bombylildæ

While in Europe we don’t have humming birds (Kolibris), we are lucky enough to have these uncanny important pollinators called the fly bee or the humblefly (Wollschweber). Our garden is absolutely full of them but I’ve never managed to capture a picture of one until now when I spied one resting on a flower (see also), which by the end of the season can grow quite substantially and present like their avian cousins but less so than the equally camera-shy Hummingbird Hawk-Moth (Taubenschwänzchen) that hovers and has a proboscis for nectaring. We’re visited by them too and maybe if I’m patient, I’ll be able to get a photo.

a touch of honey

Lampooned first by Mystery Science Theater 3000 on this day back in 1998, the 1967 British horror vehicle directed by Freddie Francis, The Deadly Bees, is sort of a low-budget homage, snowclone of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds with similar tropes and devices and is based off the above titled detective novel by H. F. Heard. A pop singer (played by Suzanna Leigh) suffering from physical and mental exhaustion after a series of shows is sent off to an island cottage for rest and recuperation and finds herself in the midst of an apicultural arms race with two competing beekeepers claiming to have developed a colony of killer bees that they control variously by pheromones and taped recordings of a moth. Well, I’m off to become Lulu. 

 

8x8

take-away: flatpack pasta designed to morph and fold into containers when cooked  

bogland: photographing the marshes and alluvial plains of Belarus 

baby’s breath: biodegradable face masks blossom into wildflowers  

private issue new age: a soothing 1984 ambient recording that’s a psychoacoustic catalyst designed for release of spiritual and emotional energies 

children’s television workshop: the creators behind Sesame Street’s Teeny Little Super Guy  

forced perspective: giant Bidens and tiny Carters were keeping us awake—an explanation of the confluence of factors via Miss Cellania’s Links 

tableau muet: visualising history and charting epochs with Antoni Jażwiński’s “Polish System” 

baibaojia: make your own thread book for safekeeping of sewing items, notions and other small treasures

abominable mystery

The aptly-named Professor Richard Buggs of Kew Gardens (previously) believes that researchers may be on the cusp to solving the above-named puzzle that Charles Darwin confessed to fellow explorer and scientist Dr Joseph Hooker in an 1879 exchange addressing the unaccountable evolution of the higher plants in recent times to include such apparently rapid innovations as flowers that could undermine his theory and the observed gradual process in the rest of the living world. Though perhaps closer to resolving the unconscionably quick rise of the angiosperms (blossoming species—some two-hundred-thousand in total), the conundrum, which some critics take as evidence of divine intervention, yet defies a full explanation albeit less vexing and cause for awe and appreciation of Nature.

6x6

a perfectly pleasant man but with a name of a bumbling villain from a Charles Dickens novel: the final resting place of Mister and Missus Skeffington Liquorish, via Super Punch 

glass-bottom: a transparent kayak with rainbow LEDs  

a line in the sand: Saudi Arabia plans a one hundred-seventy-kilometre-long belt city of net-zero, walkable communities (see previously and also here)  

beyond the poseidon adventure: the namesake blog reviews the forgettable sequel that came seven years later starring Karl Malden, Michael Caine, Sally Field and Telly Savalas 

 beauty, loss, confusion, hope, division, grace and grandeur: a ten thousand mile photographic essay of in the form of a long, lonesome look at America by Stephen Hiltner—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links 

mother nature: artist Tomáš Libertíny recreates the bust of Nefertiti (previously) in honeycomb with the help of bees

to live alone in the bee-loud glade

Via Kottke, these superlative entries in the macro category for International Garden Photographer of the Year commended us to one recent snapshot that brought to mind William Butler Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree. What pictures from your garden are you keen to share? Explore an expansive gallery of many more superb and patient, intimate snapshots at the links up top. 

