But just as when a movie director says “That’s a wrap” at the end of the final day of filming, the hard work does not stop here. Two people have read the full manuscript as I was producing chapters and their suggestions have been incorporated into this draft. The publisher will now send it to a third, independent beta reader and once their feedback has been acted on it will go to a copy editor who will suggest stylistic changes, check for logic and consistency, and so forth.
At the same time I will be choosing which plates to put in the book, which images to use on the back cover, writing their descriptions and deciding where to cite them; checking the sources and further reading sections for each chapter and formatting the references; and producing an appendix that lists the scientific names against the vernacular names that I am using in the book. I also need to finalise the acknowledgements section.
As an author, producing a book is a long process that doesn’t end with the actual writing of the manuscript. It’s incredibly satisfying, however, and working with Pelagic on my second book for them has been a great experience. All being well, Birds & Flowers should be out by early winter.
Now, I have three options for the next book that I’m writing….which one to choose…?
When I was growing up, my dad took out a subscription to the Reader’s Digest book club. One of the books he bought was called Success With Houseplants, which first appeared in 1979. I still have it and I think that it’s one of the best volumes on this topic that’s ever appeared in print. Over the years I’ve often dipped into its pages and it provided my first introduction to exotic plant families that I would later see in the wild, including Gesneriaceae, Commelinaceae, and of course my beloved Apocynaceae.
Dad loved propagating and the windowsills of our small house were cluttered with jars of water-rooted cuttings and trays of sown seed. Growing houseplants is still a passion for me though now that it’s become a social media craze it’s hard to keep up with the latest trends in plants for the home.
Enter Jane Perrone, whose writing and podcasting has opened up the world of houseplants to a wider audience and helps us navigate this sometimes confusing and faddish world with humour and sensible advice. Jane has now published a book called Legends of the Leaf: Unearthing the secrets to help your plants thrive. and I’ve had the mixed pleasure of reading it over the last few days. “Mixed” not because there’s anything wrong with the book (far from it) but because Karin and I have COVID and we’ve been laid low for the past five days and counting. The silver lining is that it’s forced me to get on with the ever-mounting to-read pile, in between scratching away at the last few chapters of my next book.
In Legends of the Leaf, Jane has taken 25 iconic house plants, and provided us with a potted (sorry) account not only of their growing requirements, but also of their origin, ecology, history in cultivation, and some fascinating cultural and sociological context. I learned a lot from this book and it elevates the plants with which we share our homes from being simply decorative to become co-habitants with rich and fascinating stories to tell us. The author also has an imaginative line in metaphors, for example likening the flowers of hearts-on-a-string (Ceropegia woodii) to miniature turkey basters, or the dried seed capsules of living stones (Lithops spp.) to a Trivial Pursuit game counter.
A huge amount of research has gone into this book and Jane does not shy away from telling us about some of the darker aspects of houseplant history including colonial attitudes, treatment of enslaved peoples, and misogynous attitudes. It all makes for an absorbing read and I guarantee that you’ll never look at your leopard lily (Dieffenbachia seguine) the same way again.
Full disclosure: I advised on the section about Ceropegia woodii which earned me a mention, which seems fitting: seeing the account of this species in Success With Houseplants was what started me on a quest to understand the pollination biology of Ceropegia.
There’s currently a lot of interest in ChatGPT and over the past week, like many others, I have been playing around with this artificial intelligence (AI) system and testing its knowledge and creative powers. The latter are really very impressive: I asked it to write a couple of limericks about Karin and my professions, and about our move to Denmark, and it produced a decent stab at those.
I also probed its knowledge about topics with which I’m familiar, mainly pollinators and pollination of course, and it produced some good answers. When I highlighted some errors it had made, ChatGPT went back and revised its answers, and politely thanked me in the process. If I were a student I would not rely on it to write accurate essays, but so far so good(ish).
This morning, however, I had a very odd experience. I was trying to track down something attributed to Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) and I asked ChatGPT: “What did Erasmus Darwin say about birds visiting flowers?”
