Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This came from reader Erik:, who said it was a”Nice short video from KQED about tiger beetles. Unfortunately, the don’t include all ref’s like Ze Frank.”
It’s just 3½ minutes long and you’ll learn something. I’m upset a bit, though, about experiments in which they cut off the beetle’s antennae or somehow blind it.
I was about to post the sad news that we have only one batch of photos left, which is true, but then I remembered that Tara Tanaka in Florida gave me permission to show her videos, and she takes good ones. Going to her Vimeo page, I found two new ones that haven’t appeared here. So here they are, with Tara’s captions notes indented. Be sure to enlarge the videos by clicking on them and then on the four arrows at the bottom right.
However, I still need photos if this feature is to survive. I’ll be leaving Monday for a week, so please get some together and send them to me when you can. Thanks!
Tara’s Flickr page is here and her Vimeo page is here.
2025-05-25 Early morning surprise in the swamp – alligators mating
2025-06-12: Male bobcat from the living room window:
We’re back, and with a text-and-photo contribution on beekeeping by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His prose is indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
No vacancies
Born in in the village of Breznica in the Austro-Hungarian empire (in today’s Slovenia), Anton Janša (1734-1773) would never have imagined that 20 May, his day of baptism (a proxy for his unknown birthday), would be celebrated around the world. Trained to be an artist, Anton’s true calling was honey bees. His innovative hive designs and books on beekeeping made him famous among his peers. In 2017, Slovenian beekeepers, backed by the Slovenian government, successfully lobbied the United Nations to designate 20 May as World Bee Day.
A 1973 postage stamp depicting Anton Janša © GetArchive:
Since then, more and more countries and people have joined World Bee Day celebrations. Inevitably, the event’s increasing visibility is a tempting opportunity for cashing in. As the day approaches, the more intense the peddling of bee-themed gin, beer, chocolate bars, fudge, skin creams, lip balms, clothing (“perfect for raising awareness”) and other items of marginal or imaginary connection to bees. The UN’s laudable initiative has another peculiarity: both the preservationist and commercialistic takes on World Bee Day focus largely on the European honey bee (Apis mellifera), giving limited coverage or ignoring altogether the ~20,000 other known species of bees, the members of the clade (a group of organisms sharing an ancestor) Anthophila. That’s unfortunate, as in many situations wild bees equal or surpass A. mellifera as providers of pollination services to wild plants and crops. Even more unfortunately, some initiatives towards the European honey bee are directed at self-promotion and public visibility, but are not guided by sound ecological principles.
The clade Anthophila: essentially a group of vegetarian wasps (Engel et al., 2020) © USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Program:
Before we proceed, here’s a quiz: what do London’s Ritz Hotel, Buckingham Palace, Lambeth Palace and New York’s Empire State Building, Madison Square Garden and the Chrysler Building have in common, besides being famed? Answer: they all house apiaries on their roofs or adjacent structures. Rooftop beekeeping is not restricted to glamorous landmarks; roofs all over the world are being occupied by hives. The practice has been adopted by companies and organisations and enthusiastically publicised on World Bee Day. One commercial real estate business boasts having installed bee hives on some 2,500 buildings across North America and Europe for honey production and to serve as “biodiversity indicators”. Another property company gives away free hives to its clients “to help bees and boost office morale”.
A Rockefeller Center rooftop, home for thousands of honey bees © Jwilly77, Wikimedia Commons:
High-rise apiculture is perhaps the most stylish form of urban beekeeping, which is growing rapidly around the world. The activity accelerated in the mid-2000s, when we were bombarded daily with news about the imminent demise of honey bees, dragging mankind with them. Well-intentioned urbanites, concerned about the environment, honey bees and the future of humanity, saw beekeeping as an ideal way to help nature – a pleasant, virtuous hobby with a sweet reward with which to impress friends and neighbours.
Alas, the road towards these noble objectives has many potholes. The first is the misconception that the European honey bee is a species at risk. Despite the problems it faces in North America and Europe, beehives and beekeeping are thriving globally. Moreover, honey bees have been managed, moved around and selectively bred for thousands of years. For practical purposes, they are more appropriately treated as livestock than wildlife, an interpretation adopted by legal statutes around the world. The upshot is that a farm animal like the honey bee is not a suitable proxy for biodiversity.
Numbers of managed honey bee colonies, in millions, worldwide (A) and by geographical regions (B) © Osterman et al., 2021:
Honey bees are not endangered and are poor biodiversity indicators, but these are not good reasons to object to urban beekeeping. Trouble arises when there are too many honey bees.
Greater London is a good example of the problem. The city is packed with about 10 hives/km2 – for comparison, farmers keep 2.5 to 5 hives/km2 in crops highly dependent on pollinators such as almonds and apples. Each London hive needs the equivalent of 1 ha of borage (Borago officinalis) or 8.3 ha of lavender (Lavandula spp.) for their supplies of pollen and nectar (Alton & Ratnieks, 2016a): these figures are not sustainable for a significant portion of the city’s area. High hive densities and the proliferation of inexperienced beekeepers bring up another predicament: greater risk of diseases and parasites, which are the bane of honey bees around the world.
