Thinking - Multi-individual organisms (ants and so forth)

A while ago I wrote about the time I saw a cockroach die of old age. At the time it put me off killing things for a while because I was just about to kill it when it did the getting all dead thing. But...

Not long after that, I was sitting on the street in front of my workplace enjoying the smells of the traffic, and eating my lunch.

We didnt have a tree, and there was no other shade.

As the inevitable crumbs dropped to the ground, the ants started to wander around picking them up and taking them home presumably to feed their kids. I watched with exactly the amount of interest such things demand until I suddenly became slightly more excited.

!

An ant had decided to bite me.

And whats more, it too was taking it's newly acquired bit of food back home to feed the kids.

The ant was eating me.

It was holding a huge lump of my leg with it's face.

It didnt care at all that it was taking a few cells at a time with, I'm guessing, an ultimate goal of taking all my cells. At least all the squishy ones.

I murdered it of course.

But then I remembered I didnt like killing things because of the cockroach event.

But then I remembered that an ant cant really live on it's own. It's just a few cells out of a much bigger creature that is the entire nest. Some critters that live like this cant even feed themselves without other critters from the hive helping. Bees and ants (except for solitary varieties) are just tiny bits of a bigger organism.

So if one bites you and takes some of you home...

Murder it.

Somebody else will take care of their kids.

The hive won't even care.




120 Things in 20 Years wants to acknowledge things are killed on my behalf all the time, that I kill things to eat all the time, and the bees and ants we might normally meet dont actually have kids. Also we all eat thousands of cheese mites (found on cheese, flour, plant leaves etc. I just thought you should know.

Aquaponics - Shell grit seed raising bee and gecko visitors

I found a little helper in my shell grit seed raising trial.

This gecko is tiny!












I also found a bee.

That's two now this year I think.

It left soon after I saw it visit my freshly transplanted wild rocket.

But my bee came back a little while later.

At least I think it was the same bee.

It certainly looked and behaved like the previous bee.

She looks busy.







120 Things in 20 years is now a bee keeper. I keep a bee.

Photography - Maybe bee

I was playing around with my new, home made macro lens, and found this interesting little dead thing to act as a model.

I thinks it's maybe a bee.

Or a wasp.

Or an ant.

I think it's a bee.

If it's a bee, it's probably a native Australian bee. Perhaps a Megachile or "Resin bee".

Or a wasp.

Either way, this is what you find if you mentally mark out a square foot of ground on my lawn, and search it as if it were a crime scene.

A very interesting looking little critter.

It's perhaps 5mm long.

The background is a dark woollen glove

Dark subject against a dark background.

Still learning.















120 Things in 20 years wonders how it's going to get a bee to wink in a planned portrait when bees don't have eyelids.

Entomology - A bee!

All last summer there were no bees, and I had to polinate everything by hand.

The closest thing to a bee in the last year I've seen, was a dead one at my mum's house 10 minutes drive away from my house.

No bees.

They are all dying out everywhere on the planet.

Colony collapse disorder I think it's called.

But I saw one, alive and kicking in my backyard today.

After chasing it around for half an hour as it frantically tried to escape my shade cloth I finally got a pic of it.

Thanks rapid fire camera maker.

Tis a poor pic, but it does prove a bee still lives.







120 Things in 20 years - Entomology - Yay BEE!

Bees - Cucumberic life without bees

The worlds bee population is in the process of being wiped out.

It's called "Colony Collapse Disorder",  which is the kind of name doctors tend to give things when they have no idea what the problem is, but want to be able to refer to it in an unambiguous manner that makes other people feel they know what the're talking about.

 Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD is wiping out VERY large numbers of honey bee hives. People that keep bees professionally have closed up shop after losing all their bees.

A while ago, a clerk at the patent office named Albert said, "If all the bees were to disappear,  humans would have 4 years before we were wiped out.", but as far as I know he wasn't a bee expert, but was a very clever man.

The reality is that bees make food grow. almost all our food crops rely on the honey bee to make their fruit, nuts and seeds. Without them we will either learn to eat grass and ferns, or die.

In the last half of this summer, we have not seen a single bee.

I've been looking for them, and I'm pretty good at looking.

I hand pollinated half my cucumber flowers with a small artists paint brush, and left the other half to nature, and not one of natures flowers bore fruit.

Not one.

I'm trying to arrange some native blue banded bees to try to fix the problem.

Some time ago I set up a time lapse photography shot of some cucumbers that I thought I had hand pollinated, but half way through the shoot, I realised I had the memory stick that was for the camera on my desk.

Oh well. At least it wasn't as big a fail as the idiot that coded the little beep noise that tells you it's working. Their design work means the device continues to make the I've just taken a picture "beep" even when there's no card in the device.

Clever.

Anyway...

Here's some time lapse of the second setup where I used the plants that were not being hand pollinated. Pay particular attention to the 3 already formed little cucumbers just to the right of centre. (sorry about all the black dead space at the end, youtube's edit says it doesn't exist so you must be imagining it just like me) ...




youtube is giving me some grief. The clip works around 50% of the time in the different ways I test stuff.

This might work http://youtu.be/z85OlJScCEE

If it's not fixed soon I'll redo it.

Entomology - Blue banded bee

I had a very pretty visitor the other day, to my grow house.

I've never met one before, but it was a blue banded bee, or Amegilla cingulata (I Think - I'm new to this).

It looks like this and is an interesting fellow indeed.

Unfortunately this photo doesn't really capture the colour of the bands, so you'll have to take it from me they were a very pleasant shade of blue green.

This one seems to be male as I'm told males have five bands, and females have four. Males hang out like this at night, and as far as I can tell, females live in burrows that they dig in soft dry clay or sandstone.

They grow to around 12mm long, and look soft and fury like some kind of plush toy.

They sting, but are pretty relaxed and don't seem to mind having a very close up camera in their face.

The underground dwelling females lay eggs in some spare rooms they make at the end of their tunnel, (one egg to a room I think) and seal the room up with wax after adding a hearty mix of pollen and nectar for the young to feed on.

The best thing about these critters is that they are one of the few things that do something called "Buzz pollination" It involves grabbing on to your flower, sticking your head in and buzzing like a bee. The result is the release of some pollen that certain flowers don't like giving up too easily.

It turns out, plants that prefer to be buzz pollinated include egg plant, tomato, and chilli (so may be a solution to my capsicum pollination issue I had a while back), so buzz pollinators are nice things to have around. So nice in fact that the commercial tomato growers here want to import the bumble bee to pollinate tomato crops, but Adelaide University is trying to convince them that we already have some native Australian bees that do the task even better.

We humans don't have a very good record when it comes to importing things to take care of other things* so it's best avoided, as are all disasters.

Currently it seems, commercial tomato growers currently use vibrating devices to act the part of buzz pollinators, but studies have shown a 20% improvement on pollination if you use these bees rather than the robot version.

Using bees also means a lot less work on the part of the human, so it seems like it might be worth doing. The stuff I've read was from a few years ago, and claimed the bees will be commercialised within a few years.

I'm pretty sure that adds up to now.





120 Things in 20 years for all your good vibrations.


*see "There was an old woman who swallowed a fly"