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This chapter describes the need for pollination in greenhouses due to its special agro-ecological conditions and unique constraints. The advantages that greenhouses hold for both achieving pollination of particular crops and for safeguarding managed pollinators are compared with open air cultures. The traits of the two main greenhouse pollinators — bumble bees and honey bees — are discussed according to their relevance for pollination in this horticultural system. Finally, some examples of pollination of greenhouse cultures and predictions for the future development of pollination in greenhouses are described.

Pollinator Biocontrol Vector Technology is a novel application strategy using bees for the delivery of microbial control agents. This technology has been demonstrated for the control of seed set in weeds, suppression of plant diseases and control of insect pests. For this multi-disciplinary approach to be successful, many factors must be considered such as efficacy against the target pests, vector safety, formulation of the inoculum, inoculum dispenser design, and environmental and human safety. Pollinator Biocontrol Vector Technology is a new, reduced risk pest management tool that reduces pesticide use and improves crop pollination resulting in increased yield and crop quality.

When disease strikes a hive of bees, it can devastate the colony and spread to the entire beekeeping operation. All bees are susceptible to diseases, and when they are domesticated, their population densities increase to suit human needs, making them more susceptible. Most attempts at disease control have centered on either drug treatments or destroying affected colonies. This chapter discusses how disease control strategies could be improved by first developing a better understanding of the disease-cycle, and in particular, developing knowledge of the disease triangle, allowing researchers to identify that time and place in the management system for which the pathogen is most vulnerable, followed by targeting treatments to that stage.

This chapter reviews currently available information on the success of introduced pollinators, their effects on native ecosystems, and examines the viability of using native pollinators to prevent unnecessary introductions of exotic species. Exotic species of bees have been introduced to different countries as crop pollinators. Well-known examples are the alfalfa leafcutting bee (Megachile rotundata) and several species of bumble bees (Bombus spp.). In most cases, these imports have been done without prior assessment of possible negative impacts of the pollinators on native ecosystems. Other species have been accidentally introduced, or introduced for purposes other than pollination of crops. The best known of such introductions is the African honey bee, imported to Brazil in the 1950s. African honey bees (Apis mellifera scutellata) have become important pollinators of crops like coffee or avocado in tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas.

This chapter considers methods for quantifying the importance of bees in pollinating a crop and in producing field-to-field cross-pollination and gene flow. Simple theoretical models are presented whose parameters identify key governing influences on bee pollination. The values of some parameters are known, particularly in systems involving honey bees and bumble bees, and their implications for the confinement of genetically-modified crops are discussed. Specific parameters whose values are unknown are identified as targets for future work.

This chapter summarizes how agricultural production and bees are inter-dependent. Honey bees are the most commonly used agricultural pollinators in the world, but are threatened by an increasing number of hive pests. In addition, not all crops are well pollinated by honey bees (e.g., tomatoes, alfalfa seed, and crops grown in greenhouses and under row covers). Fortunately, the world holds a huge diversity of bee species, although only a few of these are managed specifically as crop pollinators. Wild bees provide pollination services that often go unnoticed, yet are critical to the success of some forms of agriculture. The impact that bees have on our food production systems should serve as a reminder to our dependence, in general, on the ecosystems around us.

Supporters of WikiLeaks proprietor Julian Assange protested his arrest in Sweden on sexual charges as a classic “honey trap”—a sting operation in which an attractive person is used to entrap or coerce a target. In this case, the claim is that two Swedish women used sex as a way of trapping Assange. “Honey trap” is a phrase more familiar in Britain than the United States, and its connection with sting seems more than coincidental. The honeybee has long been associated in literature and political philosophy with a model of human society—from Virgil's Georgics to Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees to Leo Tolstoy and Karl Marx. But although the term “honey trap” was originally associated with espionage, the Oxford English Dictionary says that it is now onw which is found “especially in journalism.”

