Little Joys of Discovery #1A

     This post is just a followup of the one in which I mentioned leafcutter bees, as now I've had the chance to capture a couple of photographs of some.

      On occasion you might notice the signs of leafcutter bee activity before you see the bees themselves. This is a picture of some leaves on flowers in our garden, where you can see a few neatly cut-out sections. I'd seen this sort of thing many times before I learned of leafctter bees, and assumed some caterpillar was at work, but I was puzzled as to why it seemed to have eaten in such regular patterns and left, rather than just devouring the whole leaf.

     I didn't get a picture of any bees actually harvesting these leaves, so maybe these were done by fickle caterpillars after all, but my money's on the bees.

     When I first went outside with camera in hand, hoping to stake out a nesting site where I'd seen a bee the day before, I first crouched down to look around the porch steps to see if I could find the entrance to the nest. Then, I happened to notice that sitting right there on the step was a resting bee, complete with a piece of leaf, almost as if waiting for me to come take her picture.

 
     And as soon as I took this shot, she flew away.

     Unlike honeybees, leafcutters are not eusocial; all the females lay their own eggs, rather than tending to the eggs of their mother the queen. According to this site, all leafcutter species are solitary, but  alfalfa leafcutter bees (Megachile rotunda) are happy to build nests in close proximity to each other, which is why I think the ones in my backyard are of that species. Each of the drainage holes in the base of these flowerpots is the front door to a leafcutter's burrow; I saw bees come and go from all of them, but they're pretty quick, and it was hard to catch good still photos of any of them. I did manage to catch a little video of some, which I've put on my YouTube channel. Boy, nature photography takes patience!

 

Was the Apollo Mission a Waste of Money?

You are probably familiar with this photograph.

This very famous image of Earth was taken by the astronauts of Apollo 17. It has been seen by pretty much everybody, and has been used so much as to have become a cliché. And yet, it's still an amazingly beautiful and inspiring shot.

But was it worth all the money spent to go to the Moon? There were many people at the time who thought it was a waste, and people today still make that argument. Advocates of space exploration point out that the technologies developed as part of the Apollo program played an invaluable role in advancing our standard of living here on Earth, and there's truth to that, certainly. We have a lot of neat gadgets that we probably never would have developed had it not been for Apollo.

But I want to talk about something else. Look at that image again, and think of how often you've seen it before. It's appeared in books and magazines, T-shirts and posters, advertising campaigns... you name it. It's such a compelling image, it's used everywhere.

Now, copyright and piracy are very much on people's minds these days, and the RIAA in particular is complaining about losing staggering amounts of money to unauthorized copying. Whether their claims are accurate or not, we can agree that images like this photo have commercial value. So I'd like you to consider for a moment just how rich you'd expect to be from royalty payments if you owned the copyright to that iconic photo of the Earth.

Of course, if NASA charged royalties for the use of that photo, it probably wouldn't have been used by nearly so many people, and they almost certainly would have had the same problem that RIAA complains of when it comes to collecting from everyone who uses it. But that isn't really the point. What I want to argue is that if you were to sit down and put a dollar value on the intellectual property of that one, single photograph, taking into account how many people have used it for how many different purposes, the amount of value generated would be staggering. Now, think about these images:

NASA doesn't charge us royalties on using these images. They are part of our culture, and belong to all of us. We are richer for having them. I don't know what dollar value to put on them, but it's got to be pretty large, especially if we listen to RIAA and the film industry.

So forget about all the fancy technology we enjoy as a result of the Moon landings. I think we may even have turned a profit just on the intellectual property assets alone.

Little Joys of Discovery #1

     Every so often I learn something new in the most delightful way. Today I was out weeding the garden, turning soil to prepare for planting some vegetables, when I was surprised to come across this:

     As you can see, it's part of a wasp nest. The top image shows what surprised me: instead of hanging from the bottom of a branch somewhere, it's attached to the roots of the grass I was removing from the vegetable garden. That is, the paper nest had be constructed completely underground. I'm used to seeing wasp nests above ground, in trees or under the eaves of my garage, like this one, which I excised from our apple tree one autumn a few years ago and have been keeping in a sealed plastic box because it was just such a fabulous specimen:

    Now, you may have known this all along, but it simply never occurred to me that wasps might go to all the trouble to excavate an underground chamber and then go ahead and make this elaborate paper structure as well. I suppose I just assumed that what with the paper and the stings, wasps wouldn't bother to dig like this. And yet they do, and I feel richer for having found that out first-hand, rather than from a book or a blog, as much as I like books and blogs.

     I recall the same sort of experience a few years ago, lying on the grass and happening to notice a bee landing nearby carrying a piece of a leaf, before it disappeared into a tiny burrow in the ground. I was astonished. I had, of course, heard all about leafcutter ants, and their marvellous underground fungus farms, but somehow I had never heard of leafcutter bees. So I promptly went and looked them up, and it turns out they're very important pollinators for many crops. A few years later, I was replacing some rotten boards on our deck, and found tunnels lined with leaves, and packed with yellow powdery deposits I assume was pollen, stored for the bee's young. (Yes, singular possessive "bee's"; apparently leafcutter bees are a solitary species.) I wish I had taken a picture.

     While I had the camera out for the wasp nest, I also took a couple of other shots of delightful discoveries I happened upon today, though neither quite so surprising to me as learning that wasps built paper nests underground. After all, I knew that robins ate worms, though I was puzzled at why this one seemed to be just idly sitting there on the wire for so long without either eating its prey or taking it home to feed its chicks.

      I also knew that chives spread like weeds, but I was still pleased to find this one, almost as it if had been posing for a photo. Usually I find it disguised as tall grass, hiding from the lawnmower behind the raspberry bushes.

     So much for today's self-indulgent photo essay.