Life Before Death

Upon digging through some old folders on the computer I found some nearly psychedelic pictures taken during a course in organism biology. We spent a lot of time in a lab looking at pre-prepped slides of plant and animal tissues, marvelling at the incredibly beautiful staining (and hopefully learning a thing or two in the process). Below is a picture of the sorus of some fern - you’ve probably seen them sometime, small brown clumps on the underside of a fern leaf. Except in botany class, it’s not brown:

A sorus is in fact composed of many small sporangia, where the spores are formed. The sporangia, when mature, flick the spores away from the mother plant. Here’s a close-up of some sporangia, where you can see the individual spores inside them:

I took the pictures simply by holding my digital camera up to the eyepiece (or one of them) of the microscope. Modern technology, eh?

ferns, botany

I’m cranky today. The reason is most likely a relapse into SAD, which I tend to suffer bouts of every winter. In light of this, one would assume today isn’t the best of days to write about happiness, but bear with me (and please excuse the somewhat rambling nature of this post).

Often in discussions about the relative virtues of atheism and religion, personal happiness is brought up. We atheists are told we cannot possibly be happy, or at least not as happy as christians/muslims/jews/whatevers. Because we don’t have god in our life. Immediately, atheists snap back that we are indeed happy, in fact we couldn’t be happier. We’re so happy, happy, happy that it’s a wonder we don’t explode. It’s like we forget, in our eagerness to prove to the religious that one can lead a fulfilling existence even lacking god, that happiness isn’t the standard human condition.

Am I basically happy with my life? Oh, yes. I have a lot to be very happy about, like my wonderful family, my amazing boyfriend, and biology. But am I happy all the time? Oh hell no. Are you?

Seriously. If anyone can honestly answer that they’re happy every minute of every day - because they feel god’s love or because they’re looking forward to the UFO coming to take them to Paradise Planet or whatever - I would have to question their sanity. Feelings of happiness and discontent is the mechanism by which our brains reward good behaviour and punish doing things that are bad for us. If we were perpetually happy, we would cease working toward a better life for ourselves and our loved ones. The human mind is a problem-solving tool, and it needs motivation.

That is not to say that depression is a good thing. If you’re always feeling like life is pointless, there is something wrong, and you should seek help. But my point here is that there is nothing wrong with admitting that you’re not always happy. In fact, I think it’s a problem for many that they feel unable to open up and admit to themselves and to others that they are not happy with something, be it their entire lives or just that horrible purple shirt their spouse insists on wearing to a nervous family dinner. And keeping those feelings bottled up, pretending that everything is perfectly fine when it’s not, is just about the worst thing you can do for your long-term happiness.

In the end, I think most people enjoy similar levels of happiness and unhappiness. Regardless of your circumstances your brain will still reward you with happy feelings when something good happens, and punish or motivate you with bad feelings when you need to do something to change your situation. The difference between atheists and religious people is that atheists are aware that our personal happiness is entirely up to ourselves and not some imaginary friend. We know that when bad things happen, it’s due to circumstances, enemies, or bad choices and that we are the only ones who can do something about it. And conversely, we also know that when good things happen, it’s due to circumstance, or our own actions, or the good will of other human beings. We never worry about being punished for faltering in our faith, and we never let some sky-god take credit when we have every right to be proud of ourselves or grateful to those around us.

As for my own current crankiness, I know most of it has got nothing to do with anything outside my own head. It’s an african mammal’s unfortunate reaction to lack of sunlight (and, well, exercise). If my brain were designed, I’d blame the designer, but as it is, all I can do is ride it out, and try to remember to eat properly and not snap at people too much.

atheism, happiness, religion, depression

To distract everyone from the fact that I seem completely unable to write anything remotely interesting today, here, look at these unbearably cute newborn chickens!