The Leviticus writer finds the world divided into two kinds of humans, those under the covenant, and the rest, and two kinds of land animals, those under the covenant and the rest; but the rest are not evil, the picture is not painted in black and white – it was the work of the later commentators to read good and bad into the divisions between pure and impure. In the book of Leviticus only land animals (but most land animals) are unclean or defiling. For covenant some territorial principle, or at least ownership, is necessary; creatures of the air and water are not named as specifically unclean, although a separate set of rules forbids touching their dead carcasses, backed by the word translated as ‘abominable’. Taking this difference seriously has produced a completely new reading of Leviticus: Jacob Milgrom has argued from close perusal of the text that ‘impurity’ and ‘abomination’ in the book cannot be equivalent terms as they trigger different sequences of action, and this puts a very different complexion on previous commentaries that have tried to combine Deuteronomy 14 and Leviticus 11. This topic is explored further in this chapter, in which the different sections discuss: God’s care for his creation; the translation of ‘swarming’ as ‘teeming’ (in the sense of the positivity of fertility); leaven and honey as teeming life; the translation of abomination; creatures that swarm in the air; and competition in holiness in confrontation with other religions – in which the place of animals might become a sellingpoint for Judaism.

Honey bee (Apis mellifera) females differentiate into distinct castes during development: the primary reproductive queen and the essentially sterile worker. Workers are characterized by complex social behaviour. They move through a series of tasks, beginning with nursing brood, and culminating with intense flight activity and foraging behaviour. Worker life history progression is flexible, and is affected by social environment as well as genotype. Nutritional and sensory signalling cascades mediate behavioural, physiological, and metabolic changes in workers that translate into a largely plastic pattern of aging. This chapter reviews evolutionary and mechanistic insights about worker bee life history regulation from early development and well into senescence. It contrasts these findings to life history control in Drosophila melanogaster and outlines how aging plasticity can be better understood through an experimental synthesis of two model systems: honey bees and fruit flies.

This chapter considers Tony Richardson's contribution to British New Wave. Richardson's first film Look Back in Anger (1959), despite its faults, was important for the development of ‘a style to the purposes of the piece’. Look Back in Anger is an interesting film for many reasons. It represents the beginning of Richardson's efforts to establish a new and separate position within the British film industry. The film also helped to generate a new series of critical debates about the development of a British cinematic style, or the lack of it. The film also became allied with other films trying to do similar things, such as Clayton's Room at the Top. It can best be characterised by the extremity of shot scale deployed to show the claustrophobic relationship between Alison and Jimmy, and the construction of The Entertainer demonstrates a willingness to move out from this extreme proximity. Richardson's four films from this period need to be seen as indicative of a talent being developed rather than the achievements of a director at the height of his creative ability.

Metaphor was characterized in ancient rhetorical theory as a “sweet” figure and a source of pleasure to readers and listeners. Both Lucretius and Horace refer to this pleasure when they defend the pedagogic value of their poetry: in offering something sweet, their poetry manages to get us to accept its serious teaching as well. Persius, however, abjures any concession to the pleasure of the reader; his verse, we hear, is full of the acris iunctura, the “harsh joining.” While some scholars have taken this to be a reference to word order in his verse and the presence of elision, it is more likely to be a characterization of Persius’ use of metaphor, which violates all the ancient standards for producing a figure that is sweet, appropriate, and not too far-fetched. The Satires are thus a poetry of displeasure, and this is part of their philosophical goal.

On the basis of the plethora of evidence for tropical forest agricultural practices and urban networks in Chapters 5 and 6 it seems somewhat surprising that these environments, and their human occupants, could ever come to be seen as static, primordial, or ‘elusive’ (Biesbrouck et al., 1999). Yet, today, Indigenous peoples living in tropical forests are often depicted as being isolated from the outside world, and as equally, passively threatened by external agricultural, economic, and political forces as the habitats in which they reside. As I showed in Chapter 2, the hunting and foraging practices of these groups can provide useful insights into how our prehistoric ancestors may have made a diverse living in environments that have frequently been considered too poor in crucial resources for long-term human occupation. Somehow, however, these parallels and comparisons have also seen these groups framed as relics of some of the earliest members of our species. This has been encouraged by claims that some of these groups genetically represent ‘archaic’ lineages of Homo sapiens that survived in dense forest habitats in different regions (Endicott et al., 2003; Ranaweera et al., 2014; Ranasinghe et al., 2015).Whether this is the case or not, it is now clear from historical and ethnographic information that tropical forest foragers, the world over, have been involved in complex economic and political networks to varying extents at different points in time. Moreover, the present cultural and subsistence systems of many of these groups have been significantly affected by the infiltration of colonial and imperial regimes from the seventeenth century onwards, as well as the more recent, disruptive effects of global capitalism. This chapter is an attempt to document how Eurocentric concerns with ‘exploration’, developments in literature, modern conservation movements, and the ‘pristine’ hunter-gatherer debate have contributed to the removal of tropical forest societies from history and their placement into isolated, primeval conceptions of tropical forest environments. In response to this, I review evidence for historical and ethnographic connections of tropical forest hunter-gatherers, and agriculturalists, with societies in neighbouring territories.

