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You won’t believe the interview I’m working on now. Here’s a taste, “There are no more insects left in Spain. I used to drive coaches for over a decade and had to stop every 100 miles to wash the windshield of all the bugs crushed against it. Last year I drove to Valencia and on a 500 miles return trip I didn’t have to stop once to clean it. It’s not only the bees who are gone, but even the mosquitos, all the bugs, everything, can hardly see a butterfly”.
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I trust reports from direct experience. They may be overly local, but truth is always overly local.
Carver:
Look about you.
Take hold of the THINGS THAT ARE HERE.
Talk to them.
Let them talk to you.
The replies are citing geoengineering and HAARP and EMF pollution, so I didn’t feel like wading into the discussion there. Most of those theories get carried away and run wild. When we’re talking about birds and bees, the EMF problem is exactly relevant.
It’s also likely that the weakening of earth’s own field is confusing the bees, but the timeline on the disappearance of bees is more recent than the slow weakening. I’m more inclined to associate it with the artificial overload, which suddenly got worse 10 years ago when everyone started carrying transmitters.
Birds and bees navigate by a combination of magnetism and spotting visual landmarks. Bees communicate locations by magnetic fields. Bees find flowers that are ready to service by reading the static fields placed by the plant. After the flower has been serviced, the plant turns off the field. When artificial fields are too strong, the artificial drowns out the much more delicate natural communications.
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Careful observers have decoded the honeybee’s waggle dance. It’s a vector message. The dancer is telling her hivemates about a good source of honey. She repeatedly forms a figure-8 pattern, with the message in the middle.
The direction of the dance is relative to the main honeycomb wall of the hive. The angle between the central motion line and the wall represents the vector of the food source relative to the sun.
Transposing the viewed dance to a position on the bee’s internal compass is complex, but using the memorized template can be hardwired in an insect with compound eyes that cover most of the compass. The template is assigned to one radial set of lenses, and the bee keeps the sun centered on that group of lenses.
The distance component of the vector is conveyed by the number of waggles in each central run.
This reminds me of the glial abacus that keeps track of numbers in short-term memory. Astrocyte cells serve as a kind of scorecard or abacus outside of the neurons. The neurons click up the astrocytes, and when the number of raised beads reaches a threshold the neurons tell the body to stop swimming or flying.
Let’s try to imagine how this feels to a forager bee watching the dance.
Polistra has a hive near the mill…
Looking downward inside the hive we see one scout telling one forager about her find. I’m showing the sun on the forager’s left to indicate her knowledge of the sun’s location.
The forager observes the direction of the dance with respect to the hive, and forms a template for where the sun should be when she’s flying.
Taking the important part in slow motion:
Each waggle ticks up the beads of her astrocyte abacus. For a simple animation we’ll assume she’s a Babylon Bee who counts in base 60. For each of these five waggles she brings in one 12-bead astrocyte. The total of all the counters tells her how many wingflaps she needs. (Obviously the real multiple of wingflaps per waggle would be far more than 12.)
She then launches out of the hive and turns until the actual sun matches the template position supplied by the dance. As she flies, each wingflap clicks down a bead. When the astrocytes have all reached threshold, she’s there.
What looks like a blossom is actually a cluster (inflorescence) of a few dozen tiny florets. Each ‘spike’ is a complete little flower, with a green cup (calyx) containing a white crown (corolla).
Why are some pointing down? Those are the florets that have already been touched by a pollinating insect. The clover detects the touch and removes nutrition from that floret, allowing it to drop down and turn brown.
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This morning’s science news about bees and ions adds another piece to the old Shepardson puzzle. Polistra has been following an old idea, written up by George Shepardson in 1901, that (some) plants live more by trading electrons than by absorbing sunlight.
Today’s item indicates that (some) plants use negative charge intentionally to attract bees. When a flower is ready for bee service, the plant charges it negatively. Bees, who are always charged positively from the friction of flapping around in the air, sense the negative field and head for it. The contact of bee to flower discharges both sides, so the bee can tell which flowers are used up.
Shepardson’s special theme was that pointy things act as centers for charge transfer. Pine needles have very little sunlight-absorbing area and excellent charge-absorbing qualities, so it’s reasonable to assume that their main function is to gather electrons, not to gather sunlight. Needles are coated with wax, a good dielectric, so needles are capacitors that can hold charge. Similarly, bumblebees are hairy so they can sense the static signals from flowers.
Polistra's Mill 