muriel Rukeyser

The /Xam San people of Southern Africa knew that humans were related to the stars in a mysterious way. The /Xan suffered a slow genocide in the 1800s but their words remain. Their stories tell us that the stars are closely connected to humans:

“The stars know the time at which we die.” –Díä!kwain, 1876

Writing requires four fundamental steps:

Imagine: ‘Open your mind’ (P.D. James)

Write: ‘Put one word after another’ (Neil Gaiman)

Edit: ‘Omit needless words’ (William Strunk)

Hope: ‘Outrun the self-doubt’ (Stephen King)

The steps of writing harmonise with the four fundamental forces of the physical world:

Electromagnetism: has infinite range, like imagination,

Weak Force: is confined to the atoms, as a writer must be confined to work.

Strong Force: holds nuclei together, as editing strengthens writing.

Gravity: keeps us anchored and has infinite range, like hope.

Read my essay, The Science of Writing.

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

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’.

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.

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:

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.

Am I really made of stardust? Yes, many of my (and your) atoms were made in dying stars – when the stars exploded (‘supernova’) the atoms were flung into the universe and eventually became planets and plankton and people. The atoms themselves have not changed but were constantly recycled into different matter – those same atoms of stardust make up 93% of my body mass (some are hydrogen atoms which are actually Big Bang dust). That means I’m billions of years old… which is strange but oddly hopeful.

‘Our presence in the universe is deeply rooted in this cosmic history.’– Marco Bersanelli, physicist.

My Mum and Dad? The remnants of two ancient supernova explosions, Puppis and Vela. Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Honey bees are the glue that holds our agricultural system together…Hannah Nordhaus

There are few butterflies in New Zealand but there are over 1,650 species of moth (most are found only here) which are important pollinators. The largest is the beautiful puriri, which can be up to 15 cm across its velvety wings. It spends four years as a caterpillar eating rotten wood, then changes into a moth that lives for only a few days.

Photo: Puriri Moth, © Robert Hoare (used with permission). Click to enlarge.

1. The bee and its place in history:  by Claire Preston, author of Bee.

The bee is the only creature on the planet that is a true creative artisan. It gathers materials and transforms them to make not only architecture but food.– Claire Preston

2. Behind the Bee’s Knees: The Origins of Nine Bee-Inspired Sayings

In the late 18th century, this slang term for something stylish and excellent actually referred to something small, weak or insignificant, such as the joint in a bee’s little leg.– Time

Reading and brain development are linked almost from birth. A baby’s brain grows quickly (tripling in size in the preschool years) as the brain cells make connections with each other. What creates those connections? Reading and singing to a baby; playing with a baby; touch and eye contact. By six years old, a child has the most brain connections he or she will ever have. A baby who’s been introduced to books will start school with many literacy skills in place.

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

Reading and thinking can enhance each other. It’s our brain’s ‘plasticity’ that enables us to learn to read – reading creates brand new neural pathways and these then become the basis for new thinking. (More reading quotes here).

 Spencer and his Dad

In late autumn most of the male bees (drones) are pushed outside the hive to die – the female worker bees can’t afford the honey to feed them all.
 In winter, the large bee family huddles together in a tight ball which traps the heat of their bodies. It’s amazing that even when it’s way below zero outside, bees can keep the cluster at around 95˚F (35˚C). To adjust their temperature, bees vibrate their wing muscles and constantly change places with each other within the huddle. This close cooperation means bees can control the temperature and survive in almost any climate. Bees eat their honey in winter and on the odd fine day they fly outside to poo, as is their hygienic habit.

We should not write them off as superstitious primitives.– James Hannam

It’s a myth (turned cliche) that science and faith have always been at odds. The book, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam, shows how the church supported the genesis of science. Medieval universities were church-sponsored and ‘natural philosophy’ (as science was called back then) was a core subject. European thinkers drew on ancient Greek and Islamic texts to develop scientific principles that we still use today. Hannam debunks the myth of the ‘Dark Ages’: for example, people knew the Earth was round; the Christian church did not routinely persecute scientists; there were many inventions, from clocks to spectacles; and early Islamic scientists discovered how the eye functions and invented surgical instruments. (Essay on Science and Soul).

