Marigolds were in bloom when I walked out to the garden. February is a good time for butterflies. Many of them fluttered around the flowers. I got a Glassy tiger (Parantica aglea) sitting on one. Mission accomplished. I went back to the lectures. I can’t sit for long stretches in a cold lecture hall. I know it looks impolite, so I try to make my breaks short.
Tag: Marigold
Around lunch
Strictly speaking, this is not a post about food. Its a post about the stuff about food: the drink at the beginning and the dessert at the end. The drink was perfect for a hot summer day: loads of ice, cucumber for flavour. What was the hot orange marigold doing in there? Its become quite a fashion to serve drinks with inedible flowers. I just hope they have no traces of insecticide left on them.
The dessert was my favourite at this place: a perfect tiramisu. You can tell how much I like it. I remembered to take a photo only after finishing more than half of it. It does miss the ladyfingers soaked in coffee, but the mascarpone cream and cocoa are spot on. It is such an easy recipe that I wonder why so many places mess it up completely. Lightness is the essence.
Science da kamaal! Posts appear automatically while I travel off net.
Tagetes and Apis
Does anyone really want to know that the name marigold is a mistake? That when these showy flowers were imported from South America, they were mistaken for a different European flower? That they could be called by the genus name Tagetes? Or that they are part of the Aster family of flowers, the Asteraceae? Or that the flower in the photos here belong to a cultivar of the species Tagetes erecta, also known as African Marigold, although it comes from Mexico and therefore should be called Aztec marigold? Or that the flowers are edible, and are used to produce edible yellow and orange dyes? I don’t think so.
What people are really interested in is the very supple red dwarf honey bee (Apis florea) shown in these photo. That’s because this pan-Asian species is the original honey bee from which all other honey bee species seem to have descended. In common with all honeybee species, queens mate with multiple drones and their eggs produce drones, workers, as well as future queens. Interestingly, workers often lay unfertilized eggs which can go on to produce viable drones. If these drones then start to impregnate the queen, then one of the half-sisters gains a reproductive advantage over the others. Such a disruption to the cooperative in the colony is not tolerated by the other workers, and they all police this by eating up eggs which have not been produced by the queen. Any attempt by a worker to give special treatment to a queen egg fathered by her own father is also policed. This kind of “worker policing” behaviour is inherited by all honeybees. The lives of bees are not as mechanical as I’d thought once. Bee hives are societies, and they have conflicts and their resolution, just as other societies have.
Don't hold your breath 
