Category Archives: General Stuff

Real entomologists use aspirin bottles

Posted on March 13, 2012 | 1 comment

I was recently reminded of the tale, told by Charles Darwin in later life, about his fervent beetle-collecting youth. Peeling off the loose bark of a dead tree, probably somewhere in Cambridgeshire, he saw two rare beetles and picked them up, one in each hand. On spotting yet another he was momentarily at a loss, but then decided to pop one of those he held into his mouth for safe-keeping, in order to free up his hand to catch the third. Of course it ejected some foul liquid and in the inevitable coughing, spluttering and choking fit that followed he lost all three.

Personally, I think Mr Darwin was being a bit sloppy. No real entomologist ever leaves home without at least some potential collecting containers about his or her person. A couple of glass tubes in a top pocket are the usual answer, but at a push, almost anything can be brought to use — empty humus pots, take-away containers, matchboxes, plastic milk bottles, urine sample kits. I once had to remove the ink cartridge from my fountain pen to drop in a small picture-wing fly — worked a treat.

So when, sitting in the Red Lion Pub in London’s Mayfair, some time back in the 1980s, it was no surprise when the person next to me took out a brown aspirin bottle from his pocket and offered me some of the contents. The American tourists sitting nearby were agog, and nudged each other surreptitiously until I explained that this was the perfectly normal behaviour of anyone who had just left a meeting of the British Entomological and Natural History Society. After leaving the lecture hall of the Alpine Club, in South Audley Street, where the meetings took place, a hard core would descend on the snug bar at the Red Lion in Waverton Street (it’s now boarded up, presumably about to be redeveloped). Here we would cogitate on the proceedings of the meeting, and continue earnest discussions about the correct way to find obscure leaf-mining moths, or ruminate on the last time anyone had seen a Clifden Nonpareil.

They must have closed it down because of the strange behaviour of some of the clientele.

Unscrewing the pill bottle, he gingerly tipped out a couple of beetles into the palm of my hand — Melasis buprestoides, a strange and handsome creature, I think I had only ever seen it once or twice before. Working for the National Trust biodiversity team, Andy Foster had plenty of opportunity to find such bark beetles, especially those, like Melasis, which are particularly at home in ancient woodland remnants. Would I like a specimen or two? Actually, they are much larger than the diminutive one I remembered finding in Sussex. Might be the other sex. Yes, I’ll take a couple for my reference collection. Now let’s see what I’ve got to put them in. A small glass tube tucked into the side pocket of my brief case. Perfect. If only Mr Darwin had been so prepared.

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What a waste — what is the biodiversity value of urban brownfields?

Posted on March 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

Bulldozed piles of rubble, twisted metal and rubbish — ugly, dirty, smelly, dangerous. Brownfields have an real image problem. Click on picture for PDF of lecture text.

On Friday 9 March 2012, I gave a lecture, so titled, at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Derided as economically useless ‘wastelands’, brownfields are often portrayed as being little more than bulldozed heaps of rubble, twisted metal and rubbish — dirty, smelly, ugly, dangerous. Brownfields, truly, have an image problem.

It starts with the name. Brown is not a cool colour; it is the colour of dirt, the colour of excrement. More importantly, brownfields are seen as not green. And, conversely, green is the colour of the moment, the colour on everyone’s lips. Green is the colour of the countryside; it’s the colour of nature, the colour of goodness. More than this, green has been misappropriated by anyone wanting to link into these aspirational attributes; green has become a powerful brand. Leaving aside the Green Party, which has commandeered the word as part of its very name, even in general parlance the environmental movement is usually described as a green movement, companies are keen to show off their green credentials, we all aspire to green living. Green is so cool. I wouldn’t like to contemplate for a moment what might be the response if I said I was part of a brown movement.

Brownfields are, nevertheless, very important for wildlife; in particular they are important for invertebrates — insects especially. The trouble is that insects are imbued with their own image problem. When Ridley Scott needed a model for his blood-thirsty, parasitic, shiny, armored Alien, he leant heavily on the imagery of insects. If insects were the size of cats or dogs, they would be the most terrifyingly awful creatures on Earth. Unfortunately, even though insects are very small, many people think they are already quite awful enough thank you. Trying to show that brownfield sites are worthy of ecological study and even environmental conservation because of their invertebrate interest, is a doubly uphill struggle. But I will try.

