Senor Parrot’s Perch

Each spring My wife fills the deck with flowers. We enjoy their beauty until the fall frosts kill them off. But we’re not the only ones. Bees are everywhere, flying about from flower to flower in the hunt for more pollen. Hundreds of bees. We’ve never been bothered by them and they’ve never seemed bothered by us. It’s a happy coexistence.

Bees, specificly Honey Bees, are the subject of Jay Hosler’s  graphic novel Clan Apis. Taking the graphic novel approach, author Jay Hosler encapsulated the life cycle of honey bees within a coming of age story and found an interesting and effective way to teach kids about the ecology of honey bees. Hosler’s approach is to imagine a hive, or clan, of honey bees endowed with human motivations, through them telling the amazing story of the Honey Bee. The illustration is excellent, lively, and entertaining. I’ve included a few panels from the book that I snagged from Hosler’s website for you to see.

It’s surprising how much actual detail and information Hosler conveys through this method, while keeping the interest in the story high. Beginning with a young larva and it’s older sister, Hosler details in clear and interesting detail the growth cycle and social lives of bees. As the young larva, Nyuki, grows into a young bee she absolutely buzzes with questions. Her older sister, Dvorah, is always there explaining to her the ways of bees and their jobs and duties.

Like a child eager to grow up, Nyuki is eager to find her own way, against the advice of her older sister, landing herself in the middle of dangerous straits. This opens the doorway to explain the environment that the bees find themselves in. Older sister Dvorah, along with a friend or two, guide Nyuki through each stage of life, passing along a trove of interesting information about the lives and ecology of honey bees along the way.

I’m not sure when this book was first published. The author’s website has different dates, ranging from 1998, 1999 and 2000, and my copy says it was printed in 2000. So it doesn’t include information about the current die-offs of the North American honey bee population, but that’s not a drawback for value of this text. In a classroom setting, the interest and sympathy for bees this book would generate would serve to motivate some interesting discussions about Colony Collapse Disorder, which is destroying large numbers of bees in the U.S.

Ascribing human-like motivation to animals and their evolutionary development is a common approach to scientific story-telling. It’s also one of my pet peeves. It’s a method scientists use to demonstrate the rationality of evolution – why nature takes the course that has led us to our current state. You might call it a Will to Evolve, and this is pure nonsense from a evolutionary science perspective. This is certainly the case with Hosler’s Clan Apis. He can be forgiven in this instance because he is in fact telling a fictional story, carefully constructed with science tossed in, and the story is meant to motivate an interest in the material. All of this he does very well.

If you’ve read The Mysterious Benedict Society then you’ll remember that Mr. Curtain, the bad guy in the story, had developed his own power system using wave and tidal power. Here is a YouTube video of the AP news story with a brief report and description of actual work to harness the power of waves to produce electricity. Its a neat video showing some actual devices and deployments in the lab.

This is an exciting new direction, especially in light of the renewed interest in alternative sources of energy. Think of all the engineering challenges. What sort of materials will withstand the ocean environment for long periods of time and still maintain their functionality? What about barnacles and other ocean flora and fauna? Will they glom onto the apparatuses and bog them down or stop them dead in their tracks?

There are political challenges, as well. Where will these be placed? Will they interfere with fishing and recreation to a great enough extent that political barriers will be raised against their use? Doubtless, there are many challenges to satisfying our never ending needs for new sources of energy.

Here are two other interesting lines of questions I’m interested in here. What ecological effect would wave-energy farms have on ocean habitats and what economic conditions will need to exist for us to really break free of our dependence on oil and coal as our major sources of energy?