Glossary
A running list of words worth knowing. Natural-history terms, the names of things, and the occasional bit of useful jargon — defined plainly, in the spirit of the site. No gate-keeping. Each entry should leave the reader a little richer for having read it.
B
Bivoltine
by-VOL-teen
A tree bumblebee worker in the first week of September, small, with her corbiculae packed to bursting, is a bee that by the textbook should not be flying. Her species' colonies finish in June or July. The reason she is there is that Bombus hypnorum is partially bivoltine — some of it runs two generations in a year. A gyne who leaves the June nest may, instead of digging in for the winter, mate and found a colony at once; that colony raises its own workers through the summer and its own gynes in September, and those do hibernate. From the Italian volta, "a turn", by way of the silk trade, where voltinism counted how many broods a silkworm strain gave in a year — univoltine one, bivoltine two, multivoltine more. Not to be confused with a second brood inside one nest: this is a second colony, under a second queen, the daughter of the first.
Used in The tree bumblebee in September: rare, until it wasn't.
C
Callow
CAL-oh
Most of the bees in a nest are the colour you expect. One or two are not: pale, greyish, faintly damp, the black and gold not yet arrived, moving among the others as though the paint were still wet. That is a callow — a bee, ant or wasp in the first hours and days out of the pupa, while the shell is still soft and the colour is still coming up. From the Old English calu, "bald", the same word behind the unfledged nestling and the callow youth. The broader entomological term is teneral, which covers any freshly moulted insect; callow belongs to the social ones. She is not left alone to harden. She is put to work in a body that is not yet finished.
Used in The Worker Bumblebee.
Corbicula
kor-BIK-yoo-la
The bright lumps on the back legs of a bumblebee working a summer border look like saddlebags, and everyone calls them pollen baskets. They are not baskets. Each one is a corbicula — a bare, polished, slightly hollowed patch on the outer face of the hind leg, fringed with long stiff hairs that curve inward to make a cage around nothing at all. She combs the pollen out of her coat, passes it forward from leg to leg, wets it with a little nectar so that it will hold, and presses it into the hollow until the load stands proud of her. A single long hair rises through the middle and anchors the whole lot. From the Latin corbicula, "little basket", a diminutive of corbis; more than one is corbiculae. Only four groups of bee carry them — honeybees, bumblebees, stingless bees and orchid bees. Every other bee in the garden carries its pollen dry in a brush of hairs, and leaves a trail of it behind as it goes.
Used in The Worker Bumblebee.
D
Dehiscence
dee-HISS-ence
On a hot, still afternoon a bank of gorse will crackle and snap all by itself — ripe pods twisting open in the heat and flicking their seed across the path. That opening is dehiscence: the moment a seed pod, an anther, or a spore capsule splits along a built-in seam to let go of what's inside. From the Latin dehiscere, "to gape or split open." The structure that does it is dehiscent; one that stays shut and travels whole — a hazelnut, say — is indehiscent. In an oilseed rape field the same event goes by a blunter name, pod shatter, and it's cursed rather than admired: every pod that gapes a day early is seed on the ground instead of in the tank.
Diapause
DY-a-pawz
A mated bumblebee queen goes into the ground in September with the afternoons still warm and the ivy not yet open. She is not waiting for the cold. Diapause is a programmed shutdown — development and feeding stopped, metabolism turned down, the whole animal run on stored fat — that begins on an internal signal before conditions turn and does not end merely because they improve. From the Greek dia, "through", and pausis, "a stopping"; the word was coined in 1893 for a pause in an insect embryo and later widened to the whole life cycle. Keep it apart from quiescence, which is what a cold insect does when it is simply too cold to move and starts again the moment it is warm. A quiescent bee on a January wall is in trouble. A diapausing one is exactly where she should be, and a bright week will not wake her.
Used in The Queen Bumble Bee.
