Systems biology – Kensho Homestead

More Bees Please!

I don’t follow this very popular homesteading channel, Off-Grid with Doug & Stacy, too chatty and hyperbolic for me, but that’s what gets the clicks, so more power to ’em. Yet somehow, the Algos knew to put this particular new episode prominently on my feed.

Natural beekeeping in horizontal hives!

It’s excellent! I first heard this beekeeper many years ago and am so glad to see he continues to promote natural beekeeping and adding to his informational website. He’s also added equipment, books and events, and if I still lived in Missouri, you can bet I’d have befriended him ages ago.

Dr. Leo Sharashkin
https://horizontalhive.com/index.shtml

It really is a thrill for me to watch the growth of treatment-free beekeeping over the last decade. It used to be not only terribly difficult to find good information, but also it was treacherous. I’m not joking either. Natural beekeepers are the anti-vaxxers of the beekeeping world, with all the bullying, ridicule, and obnoxious bloviating to prove it, which I experienced for years with this simple preference.

I do not want Big Pharma livestock. It’s really not a crime, though you will be treated like a criminal to suggest it or admit that it’s your practice to most mainstream and commercial professionals. According to many of them, the fact that treatment-free beekeepers exist at all explains why their colonies are filled with diseases. It’s blind faith in The Science. And The Science is not rational.

Folks might be surprised to learn that the lifespans of pets and livestock has decreased sharply over the decades. Bees, like all the animals, are basically treated as a disposible commodity. One disgusted veterinarian who turned his practice to homeophathy complained about this in milk cows, but actually it can be observed in ALL livestock:

“While my cow patients in Wisconsin often lived well into their teens, some to over 20 years, the average California operator culled cows at 2 years old. They’d been pushed with so much grain and ever higher production goals that their health suffered and they were literally dispensed with when they couldn’t keep up.”
(3) When “organic” dairy ain’t – by Will Falconer, DVMhttps://vitalanimal.substack.com/p/when-organic-dairy-aint

But that is clearly changing! It could be that more are recognizing the false science of Pig Pharma, finally. Or, that there is so much success now in the treatment-free circles, and so many more are starting to practice it, that the bullies in the business are starting to become outnumbered. That’s my hope anyway.

One commercial beekeeper replied to Leo’s inquiry with a common fact:

14:45 “If I stopped treating my bees, I’d lose 85% in a year . . .”

I would LOVE to try a skep hive!

That’s right! And plenty of beekeepers, commercial and hobby, have experienced that, unfortunately. I also had a very hard time in the beginning. It took a lot of failure and a lot of research.

Mostly it took conviction. Good health is not found in medications. It is achieved through wholesome practices, which are the same for bees as all of life: Clean living and being left to pursue the most natural ways as possible.

From the interview we learn Doug & Stacy had similar issues as I had when beginning in beekeeping, and it was through Leo’s work and presentations they understood why and began to change their practices with continued success. Leo insists, you don’t need to invest much money, contrary to popular opinion. You don’t need to keep buying bees to grow your apiary.

Treatment-free practices rely on the natural intelligence of the bees to care for themselves. We do not requeen when we make a colony split, requiring the bees to raise their own queen. This keeps all beekeeping local, as it should be.

One of our horizontal hives with an observation window.

Instinct of the local area grows in the colony from one generation to the next. Also contrary to popular opinion, the bees get more resilient with each generation when left to their own decision-making, ie. when to swarm, how much honey to store for the winter, when to build up brood in the local conditions, which queen to keep, and when to get rid of her.

Leo’s entire apiary was grown through trapping swarms and making splits. I’ve not had much success with swarms and will try to start following more of his advice for attracting them. You’ll actually have more success attracting swarms in less rural areas, as counter-intuitive as that might sound. But bees are a bit like deer in that regard, they are attracted to the closest and most abundant and varied food sources, which often means near where humans are residing.

While he uses horizontal hives, like I do, he also has some good advice for beekeepers in cold climates and hive designs which help keep colonies alive during long winters.

LOVE SWARMS: The Complete Guide to Attracting Honeybees

by Dr Leo Sharashkin, Editor, Keeping Bees With a Smile

I once drove all the way to Arkansas on my search for treatment-free bees. This is what the car looked like when I arrived home! 😆

Unfortunately, after all that trouble, these bees also did not survive a full year. BTW, I was not stung once.

When I finally understood the importance of getting bees locally and allowing the weak colonies to die off, I finally had some success. But, it’s still a work in progress and I’m so happy for all the advice and expertise from those with more experience and success.

Live and learn!

Science’s G.O.D=Magnetoreception?

Another post pondering and speculating on the Great Organizing Dynamic, and where science stands on the issue.

