Deyrolle, a Paris (France) shop specialized in natural history publications, old-school educational charts, taxidermy, entomology, minerals, rocks, fossils, botanical specimens, shells, microscopic specimens and microscopes, founded by Jean-Baptiste Deyrolle in 1831 and moved to its current address on rue de Bac in 1888.

I visited the place in 1999, and asked the owner where they get the animals. He told me they come from zoos and circuses, where they died from old age or sickness.

Almost all the animals are for sale: lion (9,950 euros), polar bear (13,500 euros), zebra (21,000 euros), crocodile (14,000 euros), tiger lily (19,000 euros) — you can also rent them…

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Honey bees perform a particular figure-eight dance on their return to the hive, known as waggle dance.

By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar or pollen, or both, and to water sources.

All of the known species and races of honey bees exhibit the behavior. There is no evidence that this form of communication depends on individual learning.

In 1947, Karl von Frisch correlated the runs and turns of the dance to the distance and direction of the food source from the hive. The orientation of the dance correlates to the relative position of the sun, and the length of the waggle portion of the run is correlated to the distance from the hive.

A waggle dance consists of one to 100 or more circuits, each of which consists of two phases: the waggle phase and the return phase.

Excited by a discovery, the bee scrambles into her hive’s entrance and immediately crawls onto one of the vertical combs. Here, amidst a massed throng of her sisters, she performs her dance.

This involves running through a small figure-eight pattern: a waggle run (waggle phase) followed by a turn to the right to circle back to the starting point (return phase), another waggle run, followed by a turn and circle to the left, and so on in a regular alternation between right and left turns after waggle runs. The waggle phase of the dance is the most striking and informative part of the signaling bee’s performance.

The direction and duration of waggle runs are closely correlated with the direction and distance of the patch of flowers being advertised by the dancing bee. Flowers located directly in line with the sun are represented by waggle runs in an upward direction on the vertical combs, and any angle to the right or left of the sun is coded by a corresponding angle to the right or left of the upward direction. The distance between hive and recruitment target is encoded in the duration of the waggle runs. The farther the target, the longer the waggle phase, with a rate of increase of about 75 milliseconds per 100 meters.

Amazingly, waggle dancing bees that have been in the hive for an extended time adjust the angles of their dances to accommodate the changing direction of the sun. Therefore bees that follow the waggle run of the dance are still correctly led to the food source even though its angle relative to the sun has changed.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Bellarmine University Department of Biology }

720,000 ladybugs have been unleashed on the 80-acre grounds of one of New York’s biggest apartment complexes with a mission: eat pests infesting the neatly landscaped property.

The ladybugs from Bozeman, Mont., arrived at the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village complex on Manhattan’s East Side on Thursday afternoon, packed in boxes shipped by a natural gardening company. From mesh bags filled with wood shavings, groundskeepers scattered them in clusters of 72,000 per box. The ladybugs quickly took to the skies of the 80-acre rental complex.

In the next days and weeks, they will crawl into plants, flowers and shrubs in search of insects whose smell attracts them — soft-bodied, leaf-sucking aphids and mites. Buying the bugs means the complex’s owner, Tishman Speyer, can avoid using chemical insecticides.

‘’In most cases, we reach for a can of pesticide — and we kill not only the ‘bad guys,’ but the ‘good guys,”’ said Eric Vinje, owner of Planet Natural, which supplied the pest-killers for Manhattan. On its Web site, the company offers ‘’Live Ladybugs — Free Shipping!'’ at $16.50 for 2,000.

This species of ladybug — Hippodamia convergens — converges in the wilderness, where they are harvested. Vinje buys them from ladybug collectors working the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Oregon, California and Montana. In Bozeman, he keeps them alive in large refrigerators where the temperature is kept to about 35 degrees. They go ‘’dormant'’ at that temperature, using up their fat stores without eating anything, and staying alive for about five months, Vinje said.

In the shipping boxes, they slowly awaken while flying to a buyer’s destination. By the time they reached Manhattan, ‘’they were lively and ready to eat anything that was not too quick for them,'’ Vinje said. 720,000 ladybugs are about the right number to clean up the New York complex.

Each insect can take care of a piece of land measuring about 19-by-19-inches. A ladybug can eat up to 50 pests a day, plus insect eggs. The huge colony will consume billions of pests before moving on.

