Pollen, January 2016

An extremely mild January, the bees were flying on several days. Two pollen samples were collected from the debris tray, and four from flowers and shrubs in the garden: Crocus, Hellibore, Quince and Viburnum.

Debris tray samples

There were two samples, one grey and one orange. A slip in the preparation of the slides caused the loss of most of the grey sample. Fig. 1 shows a photo taken before mounting, and fig. 2 is an image after mounting.



Fig. 1 Grey sample from debris tray, at 1000x
magnification,
 after washing in propanol, but before mounting.

Fig 2. As  Fig 1., after mounting.

 

The orange sample produced some clearer images:

Fig 3 Orange sample,
 magnification 400x.

Fig 4. Orange sample,
magnification 1000x

Samples from flowers and shrubs

The quince sample (figs. 5 and 6) shows a good match to the orange debris tray sample (figs 3 and 4).

Fig 5: Quince pollen, 1000x.

 

Fig 6. Quince pollen, 400x

Fig 7. Crocus pollen, 400x

 

Fig 8. Crocus pollen, 1000x

 



Fig 9. Viburnem pollen, 1000x



 



Fig 10. Hellibore pollen, 1000x



There has been much discussion in the UK in the last few days about proposals to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Brown, the Prime Minister in Waiting, says we should improve domestic insulation while Cameron, the leader of the opposition, thinks we tax flying. I might have an over optimistic view of my countrymen, but I reckon it might just be possible to do both. We would just have to ensure that the people installing domestic insulation were not also employed collecting taxes from the airlines. It would upset the whole programme if the builder you had booked to put insulation in your had to take time off to check through British Airways books.

Brown says taxing fuel won't make people use less: this is based on the fact that he stopped raising fuel taxes several years ago because the transport lobby in the UK claimed they were about to be put out business.

Book review::
"News of a kidnapping", Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Garcia Marquez tells the story of a series of kidnappings in Colombia in 1990. The drug baron Pablo Escobar was trying to negotiate terms for his surrender and imprisonment in Colombia (as opposed to extradition to the US or summary execution). Ten hostages were taken to put pressure on the Government.

Like any work of art, the shapes of the gaps around the story are as important as the story itself. Aside from his demands for guarantees of personal security, Escobar also demands that the police stop massacring the slum dwellers of Medellin. He backs up these demands with Amnesty International reports detailing the arbitrary executions of unarmed civilians. But the Government can do nothing, they have no direct control over police operations. The massacres are part of the war being fought between the Government and the drug cartels: both sides are killing innocent by-standers. Some of the hostages form personal friendships with some of their guards, recognising them as victims of the poverty and violence that grips the country.

The ten kidnapped hostages have powerful friends who put pressure on the Government both through direct contact and through the media. But the question of dealing with police violence is not part of Garcia Marquez's story.

Escobar had gained his fame and fortune by dealing drugs openly. The aeroplane used for the first shipments to the US was displayed at the entrance of his ranch where he threw lavish parties. He was popular because he was bringing wealth into a desperately poor region. The transition from local hero to public enemy number one is another gap that defines this story.

In the 1991 Pablo Escobar released the last hostages and surrendered. In the epilogue to Garcia Marquez's story he walks out of an absurdly insecure prison. After more than a year on the run he is finally caught and killed by the Colombian police.

An image of Berta

We are sitting in a ground floor flat somewhere in Munich, all
attention on Berta, our guest from Honduras. Someone points
to the snow falling outside and Berta jumps up, her face
glowing with happiness. She has never seen snow and is delighted
by its gentle beauty. Her positive attitude to everything is
impressive. She explains what a pleasure it is to have
wine because she can never relax enough to take alcohol in
Honduras: she avoids complaining about the hardship there and
makes the most of her break in Europe. Her abstinence in Honduras
is linked to the last time she saw her husband. She thinks that they
had been drugged, because they did not hear the men breaking into
the house and only woke when the shooting started. Since being
tortured, her husband had never slept for more than a few moments
at a time, always being woken by nightmares. But this night they slept
soundly. Berta woke to see her husband be dragged out through
the door. The last she saw of him was a jeep speeding away into
darkness. Disappeared. Little wonder that she found it difficult
to relax in Honduras. Harder to understand is where she found the
strength to play a leading role in COFADEH, and organisation devoted
to finding the disappeared and supporting their relatives. After
years of nothing but death threats she finally got a brief
telephone call to say that her husband had died in jail.

I thought I'd start with a memory. I'm standing in the Andes, gazing
across dusty terraces. Beyond the terraces the land falls out of
sight, and rises up on the other side of the canyon into rugged
peaks. The depth of the canyon cannot be seen, but can be felt in
the thinness of the air around me, 4,000m above sea level.
Behind me are snow capped volcanoes. Snowdon, Ben Nevis and Scafell
Pike could be stacked in the canyon, one on top the other, and
they still would not interfere with the dramatic, beautiful view.
Beside me the farmer strikes the ground with his machete:
"ugly, ugly, ugly'' he says, with an intensity that burns the
scene onto my memory. I gesture feebly at the eagle circling
above us and try to suggest that we are surrounded by beauty.
We are communicating in monosyllabic spanish -- the best I can manage.
He points at sparse blades of grass poking up through the dust
and explains how hard he must toil, unlike in England, where ``you
just scatter the seed on the ground and plants sprout up''. I'm
surprised by his knowledge of England. He lives in a dry stone house
with a tin roof. I'm not really ready for this, on my first trip
out of Europe. The grinding poverty of Peru quickly dispels
any idea that we live in a civilised world. But it takes a long
time for the anything to fill the void left by the demolished myth.
The fields we stand in are watered by the remnants of an Inca
irrigation system. The enourmous mineral wealth of the country
continues to nourish the global economy, but the people
rely on the decaying remains of canals built 500 years ago for
a meagre existence. The farmer disappears briefly and reappears
with a terrified child: "take him to England'' he begs.
I mumble that I can't, and continue on my journey.