This is the answer that came back:
Erasmus Darwin was a naturalist, physician, and poet who wrote about a wide range of topics, including birds and flowers. In his 1794 poem “The Loves of the Plants,” he describes how different species of birds visit flowers in search of nectar:
“Birds of each hue, from the gay parrot’s beak To the goldfinch, painted in tiny streak, Sip nectar from the cups that bloom and bow With every breeze, and nod and dance below.”
Now, the first part of this, about Erasmus’s life, is true. It’s also true that he wrote a poem with that title, though it was published in 1791, not 1794.
But, when I double-checked those attributed lines against the published version of the poem that’s on Project Gutenberg, I discovered that they did not exist. ChatGPT had made them up!
As I said, this AI is pretty creative and will certainly write a poem for you on any topic you care to request. But I didn’t ask it for that, I had made a factual query. And ChatGPT had just invented some poetry and claimed it as fact, unless of course those really are Erasmus’s lines and I’ve missed their source (please correct me if I have).
Now as a scientist and writer I try to be rigorous when quoting and citing sources, and if I hadn’t double-checked this I might have taken it at face value. And one could argue that my initial question – “What did Erasmus Darwin say…?” – was a little ambiguous. But nonetheless, I was not expecting an AI to try to pass off something it had created as fact.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this when using ChatGPT? It’s a fun, creative tool. But as far as I can tell, it also has a very human ability to lie.
Yesterday, Karin and I took a winter walk through one of the local woodlands, our feet crunching on the iced-over crust which is all that remains of last week’s snowfall. No doubt more snow is on its way as we approach the deepest part of winter here in Denmark. But seeing this holly tree reminded us that some parts of the woodland might remain snow-free no matter what the conditions.
Although I’m no meteorologist (and any who are reading this can correct me if I’m wrong), I suspect that two things are going on here. Firstly, the tree is sheltering the ground and reducing the amount of snow that falls below it. That umbrella effect is fairly obvious. But secondly, and more subtly, the small amount of warmth that there is in the soil is being prevented from radiating off into space by the presence of the holly leaves. So the warmer soil and surface layer of vegetation melts any snow that manages to make it through or under the holly’s canopy.
In both of these ways, the evergreen holly is affecting the microclimate of this part of the woodland. That in turn adds to the ecological heterogeneity of the habitat, proving greater access to food for animals, affecting the phenology of the ground flora, reducing local soil moisture, and so forth. All of these, in turn, will potentially lead to greater diversity of species with the local area.
On this blog and in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society I’ve often written about evergreen trees, shrubs and climbers such as ivy, holly and mistletoe, including both their cultural associations (especially with Christmas) and their ecological importance. As so often is the case, the English poet John Clare thought about all of this two centuries ago. The quote I used in the title of this post is from his poem Winter Walk:
The holly bush, a sober lump of green, Shines through the leafless shrubs all brown and grey, And smiles at winter be it e’er so keen With all the leafy luxury of May. And O it is delicious, when the day In winter’s loaded garment keenly blows And turns her back on sudden falling snows, To go where gravel pathways creep between Arches of evergreen that scarce let through A single feather of the driving storm; And in the bitterest day that ever blew The walk will find some places still and warm Where dead leaves rustle sweet and give alarm To little birds that flirt and start away
John Clare (1793-1864)
This might be my last post of the year, and so it only remains for me to wish a Glædelig Jul and Merry Christmas to all of my readers!
During the lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many pollination ecologists were stuck at home: universities and research institutes were closed and restrictions on travel meant that it was not possible to get out and do field work. In order to keep active and motivated, and to turn adversity into an opportunity, an ad hoc network of more than 70 researchers from 15 different countries (see the map above) decided to collect standardised data on the plant-pollinator networks in their own gardens and nearby public spaces.
When combined with information about location, size of garden, floral diversity, how the garden is managed, and so forth, this would provide some useful data about how gardens support pollinators. For those with kids at home it could also be a good way of getting them out into fresh air and giving them something to do!