Here is the text of the lecture.

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Verrall Supper 2012

Posted on March 8, 2012 | 1 comment

The Entomological Club, an exclusive 8-member cabal of entomologists formed in 1826, is the oldest extant entomological society in the world. Apart from informal meetings at member’s houses to exchange specimens and discuss the latest taxonomic turns of the day, an annual meeting, followed by dinner for members and guests, was instigated. When George Verrall joined The Club in 1887 he took the dining to new heights — mainly by paying for it himself.

When he died, in 1911, he left a small sum of money to keep the annual meeting alive, but the dinner had to become self-financing. In his honour, it has been the ‘Verrall Supper’ ever since.

Entomologists, it seems, scrub-up good, and despite my incautious remarks about scruffy attire and a sometimes cavalier attitude to personal hygiene, here they all present in smart suits and frocks — women appear to have been admitted, maybe some time in the 1960s?

There is still some exchange of specimens in cardboard boxes and Latin is the lingua franca at all tables. Despite (or maybe because of) the flowing wine, much heady business is also conducted. I overheard earnest discussions of joint field meetings to obscure parts of the globe. Panama seems like a bit of a jolly: “We can pay expenses and sustenance, but not salaries; we get the majority of specimens but you take the cassidines and hispines — as long as we can agree some split of the types. Ten days should do it.”

Occasionally there is a brief pause while a huddled group try and remember some arcane snippet of entomological lore: “What’s the Onthophagus under dog dung at Camber Sands?” “Not sure about dog dung, there was a tissue beside the one I examined.” All this mixed in with the availability of funding sources, tales from the recent Prague insect fair, moans about data-input, and the evolution of lactose tolerance in human adults.

Here are a few pictures of the evening.

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Mummy — is that a tramp?

Posted on February 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

Naturalists can be a downright scruffy lot. My father tells a tale of when he was out scrambling across the Sussex countryside many years ago, and exited his most recent trespass through a deep hedge and onto the public footpath right in front of a woman, and her young daughter, out taking a dog for the walk. He would have carried a tatty faded rucksack, a battered metal vasculum (plant collecting box) and dirty field notebook; ball-point pen and hand lens would both be attached by tired pieces of string to his lapel buttonhole. Mud-splattered, torn and scratched he no doubt presented a rather startling sight.

Despite his best smile and cheeriest ‘Good afternoon’, the little girl was not taken in for a moment and muttered an urgent stage whisper to her mother: “Mummy — is that a tramp?”

I have never let him live this down. And I rail at other unkempt naturalists to do better with their personal appearance.

There is, how shall I put this, a post-hippy tradition (?) amongst naturalists to look roughly casual in the field. Part of this is the knowledge that there is no point getting your best clothes covered in grime and grit and grass stains, scrabbling about on all-fours around an unusual clump of sedge trying to get the best angle to photograph it, or dissecting a nicely fermented cow pat after dung beetles. But shabby chic has moved on from the days when the Edwardian farm worker was wearing his old third-best worsted suit to cover a stained shirt and holed weskit. Jeans torn at the knees and a shapeless sweatshirt emblazoned with Mick Jagger’s lips and the tour dates of the Stones’ 1975 UK tour do not do it.

The bearded eco-warrior student look may work in the volunteer hedge-laying or dry-stone-walling party, but it does nothing to promote the inquisitive natural scientist to genteel members of the public out for a quiet family stroll.

There was a time when openly carrying an insect net often meant disapproving looks from ramblers or bird-watchers, who equated such hunting paraphernalia with fervent butterfly collectors and ivory poachers. A disheveled appearance could only add to the general air of mistrust.

I have only one rule of entomological couture — power dress. In the days of skulking through the Weald’s hidden woodlands or tramping brazenly across the heathered mounds of the Quantocks, a tweed suit, white shirt and neat tie was just the business. In it I would speak to the landowner as an equal, or overawe the gamekeeper. I was approachable to all, curious to know what I was up to, but no longer threatening, or suspicious.