They were hatched (a couple of years back) in the same incubator we hatch our honeybee queens in, for the record. Originally, the purpose of the machine was vaguely medical, if I recall correctly…

Hopefully there will be more chickens this season.

chickens

One thing I have noticed as I have learned more and more about bees over my years of keeping them is that invariably, if someone who isn’t a beekeeper (or an entomologist) writes a text on bees, they always get something wrong (usually about reproduction). It seems as though bees are so incredibly mysterious that unless you are an expert, or handle bees regularly, bee biology is virtually impossible to get basically right. Thus it was with some trepidation that I started reading The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (ISBN 0719564093) by aptly nicknamed author Bee Wilson.

Wilson is not a beekeeper, or an entomologist - she is a food writer and a historian. It was her love for honey that prompted her to write this book, which is not about natural science but anthropology and history. She takes us on a journey through history and literature; through the minds of people who have kept, loved, revered or sometimes disdained the honeybee. The book is divided into large chunks with the headings “Work”, “Sex”, “Politics”, “Food and Drink”, “Life and Death” and “The Beekeeper”, and each chapter is riddled with references as well as - gasp! - illustrations.

On the whole, it’s a very pleasant and often amusing read. Most of the book concerns how humans have always imposed their own preferences when trying to interpret the mysterious insects. The way the beehive has been invoked by various writers to represent the perfect monarchy, the perfect oligarchy, the perfect meritocracy and even the perfect republic, depending on the particular preferences of the writer, is a perfect illustration of how humans employ Matthew 7:7 (to get a little biblical). Whatever behaviour or opinion you want to justify, you will find something in nature to support it, if you just look hard enough.

Of course, looking for justification of political ideas in the beehive is mostly a matter of interpretation - it gets much more surreal when it comes to the sex of the queen. To beekeepers today, it seems extraordinary that no one in ancient times, or even a couple of hundred years ago, seemed to bother actually observing the queen, as that surely would have let them realise that she lays eggs. However, not only have people been exceedingly confused about her gender, but also about whether she’s a virgin or not. See, no one actually saw the queen mating, so therefore she must not have. And, according to an altogether different kind of logic, she couldn’t possibly have been female either, as, after all, she carries a weapon. And everyone knows women just don’t do that.

Unfortunately, while Wilson appears to be as amused by this as I am, she does at one point embarrass herself by doing exactly what I was afraid of - making an egregious mistake when it comes to the reproductive behaviour of bees. To any modern beekeeper the error is so blatant and obvious that I’m shocked it made it through to the final edit. Perhaps she didn’t let any beekeepers proofread the book, but that’s hardly an excuse. The error itself consists of her sad misunderstanding of the parthenogenetic birth of drones. While she’s obviously understood that drones are born from unfertilised eggs, she appears to believe that these eggs are laid by the queen before her nuptial flight. This is wrong, very wrong, as the queen’s egg-laying apparatus isn’t fully developed until after she has mated, by which time she’s too fat to fly any greater distance (if a queen fails to mate within a few weeks of her birth, she develops her sexual organs anyway, remaining an “old maid” forever, and the hive dies). Once she has mated, she stores the sperm in special chambers, and makes a choice every time she lays an egg to either fertilise it or not.

Still, just one blatant mistake about bee biology in the whole book is pretty good, I think. And the rest of the book contains enough entertaining stories about other people’s faulty beliefs to make up for it. Wilson is unabashedly harsh on those she considers too kooky to deserve any respect - mormons and anthroposophers fall in this category - while she treats other, more innocently confused sources, with gentle amusement.

Although I think Wilson perhaps exaggerates the importance of bees through the history of humanity (as providers of sweet, sweet honey as well as candle-light), I can hardly fault her for that. Bees are amazing, after all.

bees, honeybees, beekeeping, bee wilson

This has got nothing to do with the regular themes of this blog, except that it’s about Sweden. Our selection procedure for Eurovision Song Contest - the “Melodifestivalen” or “Melody festival” - started a couple of weeks ago. I’ve missed both semi-finals that have been shown so far - we have four, and then a sort of extra final called “second chance”, where the people who almost won at the semi-finals get to compete with each other for a couple of additional spots at the actual final. But, thanks to youtube, I’m managing to keep up fairly well with the contest.