At last, a big picture is emerging in science as links have been found between the small and the large, between quantum physics and biology. The poster child of ‘quantum biology’ is the European robin. The bird uses the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate vast distances – but the field is 100 times weaker than a fridge magnet, so how does the robin detect it? It uses an very finely balanced system that reaches from the sub-atomic level to the biological. Here’s how it seems to work: a photon (‘particle’) of  light enters the bird’s eye as it’s flying; the photon is absorbed by a protein molecule in the eye where it causes electrons to become ‘entangled’ (an electron state that’s sensitive to magnetic fields); this creates a chemical change in the protein molecule which sends a signal to the bird’s brain telling it which way to fly. This ‘magneto-reception’ occurs in many bird species (including chickens!), honey bees, dolphins, butterflies, sharks, lobsters and stingrays. This fascinating book tells the full story:

The movie that forever changed my attitude to the future. – Michio Kaku

Forbidden Planet is a classic sci-fi movie about an alien society that has destroyed itself through technology and the scientist, Morbius, who discovers their secret.  It shares elements with The Tempest except the movie uses science in place of the supernatural – the great Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim was that any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  The film’s science is plausible and the psychology even more so. I love this movie for the brilliant monster from the sub-conscious (designed by Disney animators); its set design; the first ever all-electronic  score (by Bebe and Louis Barron); and the melodramatic script:

My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it! – Morbius

A Bee in a Cathedral by Joel Levy is a fascinating book of science analogies and astonishing numbers. Suitable for all ages, only the physics section is a bit complex. A few of my favourites factoids:

• Every day 1 million meteoroids strike the Earth
• How far to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri? Travelling in a rocket at 250,000km/h, it would take you 18,000 years
• Most of the living cells in your body are less than a month old
• About 50 million neutrinos are passing through you now
• Every molecule in a glass of water is changing partners billions of times a second.
• How hard does your heart pump blood? Empty a bathtub in 15 minutes using only a teacup —repeat this without stopping for the rest of your life
• If an atom were blown up to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be no larger than a bee buzzing about in the centre.

Male bees (drones) have a decadent life inside the hive but it ends gruesomely. In spring and summer drones spend their days eating and sleeping – the female bees even clean up their droppings for them. In autumn the females push most of the drones out of the beehive to die in the cold air. Why have drones at all? To mate with a new queen, but it only happens once every few years. Several drones will mate with her and die in the act. Drones themselves have no father; they hatch from unfertilised eggs. It was once thought all bees came from virgin births, until in 1788 a blind Swiss naturalist, Francois Huber, proved that queens mated.

What big eyes the drones have; all the better to find the queen.

Honey bees have six (girl) powers to match any comic-book super hero. And like every super hero bees have one fatal weakness: when a bee stings you, it dies.

1. Super Flyers
Like Superman, bees are great flyers. A bee flies about 1000 km in her life. If she was human sized, that’d be like going five times around the planet. And she can carry 122 times her own weight.

2. Super Attractors
Like Magneto, honey bees use electro-magnetic forces. They have their own navigational GPS thanks to millions of magnetic crystals that sense the Earth’s magnetic field. Bees also have an electrical charge which attracts pollen.

3. Super Therms
Like Torch and Mr Freeze, bees cope with extreme temperatures. In the heat, air-conditioner bees fan their wings to cool the hive; and in the cold, bees huddle in a tight ball and shiver to keep warm.

4. Super Smarts
Like Professor X, bees are intelligent communicators. They are the only other creatures we know that use a symbolic language. The bee dance indicates direction and distance to flowers, and the quality of nectar. Bees can also tell time, measure, memorize, and solve problems.

5. Super Food
Like Wolverine, bees have healing powers. Honey is nutritious, lasts forever, and is a healer, killing bacteria and fungi. Manuka honey fights infection and heals burns. Bees use anti-bacterial propolis to keep their hives germ-free.

6. Super Transformers
Like Spiderman, bees can change their genetic structure. A queen bee is not born that way – any girl bee can become a queen. The worker bees prepare a royal baby by feeding it on royal jelly which triggers DNA change.