I now have a new form of power-dressing; one suited to bluffing my way past the security guards of disused chalk pits and gravel quarries, or through the formalities of the construction sites and disused wharfs of the Thames Gateway. Safety boots, a shiny white hard-hat, and a bright yellow high-visibility jacket prominently labelled ‘Environment Survey’ will open many a padlocked chain-link gate.

I didn’t need this corporate safety-wear on Tuesday though. After dropping 14-year-old in Brighton for some art-interview coaching from her aunt, I met my Dad for a short hike through the fields and woods around Plumpton, just the other side of the Downs. The usual waxed jacket and pseudo-pashmina for me (very ‘country’). My father’s improved with age. He looked quite civilized in check jacket, pale raincoat and striped dapper tie.

Jones Senior, and Jones Very Senior Indeed.

I think he’s done rather well.

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Entomologists love all insects, except this one

Posted on February 17, 2012 | 3 comments

No matter how small and mean is an insect, there’s an entomologist, somewhere, who thinks it wonderful. Lots of people love butterflies, and moths, and bees, and dragonflies. Dung beetles are among my own favourites. Elsewhere there are fans of stick insects, earwigs, fleas and hissing cockroaches. Even ants, apparently, have their followers.

But, to a man (or woman), there is one insect universally loathed by entomologists of all walks of life. This one.

Cute, but despised, Anthrenus verbasci is the bane of entomology.

The museum beetle, Anthrenus verbasci, is a small (2.0-2.5 mm) globular little beast, very pretty under the microscope because of its mottled variegated scales. But it is the scourge of entomologists the world over. As its name suggests, it haunts museums — in particular the cases of stuffed birds and animals, stores of dried animal skins and drawers of pinned insects.

It is one of several similar species, including the more appropriately named Anthrenus museorum, that can wreak havoc among the museums’ treasured collections, unless each and every item is examined on a rolling check every year or so. Large items, like stuffed birds and animals are often on display and chewings are immediately noticed. But trays and trays of pinned and carded insect specimens locked away in dusty mahogany cabinets in the store rooms can go for decades unexamined; it is not until some visiting expert tries to check out the particular family or genus they’ve been working on, that the Anthrenus infestation is revealed. All that now remains are rows and rows of neatly arrayed pins and piles of dust. No, entomologists do not like Anthrenus.

It is the tiny bristly larvae that do the damage, chewing their way through the insect specmens, often from the inside out. With generation times of only a few days or weeks, it is not long before there is an army of Anthrenus larvae. Oh, entomologists grit their teeth and curse softly under their breath at the thought.

It might seem odd, at first, that Anthrenus should have found this strange little ecological niche in which to have evolved their annoying and destructive lives. And they rather beg the question, where did museum beetles live before there were museums?

Museum beetles do not just live in museums, they also live in homes, where they go by another name — carpet beetles. Here, the same fuzzy larvae, sometimes endearingly called woolly bears, chew away at the Axminster or the Wilton. Not that this gets us much further; OK so where did they live before humans had carpets? Where did they live in the many rug-free millennia before the intricacies of the Persian or the Turkish knot, before the loom, before even the first sabre-toothed tiger skin was cast down onto the cold rough cave floor by Mr and Mrs Neanderthal?

It seems they probably lived in bird and small mammal nests. Despite the fact that museum (or carpet) beetles now frequent our very modern homes and learned institutions, their metabolism is still governed by their digestion of the moulted feathers and fur they first tasted way back in evolutionary history. In the home they find ready nutrition in the wool of our carpets. They will also eat silk (another animal fibre), feathers (whether boas or stuffed birds), furs (stoles, coats and more stuffed displays). And they will attack the chitin shells of museum insect specimens.

The occasional Anthrenus is also sometimes fished out of empty bee and wasp nests. These are often made in the same places as bird and animal nests, either in hollow trees, loft spaces or hedge bottoms. Here they appear to be devouring the remains of dead insects littering the lower regions of the combs. There is very little evolutionary leap from dead bees and the remains of the wasps’ prey, to the insect specimens hoarded away in the local museum.

I don’t like Anthrenus. They have devoured plenty of specimens in my relatively small insect collection including, recently, a large number of parasitic flies (family Tachinidae) stored in a rather old and obviously not Anthrenus-proof store box.

