People have long been interested in the architectural endeavors of animals.
The internal structure of bee hives, the hexagonal combs of wax, have been amongst these ponderings, going back to Marcus Terentius Varro's
Rerum Rusticarum Libri Tres, a volume on
Roman farm management. He wrote, "
The geometricians prove that this hexagon inscribed in a circular figure encloses the greatest amount of space," and over the years, mathematicians have studied the hexagonal structures made by bees, and in 1998,
Thomas Hales produced a mathematical proof for the classical hexagonal honeycomb conjecture, which "asserts that the most efficient partition of the plane into equal areas is the regular hexagonal tiling."
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posted by filthy light thief
on May 21, 2013 -
25 comments
"
Honey laundering is a complex exercise that involves several players in the honey chain from apiary to wholesaler to retailer. In the case against ALW, evidence was presented to show the use of fake country-of-origin documents for shipments, replacement of labels on Chinese containers with fraudulent ones, switching of honey containers in a third country, and even the blending of Chinese honey with glucose syrup or honey from another country."
posted by vidur
on Dec 6, 2012 -
37 comments
On September 24th Radiolab posted a new episode,
The Fact of the Matter. It included a segment titled
Yellow Rain. Radiolab's website says that it's "a detective story from the Cold War, about a mysterious substance that fell from the sky in Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam war." Robert Krulwich's interview with two of the segment's guests has prompted outrage at his treatment of them. One of the guests, writer
Kao Kalia Yang, talked with
Hyphen Magazine.
posted by FatRabbit
on Oct 23, 2012 -
136 comments
Dr. Justin O. Schmidt likes insects of the persuasive sort, the ones that bite, sting or
squirt venom in your eyes. In the course of his entomological studies all over the world,
he has met the defenses of about 150 different insects, and he has rated them, creating the
Schmidt Sting Pain Index. On the low end: sweat bees, whose sting is "light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm." On the high end: Bullet ants, whose venomous bites cause "pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel." And it can last for hours, leaving you "quivering and still screaming from these peristaltic waves" [of pain].
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Aug 4, 2011 -
49 comments
An alternative look at Fatherhood: a study
with bees shows that
females mating with random males actually have more genes in common with their sisters than they do with their own daughters. And that makes them more likely to put the good of their colony sisters over their own reproductive legacy.
Would that work with humans? Well, there's a society in China where kids
don't have Fathers.
posted by eye of newt
on Jun 21, 2009 -
36 comments
The
Graduate University for Advanced Studies, casually referred to as
Sōkendai (a contraction of Sōgō kenkyū daigakuin daigaku), was founded in 1988 as the 96th
national university in Japan. Amongst other things, it is home to the
Soken Taxa Web Server which in turn hosts
the first online Japanese Ant Color Image Database that currently lists 273 species of ant, the
Illustrated Guide of Marine Mammals and the
Marine Mammals Stranding DataBase, the
Mammalian Crania Photographic Archive that currently includes 704 specimens, the
Morning Glories Database that covers the many mutants of
Ipomoea nil, closely related species and interspecific hybrids, the
Makino Herbarium Database, which is named after the pioneering Japanese botanist,
Tomitaro Makino, and the
Japanese Bees Image Database.
posted by filthy light thief
on Apr 20, 2009 -
5 comments
Voice of the Hive is a collection of informative and well-written stories about honeybees.
Half of the tales are told from a human beekeeper's perspective, and are filled with valuable knowledge for potential hobbyists.
The other half are compelling vignettes of a single bee's life -- widely diverse and compelling, told from each individual bee's perspective. The two elements come together to paint a fascinating picture of this noble insect's existence.
posted by illuminatus
on Jan 4, 2008 -
17 comments
Evil Bee (embedded QT) is a gorgeous & interesting animated short about a worker bee in a factory who rebels; bonus points for awesome soundtrack by menomena.
posted by jonson
on Nov 8, 2007 -
35 comments
