Wild Teasel

With bumblebees and great spangled fritillaries.

Captain Segue, At Your Service

Notice that the spikes lining the bulbous stem are straight. A Fuller’s teasel, on the other hand, has hooked spikes that are ideal for napping wool. Metal cards eventually replaced teasel brushes because they don’t break and ‘need replaced’.

Segue, activated: Local SW PA dialect has the ‘to be’ dropped when the subject is directly affected by the verb, but instead of the verb converting to a concealed gerund in passivization of the verb, as in “this shirt needs to be washed” converted to “this shirt needs washing”, the verb simply loses the to be and becomes “this shirt needs washed”. I need taken. The car needs drove to the crick – the rough bulbous ends of the teasel stem could be placed within a wooden frame to form a brush. Wool could then be “carded” or napped so that the wool became softer and fuzzier.

The use of “needs” or “likes”, as in “this cat likes brushed but he needs taken to the vet for shots” is a seldom-mentioned peculiarity of SW Pennsylvania regional dialect. Discussions usually stop at the examination of vocabulary and pronunciation of certain words. Yinzer cookbooks full of hickets and jagger remedies. For eight years, I communicated with laundresses in nursing homes in Georgia and Pennsylvania, so the “needs warshed” issue was a daily thing. I would sometimes steer the conversation to get the laundress to say “needs warshed/washed” or “needs to be washed/warshed” because it was so peculiar. I employed some people wo couldn’t read, which was a problem that I wanted solved. In Georgia, the “to be” was never dropped. In Pennsylvania, it allows for the overarching mushmouth quality of the spoken wordflow to blossom further.

Casually doing so on a daily basis gives me perspective. Those thoughts lead me to explore physical phenomena and forces in nature..

What make kites stay aloft? Forces of drag and lift do that. How would a bee ‘describe’ humans? Bumblebees are primitive insects with small colonies. They might lack the extensive waggle dance moves of honeybees, definitely lack their complex social structures, but they have shown the ability to communicate, despite being poor dancers, and deaf, too.

Bees sense electric fields. Their hairs detect the electric fields of flowers. At a very fundamental level, the hollow hairs of the bee’s body might be detecting the electromagnetic frequencies of light at a mechanireceptor level much like sharks using electric field detection to locate prey, or more rudely, sonar in dolphins and bats. Bumblebees have small colonies where there is less organization and communication than honeybees. I saw some honeybees in the flowers around the teasel patch, a small variety. Bees can use electric fields, dances, odor plumes, and color memory to find nectar.

Do bees increase the naturally occurring atmospheric charges? How will extreme weather events and global climate change affect bee communication. They havve enough to deal with already. Certain popular insecticides and herbicides kill bee populations. We actually ship bees to save crops damaged by the killing of critical bee populations. Monsanto reaches deeper than the seeds, they consume the insect world through which the capillaries of diurnal photoreception have persistedfor millions of years to provide us with honey, a practically eternal foodsource. To protect honey from yeast production, they use enothermic abilities to elevate the temperature within the colony and speed evaporation of water in the honey.

They want to control the crops, so bees. Controlling the food supply is the fundamental function of civilization, and fundamental power arrives when that power is wrested from one group to support another. In other words, no honey, no money.

Bees help to keep the food web from collapsing. Bees can trap airborne pollen in their hairs and carry them between plants, and they carry the fragrant pollen back to the colony. Bumblebees can generate their own warmth in winter. Not to be out-endothermed, Japanese honeybees can raise their body temperature to a level that is lethat to larger, more dangerous hornets. They kill Japanese murder bees by forming an intolerably hot ball around the hornet and killing it after about a half-hour wrasslin’ match that leaves the balling bees disabled, too, a sacrificial behavior. Bumblebees don’t do that. They don’t have bumblebees taking their honey, swilling it and refining it to be regurgitated into the combs, an intermediary in the bucketline of chemical reactions that turn nectar into honey. Spoiler: there’s bee in it. They return to the nest and deposit the honey directly. Blarghghh!

Whatever will bee will be…sideways?