E
Eclosion
ee-CLOH-zhun
The cell gives, and something climbs out that was not there before. Eclosion is that moment — the emergence of the adult insect from the pupa, the last of its transformations and the only one it cannot repeat. The verb is to eclose. From the French éclore, to hatch or open, and behind that the Latin for "to un-close", which is precisely what the cell does. It is worth keeping apart from ecdysis, the shedding of a skin, which an insect may do many times on the way up. Eclosion happens once. Whatever comes out of the cell is what it will be until it dies.
F
Fledge
In May and June there are young blackbirds on lawns that look like disasters — stub-tailed, scruffy, hopping rather than flying, calling steadily and going nowhere. Almost none of them need help. To fledge is to grow the feathers that make flight possible, and a bird that has fledged has left the nest for good, even though its parents may go on feeding it in the open for a fortnight or more. From the Old English for "fit to fly", the same root that gives us fly and flight. The state before it is callow — a word that began as "bald", describing the featherless nestling, before it was handed on to raw beginners of every kind. The bird on the lawn has not fallen out of anything. It has arrived.
Foundress
FOWN-dress
The bumblebee crawling in and out of the same hole in a bank in April, alone, is not looking for anything. She has found it. From the moment a gyne settles on a site and shapes the first thimble of wax she is a foundress — the female who starts a nest and, for the first weeks, is the whole of it: forager, builder, brooder, guard. From the Latin fundare, "to lay a base", with the feminine ending English gave to founder and has since mostly dropped. Entomology kept it, because in the social insects the founder is always female. Queen is the word for what she becomes once the workers take over and she never leaves again. Gyne is the word for what she was before. A foundress is the stretch between the two, and most gynes never reach it.
Used in The Queen Bumble Bee.
G
Gyne
JYNE, rhymes with wine
On the ivy in late summer the bumblebees are not all the same size. Among them, one noticeably bigger, feeding hard and feeding alone: a gyne. The word means a female of the reproductive caste — a queen, or a female capable of becoming one — and it holds whether or not she has mated, hibernated, or ever founded a nest. From the Greek gynē, "woman". It is the more honest word than queen, which grants her a throne she has not taken. Most gynes never take it. They are eaten, or they fail to mate, or the winter simply has them. A colony spends its entire summer on the chance that one of them will.
Used in The Queen Bumble Bee.
H
Hibernaculum
hy-ber-NAK-yoo-lum
Somewhere on the shaded side of a bank, under a few centimetres of loose soil, there is a chamber no bigger than the bee that dug it, and she is in it. That is her hibernaculum — the place an animal makes or takes for the winter. From the Latin hibernaculum, "winter quarters", the word a Roman army used for the camp it sat in from autumn to spring; plural hibernacula. A bumblebee queen digs hers fresh each autumn, alone, a short way into ground that faces north or north-west so that a mild week in January does not warm it. Bats have hibernacula too — a cave, a tunnel, the roof of a church — and snakes share theirs by the dozen. It is not a nest. She has never overwintered in one and never will; the nest is where she goes in spring, and it will be somewhere else.
Used in The Queen Bumble Bee.
I
Instar
IN-star
A stripped ragwort in August can look as though it is carrying three different insects: a few tiny pale grubs low down, some middling striped ones, and two or three fat black-and-gold monsters at the top. They are one species at three instars. An instar is the stage an insect occupies between one moult and the next — first instar from hatching to the first shed skin, second instar from there to the following one, and so on to the last. From the Latin instar, "likeness" or "form". An insect grows in steps rather than smoothly, because its skin will not stretch: it fills the one it has, splits it, and walks out a size larger, the moult itself being ecdysis. Nothing about it changes in between — only within. The number of instars is roughly fixed for each species, and the final one ends not in another caterpillar but in the pupa.