Winter at the Shack was always a great time, and some weekends it was a big challenge just to get in. After a good snowfall we would park near Mr. Lewis’s farmhouse and ski in the mile and a half, carrying our grub. We have a picture I especially love of Mother skiing through the woods, wearing her denim skirt and winter coat. What a great sport she was! And she would holler “Whoopeee!” while sliding down a short terrace in the woods. We were proud of her. Skis were not much in those days—just two waxed boards with a leather strap. But they were better than walking, and fun too. Passing through the snowy winter landscape was always, in Dad’s words, a “search for scats, tracks, feathers, dens, roostings, rubbings, dustings, diggings, feedings, fightings, or preyings collectively known to woodsmen as ‘reading sign.’ ” We could often see many of these signs on the snow. I can remember skiing through the woods with Nina one morning after a heavy snowfall and seeing little “bursts,” places where a partridge or two had spent the night in a snowbank and then burst out in the morning to feed. If one wonders how our songbirds survive a cold snowy winter, the answers are revealed on a fresh snow surface: the prairie plants hold their seed pods up away from the snow, and the songbirds land on these dark stalks and remove the seeds. Their dear little tracks show where they were picking up seeds. A way to make a living in winter. For our wood-gathering efforts, our tools were the two-man saw, a double-bit ax with an extra-long handle, two regular axes, a heavy sledgehammer, and two iron wedges. Some of the logs we cut in the woods, though of fireplace length, were too big to carry, so we would split them right there before loading them on the sled. Our favorite place for the cutting operation was west of the Shack, down the slough and bearing south at what we called the “branch slough” and “the fallen bee tree.” Our dog (then Flicky) was always running along with us.

In the last chapter, yeast was mentioned a few times as one of the generally less-problematic microbial denizens of food systems, and in fact the roles of yeast in the production of two of our most common and popular food categories, alcoholic beverages and bakery products such as bread, are so critical that it is worth dedicating a whole chapter just to the consideration of the science of these products. The ability of yeast to grow in a wide range of raw materials and convert sugars to alcohol, carbon dioxide, and other interesting products is the basis for production of products such as wine and beer, as well as higher-alcohol-level spirits, and is a process that has been exploited for the purposes of human pleasure for thousands of years. The origins of alcoholic fermentations, like those of many food products, are somewhat murky, but it is thought that honey or fruit may have been the original basis for the fermentation of such products, and that wine arose because of accidental adventitious spoilage of grapes and their juice that turned out to have, well, interesting consequences. The Greeks and Romans had wine-making down to an art, and it features frequently in their art; it also makes many appearances in the Bible (including a nonscientifically verifiable production protocol based apparently solely on water). The main reason alcoholic fermentation became of interest was as a way to prevent bacteria or other undesirable microorganisms from growing in juice by allowing a different kind of microorganism to get there first, use up the goodies, and produce products that made conditions highly unsuitable for colonization by later invaders. We routinely associate the word “intoxicated” with a formal description of the result of overconsumption of the outputs of such fermentation, but the heart of that word is “toxic,” which reminds us that alcohol is a poison. It just happens to be one that humans can tolerate only up to certain levels, beyond which poisoning and death can readily occur, but at lower levels has a range of effects that need not be described here.

