Queen Update

For those of you that follow my blog (and there are some, THANKS!), I just wanted to give a quick update on the Honeybees in our hive. Our beekeeper emailed me at the beginning of May that I would hopefully need to write a detraction in a few weeks because he placed a new queen in the hive. She got "chewed out," literally, from a sugar-covered casing he placed her in, and now she is moving about the hive, accepted by the others, laying egg after egg. There are larva and new bees already hatching out, so the hive is looking good. The new queen has a green dot of paint on her thorax so she can be easily spotted.

On another bee-related note, a man stopped by last week to let us know that he works for the Federal Government and he is charged with apiary inspection. He wasn't on the job when he stopped, and he didn't show me his badge or anything (does he even have a badge???) but he wanted to make sure we knew he'd be checking out our hive officially sometime in the near future. I have almost heard it all now. Official Apiary Inspector. Yikes.

For those of you who are interested in bees in an unofficial capacity, come up and visit any time and maybe even on June 13th at 2:30pm (it's FREE) for the Bees and Beekeeping lecture.

Animal Color Vision

I get questions from people about non-human animal vision. Can my dog see in color? What do birds or bees see? To answer those questions you need to know a bit about what color actually IS and how animals detect it in the first place. Without getting too technical, we know that the light that comes from the sun appears white/colorless, but actually represents many colors, aka "the colors of the rainbow" when we see it reflected in a prism or raindrop or some other such thing that has prismatic ability. Things that appear a certain color in actuality aren't that color, they just absorb all the other colors and reflect the color back that we see. So color isn't actually anything but a visual effect. Weird thought, I know.

The retina of the human eye is covered by millions of light-sensitive cells called rods and cones (named for their shape). These cells act as receptors to turn light information into nerve impulses via the optic nerve, ending in the cortex of the brain where they are processed into information. Rods are responsible for us being able to see in the dark (they transmit black and white information mostly), cones help with color vision and sharpness. In humans there are 3 types of cone-shaped cells, each responsible for helping in the interpretation of short (violets/blues), medium (greens/yellows) and long (oranges/reds) wavelengths associated with colors.

Dogs, it seems, see more of a range of colors than people originally thought. They aren't color-blind as they can tell the difference between red and blue are particularly good at differentiating blue and violet hues. Not too spectacular compared to humans, but not as dull as we once thought. Cats, mice and rabbits have similar visual abilities to dogs.

Birds, fish and many other mammals can see the full spectrum humans see. Some insects, like bees, can see ultraviolet colors (which are invisible to the human eye). Bees have three cone types like humans, two of them seeing the green and blue color spectrums we can (but not quite in the same hues), and their third cone type being able to detect UV (they lose out in the red wavelength area).

Birds are particularly interesting as their color vision surpasses ours. Their vision differs from ours in two ways. 1. Like bees, they can see very well in UV and 2. All bird species studied have at least four types of cones, so, they have four, not three, dimensional color vision. This means they can perceive the colors we see and some we don't even know about...another weird thought- there are colors WE don't know about!!

This kind of stuff interests me not only as a Biologist, but as a human, since it is the stuff that reminds me that being human is great, but there's more to life than just what's out there for US, keeps me humble.