Estimated effect of beekeeping on a London’s 1-km grid based on available foraging plants (greenspaces) and number of honey bee colonies © Stevenson et al., 2020:
Honey bees taking food from each other is just the start of the problems caused by high numbers of hives.
When more than one species needs the same resource and there isn’t enough of it to go around, the species will compete for it. A growing body of evidence has shown that a range of wild bees get the raw end of the deal if they are forced to go up against honey bees for pollen and nectar. Honey bees forage up to 6 km from their nests, and they are very good at it. An average colony may collect up to 55 kg of pollen and hundreds of kilos of nectar every year, depending on floral abundance and climatic conditions (Seeley, 1985). These figures add up: a 40-hive apiary collects the pollen equivalent of four million wild bees at high season (June -August); that means that one hive gathers pollen sufficient to produce 100,000 progeny of an average solitary bee species (Cane & Tepedino, 2017).
The outcompeted wild bees are displaced or forced to shift to less rewarding plant species. Lower reproductive success, smaller body sizes and poor food gathering, all factors that reduce bees’ survival, are frequent outcomes of such interactions. These effects on wild pollinators have been recorded in London and other conurbations overcrowded with honey bees such as Berlin, Montreal, Paris and Zurich. Even more damming, more and more studies demonstrate that honey bees are vectors of parasites and diseases to wild bees, problems aggravated where honey bees are overabundant.
Effect of increasing honey bee abundance on species richness of all wild bees (A) and small wild bees (B) in Montreal, Canada. The coloured figures represent 95% confidence intervals © MacInnis et al., 2023:
Beekeeping promotes well-being, boosts confidence, enhances the feeling of accomplishment, creates opportunities for learning about the natural world and shared experiences with fellow beekeepers – besides the obvious asset of honey for pleasure or profit. But like many of life’s endeavours, there could be too much of a good thing. Densities of 3 to 3.5 hives/km2 have been suggested as precautionary levels to reduce honey bee impact on other species (MacInnis et al., 2023), but these figures are way lower than those found in cities around the world.
Beekeeping on U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters rooftop in Washington, D.C. A healthy hive will house 50,000 bees by midsummer © USDA, Wikimedia Commons.
Responsible beekeepers themselves have been warning about the harmful effects of unrestrained beekeeping on honey bees and wild bees, and have pointed out that creating/restoring/protecting flower patches are much more effective measures to help all pollinators. The rub is that planting flowers does not create the same opportunities for business and politicians to flaunt their green credentials.
In 2014, the Scottish Parliament announced to the world, with much fanfare, the installation of beehives on the building’s rooftop. Honey bee experts Karin Alton and Francis Ratnieks failed to be impressed: One cannot help but be cynical that the real motivation for the hive on the Scottish Parliament building was simply to give politicians a better image. As a way of helping honey bees it is of no value, and may well have had the unintended consequence of reinforcing the now widely held impression that politicians seem more concerned with spin over substance (Alton & Ratnieks, 2016b). Not to be outdone, the UK government quickly followed suit by placing a rooftop hive on, of all places, the headquarters of the department in charge of biodiversity and conservation (Defra). The purpose: “making its own contribution to combat bee declines”. You couldn’t make it up.
A genuine, disinterested bee guardian © Remember, Wikimedia Commons:
One of my “bucket list” goals of going to the Arctic was to see polar bears (also puffins, walruses other birds, and whales). I got them all, but I didn’t get close enough to a puffin.
This photo series, one or two I showed before at much lower resolution, comprises two of these elements: a polar bear and a whale, identified by our whale experts as a sperm whale (I can’t verify this). Near the northernmost part of our trip, at roughly 83º north latitude (a record for the ship itself and everybody on it), we saw an amazing sight: a polar bear (Ursus maritimus) gobbling down the blubber of a dead sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) on top of an ice floe. So here you see the world’s largest terrestrial predator gnawing on the world’s largest marine predator. It is a rarity, as both animals are scarce, and to see them together raised the hair on my neck. It was so amazing! Here are a few shots:
Don’t ask me how a dead whale got on an ice floe rather than sinking in the sea. This sight alone was, to me, worth the price of the trip. But there was of course a lot more, which I’ll post in the coming weeks. These, though, are my favorite photos. Even an expert polar photographer doesn’t come across situations like this. (Click ’em to enlarge.)
If the resolution leaves a bit to be desired, this was taken with my point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS60 camera with the lens cranked all the way out to 30X. I highly recommend this camera for travel, as it fits in your pocket but takes a lot better photos than does an iPhone.
More to come.
