Last month I was visiting my brother,
and he showed me a bee swarm
that had made itself comfortable in
a bush at the end of his garden. My
experience of honeybees is that they
are pretty docile if you don’t do any-
thing to upset them, and he’d not
had any problems with hanging out
the washing near them. I was able to
get close enough to snap a picture of
the swarm on my phone. It brought
back long-forgotten memories of
Windy Miller smoking and catching
a swarm in a particularly exciting
episode of Camberwick Green. It
seems the original transmission date
was 1966, although as an avid fan
I’m sure I saw it a few times!
We had some debate about calling
in a beekeeper before it became a
problem, but a in due course the
swarm moved on, leaving behind
a beautiful wax comb. Joe sent me
the second picture of this incredible
piece of ‘natural engineering’.
Another example I like is the
internal bracing seen in the
long bones of birds, a pattern of
diagonal struts bringing to mind
the ‘geodetic’ construction of the
Wellington Bomber.
Just recently I saw a remarkable
news article on tool use by capuchin
monkeys in Brazil. Not only do
these clever little chaps use stones
for breaking open tough seeds and
nuts, they have actually left a 3,000-
year record of used and abandoned
stones. Unlike our own ancestors,
they simply select suitable stones- but the fascinating thing is that
over those three millennia the shape
and size of stones changes. It is
presumed that this reflects changes
in what foods are available to them.
It’s fascinating to consider such
examples of how the forms and
constructions of animals are tuned
to deal with the demands put on
them, and perhaps it helps us
appreciate just how special our own
abilities are.
August 2019 3
On the
Editor's Bench
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