Why am I even interested? Most of the music is absolute crap. But then again, I’m a closet elitist bitch who likes to heckle people in my spare time (don’t tell anyone). Since my whole family is very musical we can watch it together and suffer. Nothing makes you feel as united as shared disdain for other people. There’s also another aspect to it: I like the way this is a huge event that the whole country, and later all of Europe, can relate to. For a little while we put away our political differences and just have some fun with really bad pop music. It’s rather like huge sports events, except I actually understand music, while sports will always be fundamentally uninteresting to me.

Of course, not all of the entries in Melodifestivalen or even Eurovision suck. Have a really quick look at this video (Swedish Television is cracking down on YouTube making them remove all the entries), and please note the huge audience even though this isn’t even our final:

I love the sound of these guys, reminds me of Scissor Sisters (of which I am as you can probably figure out a fan).

melodifestivalen, eurovision, rongedal

Carnival of the Godless will be hosted here in a couple of weeks. Send in your submissions!

For those who think that Sweden being one of the most secular countries in the world means that it’s free of religious nutjobs, think again. Daniel Ocampo Daza reports from a lecture at Uppsala University instigated by Credo, an evangelical christian student organisation:

The speaker Anders Gärdeborn brought up little else but the same ridiculous arguments, misconceptions and misinterpretations, exaggerations, faulty logic and outright lies that you’ve heard over and over, just as I suspected knew. Gärdeborn comes from the fundamentalist and literalistic organization Genesis which claims to “work for a christian view of the sciences and for the biblical view to be heard in the schools and society“. The biblical view being that god created earth its creatures and all of the universe in 6 days.

/…/

As my professor pointed out to me as we were talking prior to the presentation: would the university allow for an astrologer or a holocaust-denialist to come and give a lecture at the university’s facilities unquestioned? Most certainly not. But under the banner of not discriminating against the christian students I guess it is entirely possible, which is telling of why we’re still dealing with this particular brand of counterscientific trash at this level.

science, biology, evolution, creationism

Via Skepchick I found this blog on Wired about bees as a superorganism. I’m not going to comment on it really, as it pretty much speaks for itself (also, I haven’t quite made up my mind about how useful the “superorganism” idea is), but! The author refers to a scientist (a honeybee expert, it seems) saying this:

…the worker behavior of honeybees. They’re one example of the superorganism. They have a very intriguing division of labor. That’s one of the hallmarks of superorganisms: individuals do different things, like organs in the body. An organ is different from another organ in the context of the body. The division of labor in honeybee workers is between bees in the nest and those out foraging. And between foragers, there’s specialization of a bee collecting a mixture of pollen. Just as people can do different jobs, based on interest, these bees are doing very different things.

Okay, maybe I have myself to blame for the confusion, perhaps I’ve missed a few years of groundbreaking research that hasn’t yet made it into the beekeeping textbooks, but I find this outright misleading. Honeybees, as opposed to many species of ants, only have three castes; Queens, Workers and Drones (whereas ants may have more than one kind of worker). Workers are identical to one another and an individual worker, during the span of her life, carries out all or most of the tasks essential to the working of the colony. Worker labour division is sequential; specialisation depends on the age of the individual worker. Newborn bees start their life by cleaning themselves and the cell they came out of, then they start secreting royal jelly and help nurse the larvae, then they develop their wax-secreting glands and become builders, etc. There is also a certain degree of plasticity where the workers can switch to a task that is currently in demand.

I’m sure the person quoted must know this, so why use an analogy that is just so preposterously false? My lungs didn’t start out as excretory organs and won’t switch tasks to circulation in the future. They’re morphologically distinct from other organs and only carry out the tasks they’re made for. In short, worker bees are nothing like organs in a body, but more like members of a household, where small children may carry out certain tasks, teenagers other tasks and adults yet others.