Apartment residents need not worry about confronting swarms of ladybugs, since this is not the Asian ladybug typically spotted in urban areas. ‘’This one is not prone to entering homes,'’ Vinje said.

{ AP/NY Times }

A Triad (North Carolina) man who was trying to rid his home of yellow jackets is now looking for a new place to live.

Authorities said Hugh Williams first sprayed insecticide in a hole next to the house, but that didn’t kill the bugs. He then stuck paper in the hole and lit it, but the fire spread into the house and the attic, authorities said.

The home was draped Monday with a blue tarp, and the chimney was bruised with fire soot. “We certainly do not advocate the burning out of these insects, although it may work,” said assistant Greensboro Fire Chief David Douglas.

The family is safe, and no injuries were reported, but about $80,000 worth of damage was done to the home.

{ Local 6 | Continue reading }

Inscentinel Ltd. has found a way to use honeybees as detectors in bomb-sniffing machines. The bees are first trained and then literally harnessed into a special cassette to aid in the process of biochemical molecular recognition.

Honeybees are trained to recognize particular odors (for example, minute traces of explosive compounds), and then to associate that smell with a food reward. Bees are able to recognize odors that are as faint as only a few parts per trillion in an air sample. When the bees detect the special odor, they extend their proboscis in expectation of receiving food.

Trained bees are then carefully strapped into a cartridge. A sample of air is introduced into their little chamber.

A digital camera watches the bees carefully; if the bees detect a trace of the odor that they have been trained to recognize, image recognition software will see the bees extend their proboscis in the camera image. The machine then reports a “positive” finding of that chemical substance to the human operator. Once the bees have finished their “shift,” they are returned to their hive.

{ Live Science | Continue reading }

photo { Chris Higgins }

The mystery illness that has bedeviled U.S. beekeepers since 2006 may stem from a bee virus that apparently spread to the U.S. from Australia three years ago, according to a new study that marks the first big break in the puzzling case of the disappearing bees.

Researchers performed a sophisticated genetic comparison of healthy and diseased U.S. colonies that revealed the presence of Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), an obscure but lethal bee bug, in almost all beekeeping operations affected by “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), but in only a single healthy one they examined.

“We haven’t proven this is the cause. It is a candidate for being a trigger for CCD,” says W. Ian Lipkin, director of the center for infection and immunology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, one of the study’s lead members.

The disorder may also result from a combination of poor nutrition, pesticides and other factors, including infection, Lipkin and his colleagues say. (…)

Israeli virologists discovered IAPV three years ago after investigating unexplained cases of dead bees piled in front of hives. The new study found the virus in samples of Australian bees, which were first imported to the U.S. three years ago.

If IAPV is the main trigger, researchers say, honeybees worldwide could be bred with strains of bees resistant to the virus. (…) Late last year, reports surfaced that adult honeybees were mysteriously abandoning commercial colonies, leaving ghost hives full of honey, larvae and unattended queens. The disorder wiped out an average of 45 percent of bees among the 23 percent of commercial U.S. beekeepers affected last winter.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

related { Bell jar bees }

A rare breed of beetle is in danger of being hunted to extinction – not for use in oriental medicine but for the entertainment of six-year-old video game players in Japan.

According to environmentalists, a subspecies of stag beetle found only in the Amanos Mountains of southern Turkey is being wiped out to satisfy demand from Japan, where the insects are kept as children’s pets.

The craze has been driven by Mushiking (Insect King), a video arcade game in which small boys fight one another with digital stag beetles. A million beetles a year are being imported into Japan, where they are sold for as much as 40,000 yen (£170) each on internet auction sites.

{ Times | Continue reading }

Parts of the Bronx are going to be sprayed with pesticide to combat mosquitoes and reduce the risk of West Nile virus. The West Nile virus generally causes flu-like symptoms. It has been detected in mosquitoes in several boroughs this year. But no human cases have been identified.

The health department says it will spray from trucks between Monday night and Tuesday morning. The areas to be sprayed are Throgs Neck, Schuylerville, Country Club, Silver Beach, Middle Town, Eastchester Bay, Ferry Point Park and St. Raymond’s Cemetery.

{ AP/1010 WINS | Continue reading }

illustration { Zand2ohs, Craneflies, 2007 }

When Einstein said that the disappearance of bees would lead, within four years, to the disappearance of humans, people took notice.