6x6

morning edition: artist paints sunrises on newspapers as a dawning juxtaposition to the headlines of the day

free parking: aerial views of grounded planes at the Frankfurter Flughafen—see previously

b&b: designs for a horizontal hive with human sleeping compartment

👁️👄👁️:the ubiquitous string of emoji signals a tautology

if it ain’t baroque: another in a growing chain of art restoration failures, via Miss Cellania’s Links

2020: a spa odyssey: a day retreat in Caracas inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s aesthetic

royal fanfare or call-and-response

Via Strange Company’s Weekly Link Dump, we learn that Queen Bees direct the hive through a series of tooting, honking and quacking that researchers were able to record, amplify and interpret. Like a flourish of trumpets, the toots herald her presence as she moves around the colony. The quacking comes from matured queens not yet released into society by the workers so as to prevent a power struggle and will continue to toot until the current monarch either abdicates or absconds in a swarm, splitting the hive.

svetovni dan čebel

Born on this day in 1734 (†1773), professionally trained painter become beekeeper to the Viennese Hapsburg court, Anton Janša cultivated expert knowledge on their care and maintenance and published authoritative manuals and delivered lectures on apiculture across the Empire in order to maximise their yield of honey and wax and pollination of crops. In addition to the rotation of hives in pastures, Janša’s designs for bivouacs with stacked combs (see also) are the still the modern standard today, and since a bid to the United Nations from Slovenia was accepted in 2017, Janša’s birthday has been memorialised as World Bee Day.

9x9

horsefly stretches so much time: learning French with these near homonyms that sound like (near) idioms, you know—taon temps tant tends

the lord hardened pharaoh’s heart: as scary as “murder hornets” sound, if they destroy the bees, US agriculture will be in shambles

making muppets: Jim Henson presents a tutorial on creating one’s own puppets in 1969, shortly before the debut of Sesame Street

jukebox: a neural network that’s getting quite good at imitating musical genres and syndicating wholly artificial songs, via Memo of the Air

plastique fantastique: these face shields from Isphere have a certain Avengers’ spy-vibe

do not make me fight you: reminiscent of this montage, stunt choreographer Zoë Bell takes on Hollywood

headspace: cranial collages from Edwige Massart and Xavier Wynn

catamaran: this floating shelter in Amsterdam, de Poezenboot, finds new forever homes for our feline friends

www: this was the internet we were promised—why did it take the collapse of civilisation to bring it?

der honigdieb

Though perhaps best known for his iconic portraits of contemporary celebrities, like this one of Martin Luther that’s become synonymous and defining, the imagination, which takes a rather lurid turn at times, of the painter and printmaker Lucas Cranach the Elder (*1472 – †1553, confusingly from the village of Cronach) also has a legacy worth contemplating—especially after the accusations and misapprehensions that the shock of the naked body in classical and Renaissance art wasn’t some soft smut for the elite with the intrinsic value, patronage and support system not accorded to the prole material made by machine and put out by Pornosec for the masses. We are confronted with this question by a new exhibit in the Compton Verney Gallery in Warwickshire—encapsulated by the some twenty known versions of Cupid complaining to Venus (1526, Venus mit Amor als Honigdieb)—all of which portray the two classical love deities gossiping, nude but Venus naked in a wide-rimmed hat with ostrich plumes and Cupid assailed by bees for having snatched a bit of honeycomb from the apple tree that they’re standing under. The subject was popular enough, based off a bucolic poem by Theocritus called Κηριοκλέπτης (Keriokleptes, same meaning) for Cranach to sell basically two dozen copies with slight variation with Venus laughing off Cupid’s lament and comparing the stings of the provoked bees to his own smitten arrows. One has to wonder what was informed by carnal experience and what was moralising and emendating in his portfolio. Visit the entire collection online at the link above.

6x6

multiplicands: an interesting demonstration of an ancient method of numerical decomposition that intuits algorithms base-two number systems

still life with daishi: the exquisite three decades of detailed food diaries of a soba chef

bee space: a look at how apiculture informs architecture

enhance: artificial intelligence applied to an 1896 film upscales the Lumière Brothers’ l’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Cioatat significantly

mergers and acquisitions: a clip of two Chinese young men lip-syncing the Back Street Boys’ I Want It That Way in 2006 convinced Google it the YouTube platform could be a promising investment

from sack to shift: Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic Mondrian-inspired dress (previously), including one for Lady Penelope

7x7

alltid öppet: McDonald’s franchises in Sweden (previously) install insect hotels in their signage and billboards

.xlsx: a concerning amount of scientific research contains data misinterpreted by spreadsheet software

glory to hong kong: protestors create their own anthem and rallying cry

metallic wood: researchers create a porous nickel-based matrix (see also) as strong as titanium though exceedingly light

schism: Pope Francis unafraid of conservative groups calling his leadership too progressive

k2-18β: astronomers detect water vapour in the atmosphere of a distant super earth that could harbour life as we know it

gravy train: bug-based pet food better for canine and feline companions and for the environment