Exactly maybe bumblebees are electric, insomuch as every living thing has an electric field and works as giant Amazon distro centers for electrons . Consider the fact that flying insects like bees and locusts can swarm and affect the production of lightning. That is freaky, and here is another source, but I have found sources that show spiders and ticks using electrostatic charges to overcome mobility issues by using the electric field in the atmosphere. I have seen a study where scientists used a blanket to catch ticks. They dragged it through the woods and got a bunch. It’s probably easier than rubbing a balloon on your head and holding it close to the ground.

Maybe the bumblebees have reprogrammable gut flora, and maybe they get all the limelight, but there’s other pollinators, other creatures on the teasel. I keep getting pulled back in. The attraction grows and grows. Bumbleebee gravity helps the braneworld theories. Good job bumblebee gravity! If the expected vacuum value is non-zero, then you got a stew going. you got fermions, you got bosons, you got all kinds of stuff that the proof of gravity waves, for example, bring to the fore.

Spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking is a raging puzzle that challenges the ‘standard model’. So much of our science has been nailed down already, often centuries ago. Getting excited about scientific discovery often requires an ability to understand data at extremes: in black holes, in quasars, in gravity waves, in theories involving chaos, stochastics, LLMs, cryptography, dark matter, neutrinos, multiversions of the physical world. Words like space-like, time-like start to creep into models. There are black holes with a mass of a billion suns….so, look at these damn flowers and bugs.

Great Spangled Fritillary

The brown butterfly has light edges around the wing and silver spots on the underside of the wings. The name comes from both the spots and speckled appearance. That’s how they did it back in the rustic toilet days. Two names about observable traits. This is a common, beautiful butterfly that instantly made my day better. Rain fell three inches deep here the day before. This rainstorm would flood parts of Eastern PA and kill five people, a really powerful deluge. That rainfall helped bring the nectar, and the butterflies.

Great spangled fritillary like to feed on violets. Violets have a flirty scent because they contain ionones, chemicals that monetarily neutralize the receptors that detect its odor. You smell it, but you can’t locate the source.

Japanese flower culture provides some interpretive poetic devices to describe the violet, and in this old anime video, “Sally the Witch”, Sally uses the perfume to engage a cat to chase a mouse. The violet color prefigures strongly in this cat-and-mouse analog.

“A violet in the youth of primy nature

Forward, not permanent, sweet not lasting

The perfume and suppliance of a minute

No more.”

– Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3

W. Shakespeare

Anyways, let Sax Ruby break it down for you musically.

Ask a Robot About This Here Butterfly

The presence and behavior of the Great Spangled Fritillary can provide valuable insights about the surrounding environment. Here are a few aspects that the butterfly can reveal:

1. Habitat Diversity: The Great Spangled Fritillary has specific habitat requirements. Its presence indicates the availability of suitable habitat, which typically includes open meadows, fields, and woodland edges. If populations of Great Spangled Fritillaries are abundant, it suggests a diverse and healthy ecological landscape.

2. Plant Diversity: This butterfly species relies on specific host plants for breeding, particularly violets. Observing Great Spangled Fritillaries can provide information about the presence and abundance of violet species in an area. Their dependence on certain plants highlights the importance of maintaining plant diversity for the overall health of ecosystems.

3. Pollinator Health: As a pollinator species, the Great Spangled Fritillary plays a role in plant reproduction and ecosystem functioning. Monitoring the population and activity of these butterflies can serve as an indicator of pollinator health and the overall state of the pollination process within an ecosystem.

4. Climate Change Impacts: Changes in the distribution and phenology (timing of life cycle events) of butterflies like the Great Spangled Fritillary can be an indication of climate change impacts. Researchers use butterfly populations as indicators to track the ecological effects of climate change, including shifts in species’ ranges and possible disruptions in ecological relationships.

5. Conservation Status: The presence or absence of Great Spangled Fritillaries in an area may provide insights into their conservation status. If their populations are declining or absent from certain habitats, it could indicate environmental degradation, habitat loss, or other factors affecting their survival. This information can help guide conservation efforts to protect and restore their habitats.

By studying and monitoring the Great Spangled Fritillary, scientists can gain a better understanding of local ecology, make informed conservation decisions, and assess the overall health and resilience of ecosystems.