But I do have a soft spot for one of its close relatives — Ctesias serra. The adult beetles are slightly larger, flatter and shinier then Anthrenus, and the bristly larvae are lovely.

The animated boot brush that is the larva of Ctesias serra.

Ctesias follows a quiet and secretive life on old trees where it ekes out a living eating dead insects. These it pinches from the snarled and matted webs of the the several types of spiders that live underneath the loose and peeling bark, or inside hollow trunks. It tiptoes about in the dark nibbling at the dry husks, but is itself immune to spider attack. If a spider comes near, Ctesias starts wiggling its tail, at high speed. This sets up jamming signals across the silk threads of the webs. The spiders are unable to work out where the vibrations are coming from, so cannot calculate a pounce. A spider would only get a mouthful of broken bristles if it tried.

Ctesias is a relatively uncommon species, but occurs on a wide variety of trees, including some of the large street trees here in East Dulwich. Unlike Anthrenus, it does not find abundant food in bird or small mammal nests, nor has it invaded bee or wasp colonies. It has certainly not come indoors to munch the carpet or the soft furnishings. And it has never been found in insect collections. I like Ctesias. I like it a lot.

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We’re all going on a quetzal hunt

Posted on February 8, 2012 | 2 comments

There was a time when holidays could be intrepid, adventurous — dangerous even — and not tied down to the stranglehold of school holidays. So October 1992 saw us in Guatemala, with expectations of Mayan temples and lush rainforests alive with howler monkeys, agoutis, toucans and iguanas.

After three days of oppressive dusty heat in Guatemala City, vainly awaiting our lost luggage to return from Mexico, or California, or wherever it had gone, it was a relief to be on our way to the stylish cool of Posada Montana del Quetzal, the Inn on Quetzal Mountain.

The Inn, a weekend destination of the City’s executives and civil servants, offers quiet civilized chalets and fine views over the valley. The quetzal, a resplendent metallic green and red bird, almost painfully beautiful and mythically rare, is the national emblem of Guatemala, and also the name of its unit of currency.

The four-kilometre hike from our chalet to the quetzel biotope reserve would be our first taste of the rugged terrain for which the country is well known. The mountain highway was narrow, but tarmacked, and it was almost deserted of traffic. It would be a pleasant stroll.

As the steep road wound up the heavily wooded hillside, it passed terraced subsistence farmlands and we caught sight of the occasional plume of smoke from bonfires in the ragged fields. We were expectant — any minute we might catch a glimpse of the fabled bird through the ferns and epiphytes. Occasionally a rattling pick-up truck belching diesel fumes would pass us, usually heavily laden with passengers, at least one of which would be holding a large rifle. When each had gone, the quetzal-free silence on the hills seemed even deeper than before.

As we got closer to the reserve, the cloud came down thick and damp. And the traffic started to pick up. In quick succession, several small minivans went past. Each was topped with large megaphones blaring out bird-scaring music, and the sides were plastered with ads for the local beverage — Gallo (cockerel) Beer. Were they advertising to the sparsely scattered farmers in the fields? They certainly weren’t doing much for our chances on a quetzal hunt.

Then it started to rain. We were entering cloud forest. It may seem odd now, but I was wearing a jacket and tie at the time — part of my nearly-mad-Englishman-abroad disguise. This was a time of troubles in Guatemala; there were frayed tempers in the ever-present army and disgruntled rebels in the hills. I hoped my outlandish appearance would engender curiosity and amusement rather than hostility if we were found trespassing or looked too suspicious.

At the time I thought I looked rather smart. Only my pith hat was missing.

The next noisy van had a bicycle strapped precariously to the roof and a few minutes later the explanation dawned on us as the peleton of the Vuelta a Guatemala came pedalling out of the heavy drizzle. Keen fans of the Tour de France, we applauded loudly as the cyclists passed. We were, I think, their only audience on the roadside that day. They were hotly pursued by the support convoy, a scattering of honking trucks full of bicycle parts and clattering motorcycles with pillion riders wearing spare tyres like bandoliers.

The Vuelta a Guatemala. Still the only international cycling road race I have witnessed first hand.

