It's saturday and I'd like to say that the sun is shining but it isn't, and neither is it raining. So we have the worst of both worlds - bad weather and a drought. The garden is a mess as ther is too much to keep watered and worse, there seems to be a distinct lack of honey bees. There are plenty of flowers on the tomatoes and the beans but few are setting and that gives cause for concern. Bees are declining all over the world and this is going to have major implications for food supplies. Much of the food that we take for granted depends on bees.
From a biological point of view, a beehive containing a colony of bees, is rather akin to a single organism. They are truly social animals and utterly dependent upon each other for survival. Only one member of the colony is able to reproduce, and she can produce tw types of offspring. The female eggs that she lays are unfertilized and produce the worker bees, the ones that we are so dependent upon, while mating with a male allows her to lay fertilized eggs that produce the drones, or male bees that are essential for the production of further males. It would seem that it is a community that is totally dominated by the females, and that the males are tolerated and even nurtured.
This week saw the announcement of a successful attempt to produce sperms from embryonic stem cells. Stem cells can be extracted from a variety of tissues and for the first time in history, the role of the male as a donor of sperm is in serious jeopardy - or is it? The notion that all future offspring will be produced from synthetic sperm cells, genetically manipulated to produce perfect offspring is the stuff of nightmares, and yet the potential for that looms large. Potential however is not the same as reality. I was always told that I had potential and yet I never came to much!
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