I realize I’m once again in way over my head, because even if I could understand all the formulas and lingos in these studies and articles, most of them I can’t obtain anyway without being part of an affiliated university or think tank or by paying hundreds of dollars each to subscribe to the various journals of officialdom.

I see I’m not alone in complaining about this fact and that many scientists agree and go for more ‘open source’ publishing options.

I see also I’m among a big crowd complaining about the lack of ethics in science publishing and research methodology. There’s plenty of evidence of the lack of replication ability, questionable research parameters favoring certain outcomes, not to mention the ridiculous mainstream garbage that makes it down the pipeline to the general public.

“Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a ‘statistically significant’ result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.”

Corbett Report: The Crisis of Science

What I noticed in the short abstracts and few articles I was able to read freely, was a lot of assuming, and not enough abstract observing. Like in the following example:

First, the bees’ distance errors are similar in magnitude to their directional errors, and their angular errors decrease greatly with increasing distance to the target (decreasing more than fourfold between 100 and 700 m). As a result, the absolute scatter of recruits remains relatively constant with changing distance to the target (increasing by less than 50% between 100 and 700 m). This is to be expected if the optimal level of imprecision is the same for distance and direction and does not change with the distance of the target from the nest. Second, comparative studies involving three tropical- and one temperate-zone species (allApis)suggest that the precision of the bees’ languages may have been tuned in accordance with the spatial characteristics of the resources each species uses. We suggest that both the round dance, which conveys no directional information for nearby targets, and the high angular divergence in waggle dances indicating targets within several hundred meters of the colony are both understandable in this context.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01052234

“Distance errors,” “Directional errors,” “Imprecision”?? How would scientists have any clue at all whether the bee lines were in error when they know, admittedly, so very little about a bee colony’s social behavior?

In the following study, the parameters are so narrow and there are so many underlying assumptions it doesn’t seem to have much relevance to the layperson or even to industry, so I’m naturally curious, who funded the study and for what aims?

Honeybees have been trained to respond to very small changes in geomagnetic field intensity.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/750f/ce1b8f4723b09dd2fb1324fc916c9578c77b.pdf

What about magnetoreception? Their eyes and even their instruments can’t measure half of what’s going on in the bee brain, I’d be willing to bet the farm.

Wikipedia flat out lies that research on magnetoreception in humans is a brand new thing, as of this year, when in fact there was a groundbreaking book on the topic published in the mid-80s!

Wiki: “Humans are not thought to have a magnetic sense, but there is a protein (a cryptochrome) in the eye which could serve this function.^[2] In 2019, a group of researchers have arguably provided the first concrete neuroscientific evidence that humans do have a geomagnetic sense.^[3]”

Testing Human Subjects

Brains Register Magnetic Shifts, Subconsciously

“Our participants were all unaware of the magnetic field shifts and their brain responses. They felt that nothing had happened during the whole experiment – they’d just sat alone in dark silence for an hour. Underneath, though, their brains revealed a wide range of differences. Some brains showed almost no reaction, while other brains had alpha waves that shrank to half their normal size after a magnetic field shift.”

What might activate these sensors in humans? Here’s an interesting study Wiki seemed to miss, among others.

“The Earth’s geomagnetic field (GMF) is known to influence magnetoreceptive creatures, from bacteria to mammals as a sensory cue or a physiological modulator, despite it is largely thought that humans cannot sense the GMF. Here, we show that humans sense the GMF to orient their direction toward food in a self-rotatory chair experiment. Starved men, but not women, significantly oriented toward the ambient/modulated magnetic north or east, directions which had been previously food-associated, without any other helpful cues, including sight and sound. The orientation was reproduced under blue light but was abolished under a blindfold or a longer wavelength light (> 500 nm), indicating that blue light is necessary for magnetic orientation. Importantly, inversion of the vertical component of the GMF resulted in orientation toward the magnetic south and blood glucose levels resulting from food appeared to act as a motivator for sensing a magnetic field direction. The results demonstrate that male humans sense GMF in a blue light-dependent manner and suggest that the geomagnetic orientations are mediated by an inclination compass.

Blood glucose activates sensing magnetic direction

Finally, we investigated the mechanism by which different magnetic orientations was manifested among starved men, unstarved men, and women irrespective of starvation. An analysis of raw data (Fig 2A, 2C and 2D, Fig A in S2 Fig) demonstrated that magnetic north orientation was remarkable only in the food association sessions in starved men (Fig 4A, top, middle), in consistent with the result (Fig 2D)”

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0211826

What might this line of study reveal about ‘debunked’ ancient sciences like gardening by moon phase, dowsing, astrology, lay lines, and so on?