We were also the only visitors to the quetzal reserve that day. It seemed that we were the only living things in there. Halfway round the narrow gloomy path through the forest we hunched bedraggled over a sandwich and flask of coffee; a large green chafer dropped out of the dripping trees onto my head. It was very pretty and I was pleased to see something so exotic, but it wasn’t a quetzal. It was the only creature we saw in the dank woodland.

Still one of the greenest insects I have ever seen.

Leaving for the sodden hour’s march back down the mountain later, we were suddenly hailed by one of the reserve staff; had we left a dripping anorak in their hut? No, he was gesticulating at a tall thin tree in the car park. Squinting through the mist I could just make out the long curving green tail feathers of a marvellous bird sitting stooped in the rain; it was our quetzal after all.

One wet quetzal, sitting in a tree.

Despite the continuing downpour, our walk back to the inn, with its open fire and comfortable bed, was buoyed up with our new enthusiasm for the country and its wildlife. Our luggage did not reappear for three months, but it was an unforgettable adventure — Colombian José Castelblanco went on to win the Vuelta, we got to the Mayan temples of Tikal, met plenty of howlers, agoutis, toucans and iguanas, and we saw that one wet quetzal. Magical.

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I am Wallace’s werewolf

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 1 comment

Alfred Russel Wallace is famously described as Darwin’s Moon. In which case I’m pleased to howl in his support, whenever I get the chance. Although Wallace came up with the same idea, it was Darwin, the older man, the established natural philosopher scientist and wealthy country gentleman, whose name is now primarily linked with evolution and natural selection.  Especially in the public mind, Wallace has been eclipsed.

When I had a short-term contract to sort through Frederick Horniman’s collection of exotic beetles (mostly showy and brightly coloured chafers and longhorns) still housed in the Horniman Museum, it was a thrilling discovery to come across several specimens collected by Wallace in Aru, Ternate and other Indonesian islands either side of the Wallace Line.

So it was with great pleasure that I found I was able to weave Wallace into the pages of Mosquito. I couldn’t believe the rich vein of mosquito references in his books, the importance he laid on his mosquito netting, and the deliciously neat way that malaria runs straight on to his ‘cold fit of ague’ in Ternate where he wrote that concise and focussed essay ‘On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely form the original type’ that he mailed to Darwin.

The original ‘Ternate’ essay reproduced after Darwin’s at the Linnean Society meeting is here.

The first proofs of Mosquito have arrived, and I’m bouncing with excitement to show off a few pages. So here is my homage to Wallace. These are screen-grabs from the uncorrected first PDF proofs, and I know that his name is spelled wrongly in the figure captions.

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The wind blows across the sacred beacon hills of my childhood

Posted on January 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

I have been invited to interview Sir David Attenborough at Glyndebourne, for Countryfile Magazine. Even my children are impressed. The opera house has installed a wind turbine to provide it with electricity, and when it went to a public enquiry, David Attenborough spoke in support of the proposal. Friday was the official opening and press launch.

I grew up here; it was 6 miles from my house to the opera as the crow flies. I never went, though. Once, I was 10 or 12 maybe, I was waiting for the Newhaven train at Lewes Station and was surprised to see a train pull in with carriages entirely populated by passengers in black tie and ball gowns. Off to the opera I was told. I don’t think I entirely knew what opera was. But I knew every curve of the hills from my doorstep to the great sweep of the steep chalk scarp overlooking the Sussex Weald. This is, I think, one of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth, and it still makes me cry when I look out from the beacon hills above Firle.

Who could resist stepping over this stile and being swept off on an adventure in the meadows and copses of the Sussex Weald?

It was to this chalk down I set out for, before the formalities of the day, and it made me cry again; partly it was the blistering wind in my face. No-one else was on the hills that day. There were plenty of sheep though. Looking out across the chequerboard of erratic fields and woods below I was reminded of those idyllic landscape paintings by A.E. Bestall that formed the endpapers of the Rupert Annuals in the 1950s and ’60s. I was always fascinated by this higgledy-piggledy jumble of hedgerows, streams, meadows, woods and coppice. It could only have been constructed, piecemeal, over the centuries; it’s so different to the structured geometric grid landscapes of East Anglia.

