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This morning, as I walked to the shops, I spotted a crow.  That wasn’t hard because it was making a loud cawing sound – a proper South East London crow, indeed.  Perhaps there was a cat around, maybe it was trying to locate its mate, or it could have been defending its territory.  I’m not sure what was going on, but one thing was for sure – this crow was perched very precariously on a sapling in a planter.  Perhaps six foot tall, the young tree has been damaged (perhaps by the crow?), meaning that a bird, if it lands elegantly enough, can perch atop it.  Yet what bird would want to do that? This one, obviously.  I didn’t see it land, but the level of expertise it must have taken is astonishing.  I say this because I can’t even do a three-point turn very well, so I can’t imagine calculating angles with height involved too.

Still pondering these avian acrobatics, I reached home and popped the eggs I had just bought into the fridge. I discovered a single egg at its back, and I decided that, since the crow had given me a visual treat, I would give the ones that haunt my garden an edible one. Now, this isn’t something I do often.  Although I do like to see the bigger birds in my garden (the rivalries between the crows and the magpies are legendary for their riotousness, noisiness and general length!) I generally do not feed birds at all. I used to, but then read up on it and discovered that it could produce an over-reliance on feeders, not to mention that lots of birds congregating together isn’t necessarily good for their general health.

Some species don’t need males.  Take the New Mexico Whiptail Lizard for example.  There are no males in this species. So, of course, the sensible question to ask is how do they reproduce?  They use something called parthenogenesis which involves no males and no sperm.  The female can produce an egg all by herself.  The eggs will produce an all-female brood, clones of the other – who will go on to… you get the point.  While this does allow some species to rapidly increase their range, it does somewhat limit the genetic diversity of the species!

For a closer look at parthenogenesis, take a look at these videos created by the Natural History Museum in the UK.

Did you know that a health queen honey bee can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day in the peak season?  That is one busy queen – and running the whole colony on top of that must sap her strength somewhat.  But wait a second – does a queen bee actually run her colony?  That is what most people would naturally assume, but they would be wrong.  She doesn’t make any decisions about what goes on in the hive, she simply secretes a pheromone that reassures the other bees that she is still around and healthy to boot.  If she stops producing the pheromone the colony would quickly become chaotic.  The worker bees that make up 99% of the colony and they are really the ones who keep the colony together, through a variety of tasks that they do throughout their lives.

There is a strict hierarchy in a hive and that includes not just the workers, but drones too. These are the only males in the colony and – unfortunately for  them – they get thrown out of the hive when times get hard.  I suppose having one job (mating) is a plum one when times are good (except for one gruesome fact!). Find out all about bee hierarchies in this fascinating video.