With the exception of ants, it’s difficult to imagine an arthropod more colonial than bees. However in thinking of bees this way, we all-to-often forget that not all bees are colonial. In Britain and Ireland, for example, there are approximately ten times more species of solitary bee than bumblebee and honeybee species combined.
Ever since acquiring a new microscope, I have been spending quite a lot of time renewing old acquaintances with some once familiar microscopic flora and fauna. Needless to say, despite my best efforts and plenty of dipping into assorted local ponds for specimens, blowing the dust off my identification skills has been progressing somewhat less quickly than I’d hoped.
Names are powerful things. In many human cultures, the selection of a name for a new baby is a matter of the utmost seriousness, reflective of a family’s, society’s, or religious group’s past as well as perhaps portentous of that child’s own future. So it is also that what particular groups of people, entire races […]
Despite the fact that the feces of humans is commonly of sufficient firmness to be picked up with one hand (gloved, of course) while that of cows is roughly the consistency of spoiled pudding, both contain – on average – the same percentage of water content. So why the significant difference in texture and consistency?