Looking back across the downs to Newhaven they were, still, very much as I remembered them. The steep edges of the undulating combes remain thankfully unploughed, browner against the crop fields and grazing meadows,  because of the rough flowery grassland and dotted gorse scrub. These were the haunts of all those fantastic chalk downland insects I found. Poverty Bottom and Devil’s Rest Bottom were the scenes of regular visits. My aunts used to giggle slightly at the mention of them — ‘bottom’, how rude.

As I strode up to the beacon top, from the small car park, I was reminded just how ancient was this place. A sunken lane gathers itself from the hill crest and winds down through Firle Plantation, and off to the village below.

No machinery cut this way, just the passing foot traffic of — how long? Certainly many centuries, possibly several millennia.

There are several of these old pathways crossing the downs, but many have had their outward signs obliterated by widening and tarmac. At the beacon top itself is another ancient sign, a series of burial tumuli, long ago desecrated and dug over, but still visible as an unnaturally undulating sward. The trigonometrical point is just off to one side, and in a modern echo of the mysterious earthworks a mole has been busy in the shallow topsoil.

It's probably many years since this trig point was used for surveying.

After an hour of struggling against the wild wind I set off for the civilization of Glyndebourne. Back to the 21st century. I recorded the 15-minute interview on my iPhone. It all seemed to go very fast, I’m not sure I asked enough questions so thought I’d check what was said as I sat in my car in the staff car park. Hmmm. The interview would not play back. I kept pressing the ‘play’ button, but it stalled and the screen seized. My anxiety was mounting and I became aware of the whoosh whoosh whooshing of blood in my ears. The drive back was slightly nerve-wracking. At what point do I panic that the technology has failed me? Thankfully the whooshing in my brain had stopped. It wasn’t my rising blood pressure, but the sweep of the turbine’s sails I had heard through the trees. It was a very windy day.

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Our Lego giraffe-necked weevil is a triumph

Posted on January 16, 2012 | 2 comments

Buoyed up by the previous success of of our Lego head louse, 6-year-old and I have been working on some other insect constructions. The kitchen table could barely hold the mountain of bricks and the cats occasionally got out of hand skittering small bits under the fridge or behind the bin. I had to rescue Hagrid’s hair and beard from the mouth of the black one, and it is now rather unpleasantly slimy. Luckily, I don’t think that particular Lego piece will ever be needed for one of our entomological masterpieces. And, although I say it myself, masterpieces they are.

I wanted to do an earwig. I’m quite pleased with the result, but as my assistant pointed out, the yellow is a bit jarring on the eye. Lego need to commission a series of more insect-based chitinous colours; testaceous, ferrugineous and fuscous should do it.

Not much chance of this Forficula auricularia crawling into your ear.

Incidentally, I recently came across this report on ear-invading arthropods, which I thought was quite peculiar. Earwigs are not mentioned though. There is, however, a tale, not apocryphal I believe, that a ‘gentleman of the road’ visited the Natural History Museum in London (must have been back in the 1950s or 1960s maybe) expressly to offer personal testimony to assembled experts that, given the chance, earwigs would indeed invade the ear canal if you slept rough under a hedge.

Anyway, back to Lego. Next, we moved on to the sinister outlines of the death’s-head hawk. Not bad, although the sombre subtlety of the wing mottles do lose something in the translation to Lego pixelification.

For best effect, try squinting at this one.

What next? I thought bed-bug, maybe, or dung beetle. But 6-year-old had a better idea. He knew exactly where to go for the image, the Japanese edition of Extreme Insects, which has this wonderful creature on the cover:

Our giraffe-necked weevil is a triumph.

The giraffe-necked weevil, Trachelophorus giraffa, suits everything about Lego: its bright colours, angular shapes and robotic form. If anything, our model looks more life-like than the living insect.

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Life is sweet

Posted on January 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

Even in the bleak post-industrial dereliction of the Thames waterside through North Woolwich and Beckton, life is still sweet. Mr Tate may have given us art galleries of repute, but his partner Mr Lyle gave us a giant tin of golden syrup the size of a Transit Van.