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”

Problem is, the famed physicist never said it. (…) Like many a quote, this one appears to have been attributed to Einstein to lend it an air of authority. As it happens, there’s a grain of truth to the apocryphal quote. (…)

If all honey bees disappeared worldwide, food would be scarce, as colonies of bees stopped pollinating fruit, nut and vegetable crops. (…) The ripples through the world economy would be profound and prolonged.

If all 7,000-plus species of bees disappeared from the Earth, those ripples would grow into tsunamis ruffling entire ecosystems. In some ecosystems, bees are “keystone” species – a reference to an arch’s top stone, without which both sides collapse. As the plants that rely on bees die off, species that relied on those plants will suffer, leading to the decline or death of species that rely on them, and so on. { The Daily Green | Continue reading }

{ DreamWorks’ Bee Movie, in theaters Nov. 2007 }

Why can’t insects fly straight? Actually, most of the time they do. We just don’t see them winging their way under the stars to a chosen flower.

The reason we see them swinging around is because their guidance systems are based on a good system that didn’t take into account the invention of modern artificial lighting. These creatures have evolved over millions of years, and suddenly, in the space of less than a hundred, the environment changes radically, and now they’re ill-equipped to deal with these changes.

The eyes of moths and mantises are geared to steering by the moon or stars, with both objects set at optical infinity. Their basic rule of thumb requires them to fly at a specific angle to an optical stimulus. Science Professor and author Richard Dawkins writes that if this angle is 30 degrees, and the object is not set to infinity, then the rays spoking towards the eyes are no longer parallel, but converge, like the spokes of a wheel. He goes on to point out that one can “produce an elegant logarithmical spiral to the candle” using an angle of 30 degrees.

The science is interesting, but the reality has the proportions of a Greek tragedy… { OhMyNews | Continue reading }

artwork { Evinrude | The Rescuers, 1977 }

+ previously { Insects: The Living Dead }

There was a major decline in bee populations 20 years ago. Why is this more troubling?
In the ’80s the cause was clear: the accidental introduction of a parasitic mite that saps honeybees of vitality. This time, the bees are simply disappearing. There are no dead bodies. It’s as if they’re not coming home. Among the hypotheses is that their navigation system is perturbed. Honeybees have an incredibly sophisticated system for finding floral nectar and pollen sources, providing directions to their nest mates to promising nectar and pollen sources, recruiting them to these sources, and having everybody come home safely. And that’s not what appears to be happening.

What could be causing this?
Name something and it’s been suspected. A British paper [suggested] that cellphone transmission is interfering with bee navigation. There’s absolutely no evidence for it. People have also suggested jet contrails, wireless Internet, changes in the earth’s magnetic field. More plausibly, high-fructose corn syrup, used to supplement honeybee diets, is not nutritionally very complete and has been shown to influence behavior. Some new pesticides that are known to affect behavior are in wider use, and those may be a factor. People are also suggesting a sort of multiple stress disorder.

It’s not just about running out of honey?
Honey is trivial compared with the importance of pollination. The two-billion-dollar almond industry in California depends entirely on honeybees. Blueberries, melons, squashes—all kinds of crops rely heavily on honeybees. Over three-quarters of flowering plants—the foundations for most terrestrial food chains—depend on [honeybees and other animal] pollinators. Yet we know pathetically little about most of them.

Why can’t we just pollinate these flowers ourselves?
First of all, we’re talking about thousands of acres. Secondly, flowers are very complicated. They’re designed to keep out inappropriate visitors. { Smithsonian Magazine | Continue reading }

photos { Honey Bee Control and Removal }

Most bees are fuzzy and carry an electrostatic charge, thus aiding in the adherence of pollen. Female bees periodically stop foraging and groom themselves to pack the pollen into the scopa, which is on the legs in most bees, and on the ventral abdomen on others, and modified into specialized pollen baskets on the legs of honey bees and their relatives. Many bees are opportunistic foragers, and will gather pollen from a variety of plants, but many others are oligolectic, gathering pollen from only one or a few types of plant.

Visiting flowers is a dangerous occupation with high mortality rates. Many assassin bugs and crab spiders hide in flowers to capture unwary bees. Others are lost to birds in flight. Insecticides used on blooming plants can kill large numbers of bees, both by direct poisoning and by contamination of their food supply. A honey bee queen may lay 2000 eggs per day during spring buildup, but she also must lay 1000 to 1500 eggs per day during the foraging season, simply to replace daily casualties. { Wikipedia | Continue reading }

illustration { Autumn Whitehurst }