Another thing that strikes me as really odd about the Wired blog post is that the picture at the top, while beautiful, cuts a queen in half (notice the large, dark and shiny abdomen at the top edge of the picture; very different from the striped, fuzzy bottoms of the workers). The photographer was obviously aiming for the queen and whomever cropped the picture completely missed out on this…

bees, honeybees, worker bees, superorganism

Another picture from last summer, although this one was taken indoors:

Beekeepers habitually replace the queen in their hives every or every other year, as colonies with young queens are often more productive and less likely to swarm. To do this, you obviously need to raise and mate new queens under controlled circumstances. Me and my father don’t own any breeding stock, nor do we have a mating station (usually an island where you can easily control the bee population and make sure only drones from breeding stocks are available to mate with your young queens) or whatever is needed for artificial insemination (where you simply take the sperm of drones from good stock and insert it into your queen). So last year as we first embarked on the exciting new task of raising queens for our own use, we did it with larvae very helpfully donated from a local professional beekeeper with lovely breeding stock, whom we normally buy our queens from.

It seems all people who keep pets as a serious, involved hobby end up doing some form of breeding, sooner or later. And strangely enough, it’s just as amazing with bees as it is with kittens or budgies. Here’s how we do it: We choose very young larvae from a queen of good stock and move them carefully with the help of a small paintbrush from their cells to special plastic cups. Then we put the cups in a box of bees that have been isolated from their queen for a while and hence in the mood to raise new queens. After they have started feeding the larvae and build waxen walls on the cups, we can put them back into their hive, which will then take care of the larvae. When they are old enough to be capped, we take them out of the hive, put a small cage around each capped cell, and put them in an incubator.

Finally the queens hatch, usually within the space of 24 hours. [ETA: I meant that all the cells hatch simultaneously, not that it takes 24 hours for a capped cell to hatch. The pupa stadium is rather longer than that.] Newborn queens, like all young bees, are adorable to look at; slightly clumsy in the beginning but quickly picking up speed as they investigate their surroundings, with thick, fuzzy fur covering their head and thorax. The queen above has just been marked with a small plastic tag, which is a bit more advanced than the regular method of simply painting the back of the thorax. A colour code is used to know what year a queen is born (last year was yellow, this season it will be red). As you can see, the queen in the picture was not at all interested in being photographed - although queens that young are unlikely to try to fly away, they’re very, very fast.

Once the queens have hatched, they can either be introduced to a new hive (after removing the old queen), which will then have no fertile queen for a while, or they can be put in a “miniature” hive with just enough bees to get by, until they have mated and have started laying eggs. Mating can be dangerous and may result in the queen never coming home, which is why you don’t want to introduce an unmated queen to a fully working hive unless you have no other choice. Our queens are allowed to mate with whatever drones prowl the area, but a queen with a pure-bred mother can mate with wild bees and still produce very good-natured and gentle offspring. The next generation of bees however, if you allow them to swarm or try to breed new queens from the freely mated queen’s larvae, will not be as nice to work with.

bees, honeybees, beekeeping

I’m sure a lot of you have seen the news earlier this month of female muslim med students in the UK not wanting to have to bare their arms, even though hygiene rules state that doctors have to be bare below the elbow. Now a female muslim was denied a job at McDonald’s in Angered (Sweden) for the same reason, and she’s taking it to the Ombudsman against Ethnic Discrimination.

She says, “Alla ska ha samma möjligheter till ett arbete. Det här är diskriminering och det är inget man ska hålla käft om” - “Everyone should have the same possibilities to get a job. This is discrimination and it’s nothing you should shut up about.”

Frankly, this is ridiculous.

It’s one thing if people don’t want to comply with arbitrary dress codes. They can bring it up with their employer and try to explain why their religious dress is important to them. But this is about hygiene. It is something that affects other people. Freedom of religion is and should be a human right, but only so long as it doesn’t harm other people. Freedom of religion should not be possible to invoke to cut off the foreskins on male babies, or deny your child a life-saving blood transfusion - and the same goes for med students who don’t want to show their arms. Religion simply doesn’t come into it.

Unfortunately there appears to be a previous case where a female muslim dentist was allowed to wear longer sleeves than the dress code prescribes, so this girl might actually win. Ugh.

islam, muslims, hygiene, freedom of religion