Abram Lyle would be pleased at his architectural legacy. What, I wonder would he have made at the pretence to metrication — by the relabelling of his 2 lb tins as 907 grams?

This is the surreal view from West Silvertown station on the Docklands Light Railway, showing the Tate & Lyle factory, one of the few remaining commercial premises still working in the area. According to the Tate & Lyle website, Abram Lyle started selling off the previously waste syrup created during the sugar refining process in 1883, first in wooden casks to employees, but in tins to the general public from 1885.

If you click on the photo and enlarge it, you can make out the lion and the quotation from Judges (Chapter 14, Verse 14): “…out of the strong came forth sweetness.” This, of course, is the insect link on which I will now dwell. The lion is dead, and the speckles above it are supposed to be honeybees; the story just keeps getting stranger.

The words are spoken by Samson, to some truculent in-laws (‘uncircumcised Philistines’), at his wedding. It is a riddle, on which hangs the wager of Samson receiving 30 bed-sheets and 30 sets of clothes or, if he loses, having to provide them for his guests. He’s remembering some time before when he killed a young lion with his bare hands and, walking past a short while later, he noticed a swarm of bees in the carcass. The full riddle is: “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness”. Meat, in that archaic sense of anything edible, was, of course, the honey.

Needless to say, the Philistines had no idea what he was on about, until they convinced his fiancée to wheedle it out of him before the full 7 days of the wedding bet were up. Not best pleased about being answered in so sly a manner, Samson berates them that they only got the answer by ploughing with his heifer wife. An interesting, but rather harsh analogy I thought. He then went off and killed 30 locals, stripping them of their spoil to settle his debt of wager. Grim reading it all makes. I doubt the marriage lasted.

Of course, if an entomologist had been on hand, the whole thing would have been sorted in a trice. The notion of the oxen-born bee, the spontaneous appearance of bees in ox carcasses, prevailed for thousands of years. In Greek mythology Aristaeus was in big trouble with Eurydice’s nymphs; she’d trodden on a snake and been bitten, as she tried to escape his amorous attentions, so the nymphs killed all his bees. He had to appease them by sacrificing four bulls and four heifers. Nine days of putrefaction later, bees miraculously spewed out of the dead animals. Killing a bullock by blocking its mouth and nostrils and bludgeoning it to death, then leaving it to ferment until its bones were softened, was widely accepted as a useful bit of bee husbandry until at least the middle of the 17th century. The blocking of its nose and throat was to prevent the animal’s soul leaving its body — that was destined to enter the resultant bees.

Strange though this thinking may seem to modern minds, there is an element of potential true observation in what was supposedly being reported. If an animal carcass if left to rot, it attracts the usual swathe of carrion insects. Blowflies and burying beetles come early, but when it gets to the semi-liquid putrefaction stage it attracts a hoverfly.

Adult and early stages of Eristalis tenax, plate 1 from 'The natural history of Eristalis tenax or the drone fly' by George Bowdler Buckton, 1895.

Eristalis tenax is a large brown and orange hoverfly; in English it is the drone-fly, so called because of its close resemblance to a male honeybee, a drone (larger eyes than the colony’s female workers). Eristalis  normally lays its eggs in the rotting soup of dead leaves in hedgerow ditches, farmyard drains fouled by animal sewage run-off, and the stinking mud of stagnant woodland pools. And it will, on occasion, also oviposit in the rank gelatinous slime of putrescent meat. Its rat-tailed maggots get their name from the long tail-like breathing siphon on the rear end, which they use to take draughts of air from the water surface whilst they are nibbling their way through the smelly gloop at the bottom of the mirk. This, it turns out, is the oxen-born ‘bee’.

Quite what Abram Lyle was thinking when he designed or commissioned his famous tins is now rather lost to conjecture. Like many Victorian gentlemen of the time he was reputedly a deeply religious man, and he may have seen it as representing the strength of the Lyle company or brand. Or could it have been a clever marketing ploy? Today he would certainly not have got away with calling his artificially produced sweet golden liquor anything to do with honey, or even be allowed to reproduce that symbol of all things sweet and natural and wholesomely industrious — a honeybee — on the label. Yet his tins still proclaim that biblical honey link, even if the supposed bees are now really flies.

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