L
Learning flight
A bee leaving the nest for the first time does not fly off. She turns and faces the hole, and works outward from it in slow widening arcs, keeping it in view the whole time — a minute of what looks like hesitation. It is the opposite of hesitation. This is a learning flight, or an orientation flight in the older books: the deliberate fixing of what a place looks like from the air, so that it can be found again. Niko Tinbergen showed what it was for in the 1930s, ringing a digger wasp's burrow with pine cones, waiting for her to make her flight, then shifting the ring of cones to one side while she was away. She came back to the cones. Bumblebees make the same flight at the nest, and a shorter version of it on leaving a flower worth remembering. Nothing a forager does afterwards works without it.
Used in The Worker Bumblebee.
P
Proboscis
pro-BOSS-iss
Watch a bumblebee work a foxglove and you'll see it vanish head-first into each bell, back out, and move to the next. What it's posting into the flower is its proboscis — the long, tubular tongue an insect uses to drink, folded away under the head between visits and extended to lap up nectar. From the Greek proboskis, from pro, "forward," and boskein, "to feed." Length is everything. A long-tongued garden bumblebee reaches the nectar at the base of a deep flower that a short-tongued buff-tail simply can't — which is why the short-tongued ones sometimes cheat, biting a hole at the bottom of the bloom to steal the nectar without ever brushing the pollen. A whole quiet economy, settled by the length of a tongue.
Used in The Buff-Tailed Bumblebee: The Shift Worker in the Bramble.
Pyrrolizidine alkaloids
pi-ROL-i-zi-deen
A horse turned out on a ragwort field does not drop where it stands. It grazes a season, or two, and then one autumn it is ill and does not come back from it. The reason is a family of compounds called pyrrolizidine alkaloids — PAs, for short — the slow chemical defence of ragwort, comfrey, borage and heliotrope, with several hundred known across a good many plant families. They do not arrive as poison. The liver does that part, converting them into reactive pyrroles that bind to whatever is nearest and take out a few cells at a time — no dose big enough to notice, and no mending in between. They are named for the pyrrole ring at their centre, and that from the Greek pyrrhos, "flame-red", the colour the stuff turns a splint of pinewood. The cinnabar moth caterpillar eats them all summer and is untroubled: it stores them safely away as N-oxides and wears the plant's poison as its own armour.
Used in Common ragwort: the best table on the verge and the worst name.
S
Silique
si-LEEK
Snap a stem of oilseed rape in June and you're holding a handful of them: slim pods an inch or two long, each divided down its length by a papery wall with the seeds set in rows on either side. That pod is a silique — the signature fruit of the cabbage family, worn by charlock, garlic mustard and the rape that turns whole fields yellow. From the Latin siliqua, "pod." When the pod is short, no more than about three times as long as it is wide, it earns a different name — a silicle — which is what those flat, translucent moons of honesty really are. The seeds ripen, the two halves spring apart (see dehiscence), and next spring's yellow is already decided.
Synanthropic
sin-an-THROP-ic
Some wild things keep their distance. Others move in with us. The tree bumblebee setting up home in a blue-tit box, the fox trotting down a suburban street at dusk, the house sparrow in the supermarket rafters — these are synanthropic species, ones that live alongside people and thrive on what we build. From the Greek syn, "together with," and anthropos, "human." Not tamed and not kept — just quietly at home in the gardens, walls and roof spaces we think of as ours. The word is a reminder that the line between the wild and the domestic is softer, and a good deal busier, than it looks.
T
Trophobiosis
troh-foh-by-OH-sis
Watch a line of ants working up a thistle stem in July and you'll notice they're not after the plant at all. They're after the aphids on it — or rather, what the aphids leave behind. The aphid takes in more sap than it can use and lets the sweet surplus go as honeydew; the ant drinks it, and in return stands guard, seeing off the ladybird and the lacewing, even carrying the herd to fresher growth or down out of the frost. That arrangement has a name: trophobiosis, from the Greek for "nourishment" and "way of life." A debt paid in sugar and settled in muscle. Not quite farming. Not far off it, either.