Δ9

The local farmers have really done an outstanding job with creating refuges for bees and other pollinators, going above and beyond the usual fallow fields of crop rotation and cultivating verges of sunflowers and wild flowers—re-wilded to include anything that will take root among which somewhat incongruously is industry-grade hemp. I am told on good authority that because they’re male plants, they would not elicit the most enjoyable experience, though they make a novel sight to behold nonetheless.

hov lane

Via Design Boom, we learn about a simple but effective intervention that the city of Utrecht has instigated to create sanctuaries—bees stops (Bijstopt), for urban insects by planting grasses and wildflowers on top of bus shelters, some three hundred of them throughout the city. This is a step we could all encourage where we live. Much more to explore at the link above.

endonymy

From one of our favourite weekly features, Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links, we are invited to ruminate over the fact that while most countries are named after one of four things—often tautologically, especially in translation—that are sometimes not very consequential to present geopolitics, there are some notable mavericks that defy or really lean into categorisation.
With nearly all countries named in deference to either a cardinal direction, a distinguishing geographical feature, a tribe or clan or an important personage, we’d wish that the campaign to make America great again was an effort to improve scholarship on the Latinised name of a fifteenth century Florentine cartographer from the Vespucci family but alas and alack.  There are nonetheless some notable (and notably disputed too) outliers as well. Our favouites being Malta named for bees (Μελίτη, honey-sweet), Mexico after a simplification of an Aztec city (Mēxihtli) that meant in the navel of the Moon and the Pacific island nation of Nauru, possibly derived from the native conjugation anáoero, I go to the beach.

fruchtfolge

Though maybe I am just doing a better job paying attention—which certainly counts for something too—and being engaged with the consequences of our behaviour for the environment or maybe it’s the recently adopted legislation and agricultural reforms made to be more sustainable and friendlier for pollinators, while I’ve noticed that crop-rotation and allowing fields to be fallow for a season, recharging the soil by sewing clover or grasses and letting it rest, I don’t think I’ve seen before sections of land, vast swaths of it, wholly given over to wildflowers like I am seeing now.
It isn’t just the margins and shoulders along tractor trails that are teeming with blooms but also deep into the interior of grain crops, thick with cornflowers (Cyanus segetum, Kornblume—considered endangered due to over-use of pesticides), poppies (Papaver rhoeas, Mohnblume), baby’s breath (Gypsophila paniculata, Schleier-Gipskraut—that is, chalk-loving), thistles (Silybum marianum, Disteln) and daisies (Bellis perennis—pretty everlasting, Gänseblümchen), the fields are droning with the buzz of bees.

pollinators’ corner

Here is a selection of various insects visiting flowers in bloom, mostly daisies, around the backyard, taken in quick succession—and not including the elusive ones that were harder to photograph at the moment. What celebrity bug friends can you find and identify near you?

apis and bombus

Via Slashdot, we learn that the same Australian-French collaborative team of researchers that determined that honeybees understand the concept of zero, can recognise human faces and perform basic arithmetic also can understand numerals as stand-ins to symbolise numerical values.
Separate studies suggest that bumblebees (which also live in nests and hives as colonies with a queen and division of labour—albeit on a much smaller scale) are capable of a similar level of communication and learning, they just don’t dance like their more agile cousins, a fact that sounds funny given that they’ve garnered the reputation of being too heavy to fly, which they manage quite well on the contrary. Insights into how smaller brains process such abstractions are not only humbling and point to the eusocial insects and their cohesion as drivers of culture but could moreover led to new and innovative ways to mimic Nature with artificial intelligence.

le forêt

As debate continues on how the iconic landmark ought to be rebuilt and restored, true to its former self or romanticised memories or rather a showcase of innovation in building material and technique as it has been over the centuries, Studio NAB puts forward its proposal to replace the ancient wooden roof with a green house that hosts educational and outreach programmes and is reflective of challenges facing contemporary times. What do you think about that?  The burnt oak timbers known colloquially as the Forest would be fashioned into planters and fertilise new growth from the ashes and the spire would be raised again as an apiary, accommodating a number of beehives.