I swear that the NYT seems to be inserting more and more fluff in the paper in lieu of news (well, at least on the front e-page). But sometimes that’s ok, so long as you don’t mind the Gray Lady becoming the National Enquirer.
But I’m a sucker for a quiz—especially one on biology. And if you click below you’ll find ten questions, each with four answers, about how to deal with potentially dangerous animals (click here to see the archived version). You can also see the questions archived here, but you can’t see whether your answers are right. In the regular paper, if you’re right you get an instant check mark, but if you’re wrong you get a red “X” but the right answer is shown with a check. Good luck; give your scores below (see mine further down) but please don’t reveal the questions or answers in the comments.
I got only 50% of the questions, but it seems that that is a decent score given that random guessing would give only 25% (yes, somebody will point out that 5 out of ten is not significantly different from 2 or 3 out of ten, but don’t be a wiseass).
Here’s my score:
We continue today with Ephraim Heller’s big safari in Africa. Today, in part 7, he concentrates on birds; Ephriam’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Brief introduction: Continuing with my virtual safari, these photos were taken in Tanzania in April 2025. Most are from the Serengeti National Park with a few from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. On today’s agenda are some random cool birds: weavers, parrots, and secretarybirds.
Weaverbirds (Ploceidae) are a family of old world birds that take their name from their intricately woven nests. The family includes 15 genera with a total of 122 species. I photographed just two species.
Here is a male Vitelline masked weaver (Ploceus vitellinus) refurbishing a nest from a previous season. You can see the strands of fresh green grass that he has added to the old grass:
I find these nests to be miniature feats of engineering. Here you can see a male constructing a new nest.
The male constructs multiple nests hoping that a female will find one of these to be acceptable and choose to mate with him. The female flies from nest to nest making assessments, much as a human female will investigate a prospective mate’s bachelor pad. Here is a female emerging from the premises — I don’t know if this one passed the test:
And here is a male Speke’s weaver (Ploceus spekei) building its nest. They are colony nesters and nests built in previous seasons are visible in the background. The species is named for John Hanning Speke (4 May 1827 – 15 September 1864), an English explorer and army officer who made three exploratory expeditions to Africa. He is most associated with the search for the source of the Nile and was the first European to reach Lake Victoria:
Next up are the parrots. First, a Meyer’s or brown parrot (Poicephalus meyeri). They are commonly bred for the pet trade. They are relatively quiet and small and are able to learn dozens of words:
The Meyer’s parrot nests in tree cavities, but occasionally peek out to say hello (I took this photo on a previous trip in the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya, but it seems apropos here):
Much to my surprise but obvious when you look carefully, Fischer’s lovebird (Agapornis fischeri) is a small parrot. These tiny, adorable birds are a popular pet bird, but they do not do well in captivity. The term lovebird arose from the strong bonds that mates make with one another. When separated, the physical health of each individual will suffer. Mates like to be in physical contact as much as possible. Note the chick being fed in one of the photos:
I include this photo of a Secretarybird (Sagittarius serpentarius) just because it’s amazing to see them kill snakes (which I’ve only seen in nature documentaries) and because I like the image. Secretarybirds specialise in stomping their prey until it is killed or immobilised. If you haven’t seen them hunt, here is a short video (not mine):
JAC: I’m adding a video of a secretarybird stomping a snake to death:
You can get the world news from this morning’s “Hili post,” and it’s depressing, so this post serves as a palliative. Japan is the land of “kawaii,” or cuteness, and so it’s no surprise that the world’s cutest bird and cutest rodent are found there.
I came across the first video below with the caption, “The Shima-Enaga this is is a type of long-tailed tit that lives only in Hokkaido. Unlike the Northern long-tailed tits in the rest of Japan, this one doesn’t have brown “eyebrows” – its face is completely white.”
It turns out that the Shima-Enaga—meaning in Japanese “long-tailed island bird”—is indeed ineffably cute, and is a subspecies of the widespread long-tailed restricted to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaida, so it’s not a full species. Wikipedia says this:
The long-tailed tit (Aegithalos caudatus), also named long-tailed bushtit, is a common bird found throughout Europe and the Palearctic. The genus name Aegithalos was a term used by Aristotle for some European tits, including the long-tailed tit.
Looking at photos of the species, there appears to be considerable color variation, probably associated with geography.
The videos have music.
The species ranges widely across Eurasia, and I suppose the white color of this subspecies is evolved camouflage for the snowy area where it lives. The range:
Here’s an AI voice accompanying a video showing photos of the arboreal gymnastics this bird engages in.
Well, is it the cutest bird ever? (For more photos, go here.)
Speaking of kawaii in Japan, that country also harbors what is without doubt the world’s cutest rodent, the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel (Pteromys momonga). I won’t bore you with details of behavior or morphology; it’s enough to look at the videos. The rodent does bear a resemblance to the bird: rotund and whitish with big black eyes.
Of course you’ll want to see it glide, so here’s a short video showing that behavior:
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