The resulting data set of almost 47,000 visits by insects and birds to flowers, as well as information about flowers that were never visited, is freely available and will be an invaluable resource for pollination ecologists. For example, analysing the links between ornamental flowers that share pollinators with fruits and vegetables such as apples and beans, will allow us to make recommendations for the best plants to grow in home gardens that can increase yields of crops.
There’s an old saying about turning adversity into a positive outcome: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, and the researchers were pleased to find that there’s one record of Citrus limon in the data set!
The paper describing the data set has just been published in the Journal of Pollination Ecology and you can download a PDF of the paper and the associated data for free by following this link.
Sincere thanks to all of my co-authors for their commitment to the project!
Recently Phil Stevenson and I advised on an art/science project called Minus Pollinators which considered what a small café menu might look like if there were no pollinators to help produce the many, many fruits and vegetables and nuts that are animal pollinated.
The project is a collaboration between writer and consultant Max Fraser and artist Freddie Yauner. To quote Freddie’s description on his website, the project represents:
A dystopian future in the form of a drinks kiosk where the staples such as coffee, teas, juices, chocolate etc. are no longer available due to pollinator decline…the mobile drinks kiosk acts as an exhibition display, with artworks painted in pollen…and a take-away pamphlet…detailing the importance of insect pollinators for our collective future on this planet.
Minus Pollinators was commissioned as part of a summer-long event called Food Forever at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, after which it goes to the Groundswell festival.
It was a pleasure to work with Max, Freddie and Phil on this because art/science projects are a great way of getting the message across about the importance of biodiversity and the current environmental crisis that we are facing.
Common Elder (Sambucus nigra) is a plant that has fascinated me since my childhood, when I spent many happy hours scrambling around in its branches and pelting friends with the small fruits that stained our clothes and skin. I was therefore delighted to be able to finally write about my fascination in an article in the May issue of British Wildlife magazine. Although many dismiss it as a rather weedy, commonplace plant, I hope that readers are pleasantly surprised by just how interesting Common Elder is, in terms of its utilitarian value, the mythology and superstitions associated with it, and of course the wildlife that it supports.
I’m developing a talk based on this article, which I’m happy to present online for any natural history or botanical groups. If it’s of interest, drop me a line via my Contact page.
Recently I enjoyed chatting with Dr Daniela Scaccabarozzi for the YouTube channel that she runs called Earth To Be. In a wide ranging interview we discussed my recent book, how it came about, some of the things that intrigued me during its research (including a cockroach-pollinated flower!), and the role of people and pollinators in the wider ecosystem. Thanks to Daniela for the invitation to chat! Here’s the link to the interview.
As kids, my friends and I did a lot of digging. We always seemed to be burrowing into slopes or excavating trenches, pretending to be archaeologists or treasure hunters. Indeed, there was a lot of ground treasure to be found in the part of Sunderland where I grew up. The area has a long history of pottery and glass making, and ship building, and the remnants of these industries could be uncovered every time we stuck a spade in the earth. Over time I developed my own small museum of interesting, unearthed fragments, including bits of hand-painted ceramics, glass bottles, and unidentifiable metal shards, alongside various animal bones I’d excavated. My parents quietly indulged this interest, and my muck-streaked face and clothes, even if they didn’t quite understand what I was doing.
Aged about 10, my first encounter with a bumblebee nest was during one such dig. On the waste ground behind a large advertising hoarding, we began digging into a low, grass-covered mound and accidentally excavated what was probably a small nest of Buff-tailed Bumblebees (Bombus terrestris). I can recall being fascinated by the waxy, odd shaped cells and by the sticky fluid that some of them were leaking. Being an adventurous sort of child I tasted the liquid: it was sweet and sticky, and that was my first encounter with bumblebee “honey”.
I’m going to leave those quotation marks in place because if you do an online search for “do bumblebees make honey?” you generally find that the answer is “no, only honey bees make honey”.