Before we move forward from our previous chapters’ exploration of the importance of the microbiology of food from its many different angles to start to focus on how we process food to, among other effects, control that microbiology, we need to consider one more basic constituent of food. This is because, even after several earlier chapters in which the key functions of proteins, sugars, lipids, and other rather high-profile food constituents were discussed, we have yet to discuss explicitly the one that is perhaps the most significant of all. It was mentioned many times of course, lurking in the background like a supporting character actor in a movie who doesn’t dominate the foreground activity but is a key part of the scene. This magically powerful ingredient is water, yes water, that represents the majority of most food products, and without which most of their properties and characteristics would not exist. We have seen already how water can appear in food in many guises, depending on whether it deigns to interact with the other constituents present, leading to apparent logical surprises like the fact that a melon (a solid?) has actually more water per gram of its weight than milk (a liquid?), just because in one case the water is absorbed and robbed of its innate fluidity, while in the other no such restrictions apply. Besides influencing texture in a completely fundamental way, though, water influences behavior of just about every other molecule in food, from the structure of a protein (and hence the texture we perceive) to the suspension of oil droplets in the many food products that are emulsions. As well as this, almost all the dynamic changes we encounter in food, for better or for worse, depend on water. Microbes require water to live, as we can see when we preserve food by removing it (in drying), or else denying it more subtly by adding substances such as sugar or salt, which can suck the very water out of bacterial cells like molecular vampires.

One term that has acquired a particular air of consumer suspicion in recent years is “processed food. ” Processing is seen as being something that is used to make food less fresh, less natural, and so more suspicious. However, even though we say we don’t want processed food, every food product, before it gets to your mouth, has been subjected to some form of processing and treatment that has a scientific basis. Even washing an apple, chilling sushi, or peeling a banana are forms of food processing, while the bag of salad we buy in a shop or market isn’t full of air as we might expect. All of these phenomena I will discuss in coming chapters. Before dealing with the science of food processing, it is worth discussing what exactly that highly loaded term means. To a food scientist (well, me anyway), food processing means subjecting foods or raw materials to external forces designed to cause a desirable change in the food, typically in terms of its safety and stability, and also in many cases its flavor, texture, and color. In many cases, the primary target of food processing is the resident population of contaminating microorganisms that, if not dealt with, might otherwise cause the food to spoil, or else spoil the day of consumers who finds themselves with a range of symptoms of food poisoning, up to the most lethal. The force most commonly applied in processing is temperature, whether low (refrigeration), very low (freezing), high (for example, pasteurization or cooking), or very high (canning or sterilization). Temperature is indeed probably the key physical variable of significance to food, as almost everything that happens in and to food is influenced by temperature, and most changes take place optimally in a relatively narrow band around body temperature (37 °C). If temperature is pictured as a line scale, the zone of greatest danger and likelihood is centered around that point, but food processors look far below and above that zone and have come to understand how we can work around the optimum temperatures for various reactions and biological changes in order to make our food safer and more stable.

Antimony in a corpse persists indefinitely, and unless a body was cremated, which in former times it rarely was, a murderer using antimony could never be certain that he or she would not one day be brought to account. However, that was a small risk to set aside the potential benefits, which could be large. And there were other benefits in choosing antimony as the murder weapon, not least that it was itself widely used in medical treatment. Poisoners choosing antimony invariably selected tartar emetic (antimony potassium tartrate), and indeed its faint yellow crystals had two advantages. Firstly, they are very soluble in water and, while the solution has a faint metallic taste, this is easily masked by the presence of other flavours. Secondly, the compound was readily available, and all pharmacists stocked it and rarely queried its sale because it was widely used to treat sick animals. Moreover, tartar emetic was cheap; an ounce cost only 2d. in 1897 (around 50p or $1 today). Pharmacists ordered it by the pound, which gives some indication of the demand for it. In small doses of about 5 mg, antimony potassium tartrate acts as a diaphoretic, in other words it promotes sweating and will thereby lower the body’s temperature. In larger doses of around 50 mg it acts as an emetic. Vomiting begins within 15 minutes and most of the stomach contents are expelled. Thus the poison acts as its own antidote to a certain extent: witness the man who recovered from a dose of around 25 grams (25 000 mg), corresponding to two teaspoonfuls of the crystals, which were taken in mistake for sodium bicarbonate. On the other hand, some have died after swallowing as little as 120 mg, although such sensitivity to the poison is extremely rare and it would normally require a dose of twice this amount to cause death, assuming it was retained by the body long enough for it to be absorbed. Some individuals are particularly sensitive to antimony, as the ‘Balham Mystery’ will show, and this sensitivity may well explain the puzzling death of Mozart.