Workin’ the Waggle

Continuing from my new line of questioning on this blog, Science’s G.O.D. (https://kenshohomestead.org/2019/11/29/sciences-g-o-d/), or the Great Organizing Dynamic, here’s some more speculation. Please volunteer any thoughts, facts, references, opinions—I’m really searching for direction and substance in this series of posts.

A bit of bee background:

The way honeybees communicate has been historically termed ‘the waggle dance’. There are at least 9 different dances that have been observed and recorded. (v. FRISCH, 1965)

1) The round-dance is a call to search for food in all directions within a radius of 25 m.
2) The waggle-dance describes the direction of the destination in terms of the respective position of the sun and defines the distance.
3) The Rumpel-dance describes a conspicuous type of movement made by suc- cessfully returning foragers. They hastily make their way across the honey- comb, bumping into colony members and informing them that something is going on, e.g., that food is available.
4) The Ruck-dance is carried out by foragers that are emptying their honey sacs and involves intermittent, directed tail wagging. It serves more to indicate a general dancing mood than to impart any specific message.
5) The sickel-dance has been observed in every bee species (with one exception) in the transition between the round-dance and the waggle dance (figure-eight). The opening of the „sickel“ in the dance pattern denotes the direction to the feeding site.
6) The buzzing run is the sign to disperse. Scouts barge through the interlocked bees in the swarm in an undirected, zigzag course and audibly buzz their wings.
7) In the Putzlauf the bee shakes its body from one side to the other.
8) In the vibration-dance, one bee takes up contact with another, whereby it rapidly vibrates its abdomen. The meaning of this dance has not yet been deciphered, although their is strong evidence that it involves a communication form combining dance and acoustic signals.
9) Finally, the Zitter-dance is an expression of neurotic behavior and is disregarded by the surrounding bees. Research has shown it to be a result of a traumatic experience such as severe impact, poisoning, injury to appendages, or extreme state of alarm.

What researchers draw in copying these dance moves has been described as a ‘squished figure 8’. More current research focuses on not only what can be observed visually, but precisely how their communication works acoustically.

The first time I saw the figure of this ‘squished figure 8’ drawn by my beginning beekeeping teacher, I recognized it, and being the diligent student I sometimes can be, I raised my hand and questioned, “You just drew a torus, the bees must be communicating through a toroidal field?” No one had any idea what I was talking about.

But I’ve got a strong sense that those who study UFOs know exactly what I’m talking about.

http://www.zamandayolculuk.com/html-2/ufogravitymanipulation.htm

“The craft was able to displace gravity through the propagation of magnetic waves controlled by shifting the magnetic poles around the craft so as to control, or vector, not a propulsion system but the repulsion force of like charges.[p100]

raced among themselves to figure out how the craft could retain its electric capacity[p100]

The air force discovered that the entire vehicle functioned[101] just like a giant capacitor. In other words, the craft itself stored the energy necessary to propagate the magnetic wave that elevated it, allowed it to achieve escape velocity from the earth’s gravity, and enabled it to achieve speeds of over seven thousand miles per hour.” [p101]

I’m not a scientist by any stretch, I’ve never been good at science, or math, or any technological field. I could be completely wrong in trying to make this connection.

But, I do think I’m right in assuming there are some far more intelligent minds out there who have also considered this connection. And I’d really like to find them.

“The results indicate that the wagging run is the “master component” of the dance. The figure-of-eight dance path does not seem to convey information. Both sound and wagging must be present in the dance, but no specific roles were found for these components. Both sound and wagging convey information about distance and direction, and they appear to be largely redundant.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00166696

Redundant? Kinda like the bee version of ‘junk DNA’ the scientist have tried to sell us? Come on now.

“It is also not known how the dance followers detect the dancer’s movements in the darkness of the hive where visual cues can not be used.”

The popular wisdom has been the bees communicate their navigation paths using the sun, but I’ve seen bees out foraging on overcast days and even in light rain.

Which makes me wonder, could the bees be demonstrating Ampere’s Law?

The magnetic field in space around an electric current is proportional to the electric current which serves as its source, just as the electric field in space is proportional to the chargewhich serves as its source. Ampere’s Law states that for any closed loop path, the sum of the length elements times the magnetic field in the direction of the length element is equal to the permeabilitytimes the electric current enclosed in the loop.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/magnetic/amplaw.html#c1

D7AB60A1-532F-4B98-A74F-73C5B7DD5C18 — Yeah, I don’t get it either, but someone does!

Furthermore, do you think all this research is being done for the love of bees? That’s what many bee-lovers believe, I’m sure.