Now, defining honey as something made by honey bee strikes me as a circular argument at best. And it also neglects the “honey” made by meliponine bees that is central to the culture of stingless bee keeping by indigenous groups in Central and South America, and the long tradition pre-colonial tradition of honey hunting by Aboriginal Australians. So if we widen our definition of “honey” as being the nectar*-derived fluid stored in the nests of social bees, then Apis honey bees, stingless bees and bumblebees must all, by logic, make honey. And likewise there’s wasps in the genus Brachygastra from Central and South America that are referred to as “honey wasps” because, well, I’m sure you can work it out!
But this is where things become a little trickier, because turning nectar* into honey involves some complex evaporation and enzymatic activity, so that the resulting fluid is more concentrated and dominated by the sugars glucose and fructose. Although analysis of honey bee honey is commonplace, and there’s been some research conducted on the honey of stingless bees, I don’t know of any studies that have compared Bombus honey with that of other bees, or with what is stored in the nests of honey wasps**. If I’ve missed anything, please do comment and let me know, but this strikes me as an area of research demanding some attention.
So do bumblebees make honey? That very much depends on our definitions, but I’m happy to accept that they do because “honey” is not a single thing: it’s an insect-derived substance that can take a range of forms but serves the same broad purpose of feeding the colony. And although insects have probably been producing it for millions of years, I think I’ve known the answer to the question for almost 50 of them…
UPDATE: A couple of people have commented on social media that there are legal definitions of “honey” as a foodstuff. Here’s the definition according to UK law***:
“the natural sweet substance produced by Apis mellifera bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living parts of plants which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in honeycombs to ripen and mature”
So, legally, we can’t call anything that isn’t made by Apis mellifera “honey”, at least from a foodstuffs regulation perspective. But that’s clearly different to what we have been discussing above, which is about a biological definition of honey.
It’s also interesting to look at the compositional requirements of honey as a foodstuff (presented in Schedule one of that document, if you follow the link above). The lower limit for moisture content is 20%. Now if you consider that most nectar in flowers has a sugar content of between about 20% and 50%, clearly there’s been a lot of evaporative work done by the bees to reduce the amount of water in the honey. I would love to know how bumblebee (and other insect) “honey” compares to this: do they put the same kind of effort into evaporating the water from the stored nectar? Given that the purpose of reducing the water content is to prevent fermentation by yeasts when it’s stored for a long time, and that there are bumblebee species which have colonies that are active for more than one year, I imagine that at least some species in some parts of their range may employ similar tactics.
Thanks to everyone who has been commenting and discussing the topic. It never ceases to amaze me how much we still do not understand about some fundamental aspects of the natural history of familiar species!
*And honeydew to a greater or lesser extent.
**I’m going to ignore honey pot ants for now as this is complex enough as it is and they don’t store the “honey” in nest cells.
***From what I can gather definitions in other countries are similar.
The invasion of Ukraine by hostile Russian forces is a humanitarian disaster the likes of which Europe has not seen for decades, and hoped never to see again. Like many people, Karin and I have been watching the news about the war with a sense of helplessness, bewilderment and alarm, wondering how such things can come to pass in the 21st century. We thought we were past the stage where aggressive, narrow-minded dictators could bully their way into adjacent countries.
Faced with 24 hour media coverage of such desperate events, it’s easy to lose touch with the world around us. Karin and I are fortunate to be able to bicycle to some beautiful local spots where we can reflect and try to find some solace in nature. That’s what we did yesterday with a late afternoon visit to the Hov Vig bird reserve. In addition to my photos, which I’ll let speak for themselves, Karin filmed a short video for her YouTube channel which includes a marvelous array of bird calls.
Tonight we are taking part in a fund-raising event at the local culture house. Please think about how you can help to support Ukraine, in however modest a way, but also don’t forget to connect with nature. It will always endure, despite the destructive efforts of humans.
Prof. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author 