My forest is dark and forbidding at first; tall, mysterious firs filtering the sunlight onto the green, green moss. Then it breaks up, splinters, pines occupying the lichen-clad hillocks, deciduous trees (mostly birch and aspen) competing for space in the lower spaces. In some places miniature wetlands form, circled by ferns.

It’s a varied landscape, full of surprises, new discoveries around every bend of the path. And so far, we’ve had it almost to ourselves, but I don’t know how long that will last - there’s an increasing number of people turning up to pick mushrooms each year…

forests

Slime molds are weird things. Originally thought to be a group of fungi, they’re now considered to be paraphyletic - that is, not a natural group of related species. And they’re not fungi, either. Also, I can’t quite tell if they’re supposed to be unicellular or multicellular organisms, as they begin their life cycle as amoebas that eventually aggregate, as food grows scarce, to collectively form fruiting bodies. Earlier this year it was reported that slime molds can learn to navigate labyrinths. What this says about intelligence and consciousness remains to be seen.

The specimen/s below I discovered on a mushroom-hunt near my parents’ place. I suppose it’s feeding on the rotten wood.

The more you study biology, the more you realise that all of these classifications we invent are purely for our own convenience. Nature doesn’t care if we would like to divide it into unicellular and multicellular, or about what definition of “species” we want to use. There’s always something out there that defies explanation until we’ve restructured our thoughts and language. Slime molds are one such example.

slime molds, biology

Time to resurrect the picture Fridays! First up, a picture that recalls the beginning of the summer. I don’t know what kind of larva this is - only that it is very beautiful, and that it was munching leaves in a flowerbed.

If anyone could help me identify it - at least tell me if it’s a beetle or a butterfly, say - I would be much obliged.

larva

Because I seem to be suffering from an over-all writer’s block, and to make up for the missing Friday Pics, here is a cavalcade of photos that illustrate what sort of things have been taking up my spare time this spring.

Tiny tiny chickens:

Stockholm and beautiful spring weather:

Mountains of beekeeping supplies needing attention:

Planting of interesting varieties of elderberry and discovering beautiful critters:

The first true democratic assembly of the Swedish Humanist Youth Organisation:

Flowers and bees:

Please don’t give up on me. Next week I’m going to the World Humanist Congress in Washington D.C. That should yield some interesting blog topics and release me from my writer’s block!

bees, beekeeping, chickens, humanism, stockholm

Nearly as cute as the chickens from two weeks ago, this is a tiny planktonic sea star larva:

The part that actually looks like a star was only a couple of millimeters across but had a fully functioning ambulacral system, complete with tiny flailing suckers that it used to crawl across the bottom of my petri dish.

sea star

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

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

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

Today’s picture barely needs a description. This beautiful little bumblebee I rescued from drowning in a jar of newly extracted honey, and undaunted by her near-death experience she simply proceeded to gorge herself on the sweet stuff.

With such a bountiful harvest, little wonder she had trouble lifting off afterwards!

bumblebee, honey

This week’s Pic was taken back in November when I spent a couple of weeks at a marine laboratory on the west coast of Sweden. On a walk along the beach I spotted this:

A seashell from a gastropod, lodged into a crack in the bark of a pine and cracked open. The shell was situated about a meter above ground, if I recall correctly, and there were more cracked shells and shell fragments on the ground beneath it.

I know woodpeckers and other birds lodge nuts and other food into the bark of trees to crack them open, and some shore-living birds bring shelled molluscs to certain rocks away from the shoreline where they crack and eat them. But I have never heard of a woodpecker gathering molluscs, taking them into the trees away from the shore, and lodging them into the bark just above ground! Of course, a human may have done this - possibly with the intent to confuse biologists - but that seems a bit unlikely.

Does anyone have an idea who might have done this?

seashell, mollusc