Naïve folks think it’s all about making life easier, and more enjoyable for everyone, and learning all about the bees, just because they are fascinating creatures and honey is delicious and we all love nature.

Sorry to try to burst that bubble once again, but the global military industrial complex doesn’t give a crap about your comfort, or the bees. They want better weapons.

Acoustic weapons are all the rage. “Simple high-intensity sound causes the inner ear to generate nerve impulses that register as sound. Since the inner ear also regulates spatial orientation, saturation of the inner ear by high-intensity sound may cause spatial disorientation. For example, loud music was used by American forces to drive Manual Norriega from the Vatican Embassy in Panama in 1990. High-intensity low-frequency sound may cause other organs to resonate, causing a number of physiological results, possibly including death. Acoustic weapons pose the hazard of being indiscriminate weapons, potentially imposing the same damage on friendly forces and noncombatants as on enemy combatants or other targets.” GlobalSecurity.org

Bees dropping from the sky confused around cell towers. Hmmm . . .related?

Science’s G.O.D.

“Order already existed,” I claimed in my last post. Let’s talk about that.

Before science and religion came along there were highly organized human civilizations, not to mention the non-human ones, that somehow managed to thrive without these disciplines. Ancient wisdom fascinates me, how modern science and religion exploits it at our ‘collective’ expense fascinates me even more.

Part 1 G.O.D. = Great Organizing Dynamic

An introduction of terminology: Metaheuristics, Embodied Spacial Cognition, Toroidal Field, Tesselar Spherical Harmonics, Stellarator Optimization, Radiofrequency Plasma, Tokamak Discharge/Sawtooth Oscillation, Quorum Sensing, Vector Memory, Path Integration (PI), Stigmergy

Part 2 = As Applies to Sociopolitical One World Acceleration Process

Underlying Assumption: Crisis Drives Evolution (potential origination of worldview: Cult of Mithras, exploration continues.)

“Living nature is a global community of communication, humans could view themselves as members among many other (non-human) members in this community. Universal-communicative, normative rules can also be derived from such a membership. Their non-observance has led us into a historically unprecedented ecological crisis. In light of this ecological crisis, future adherence to these rules will probably become the greatest cultural and evolutionary challenge that mankind has ever faced. Should we be unable to master the ecological crisis in time by adequately complying with these rules, then our survival is as uncertain as that of most other biological species threatened by mankind ́s activities.

Viewed from this perspective, this book provides support for an ecologically oriented ethics. It does not represent ethics in itself; rather, by opening the way to a new perception of living nature, it wishes to provide the information we need to introduce and establish norms of ecological ethics.”

https://philarchive.org/archive/WITLTC-3

“The evidence that the sign-mediated interactions of honeybees from warmer latitudes differ fundamentally from those of the northern hemisphere leads to a discussion about how certain capabilities and skills on the molecular level are genetically fixed, in the nuclei of the cells of organisms, culminating in the paradigmatic realm of intra-organismic communication.”

https://zone.biblio.laurentian.ca/handle/10219/2267

“This series of studies investigated the effects of applied, low-intensity electromagnetic fields on the behaviour of several species. To cover a range of species; the eusocial harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex sp.), solitary orb-weaving spiders, and aquatic planarian (Dugesia tigrina) were examined for behavioural consequences associated with applied electromagnetic fields. An additional component examined these effects on various volumes of water. In all species examined, significant behavioural consequences were observed. Intensities of the used fields ranged from nanotesla to millitesla, and their patterns included a fixed-pattern 60 Hz field, and a more complex-patterned field. A separate component also analyzed the effects of light and polarity, where additional effects were evident. For the experiments with the harvester ants, significant changes in tunneling behavior were observed; for the spiders, significant changes in the structure of the web were observed; for the planarian, significant effects on t-maze arm selection occurred; and for water, significant changes in pH were detected.”

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbot.2017.00020/full

Frontiers in Neurobiotics

Electromagnetic fields as communication medium of intercellular communication. Mechanisms of indirect coordination based on bee behavior.

This is my newest line of inquiry on this blog, interspersed with the homestead life and happy snaps and the occasional sub-par efforts at fiction, poetry, philosophy, etc.

My intention is to not make it too boring for y’all as I try to ascertain where the real science is, not the crap making it down the public marketing pipeline.

I do hope y’all will join me, and contribute knowledge and wisdom where possible, in this latest topic venture.

Thank you, I do love your company!

Joining me will be Schelling and his problems of nature as subject. 🙂

https://www.schellingzone.com/

LOVE SWARMS: The Complete Guide to Attracting Honeybees

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Testing Human Subjects

Brains Register Magnetic Shifts, Subconsciously

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