http://web.mac.com/mcastagna/iWeb/Site/Blog/Blog.html Weather report: sun and warmth; wave goodbye to the salt truck. iWeb 1.1.2 http://web.mac.com/mcastagna/iWeb/Site/Blog/http%3A/www.mac.com/st/1/sharedassets/1.1/Common/Templates/Gazette/Blog/Seperator%203-5.jpg http://web.mac.com/mcastagna/iWeb/Site/Blog/Blog.html http://web.mac.com/mcastagna/iWeb/Site/Blog/95EF0E68-F2ED-11DC-AE70-0011242FB6DC.html http://web.mac.com/mcastagna/iWeb/Site/Blog/95EF0E68-F2ED-11DC-AE70-0011242FB6DC.html Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400 For clear proof of spring, nothing rivals the sight of bluebirds, skunk cabbage, or a villager falling waist-deep through pond ice. Each of these signs has been recorded; winter is done and over. You needn’t understand the difference between meteorological and astronomical spring to know when Old Man Winter has packed up his flint knives, axes, and other Stone Age weapons. So spring has arrived, and with it an excitement almost pre-verbal. We are a naked people stepping into a new jungle. We are stretching goatskin over the first drum. (Mrs. W____, at any rate, has been seen wearing flip-flops.) Already, though, something is lost. You may have sensed it at the diner, in the pub, on the church pew; you may have felt it in the very bed of matrimony or fornication. The truth is, seasonal and social climates often generate inverse temperatures: the chill of winter invites the warmth of human association; the heat of summer restores our independence. Bittersweet, then, is the coming of spring. The huddling and cuddling is largely behind us. We will not, for instance, belly up to the bar again with such knowing camaraderie till December; we will not have the ear of our friends and neighbors—really have it—till we have added to our lives eight long, uncertain months. I’ll say this, I was much the better for your company last winter. I would like to thank many of you personally—many of you with whom I shoveled snow, wolfed down scrapple, or nursed pints of beer—but I will offer my general thanks in the form of a quotation, taken from “Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival,” by eminent biologist Bernd Heinrich. What he says about the winter life of bees . . . it goes for the winter life of our small town: “Of the many surprises that have been revealed in these insects over the last century, one that is almost taken for granted is the colony response of regulating its temperature. Even in winter, temperatures in the center of bee clusters remain within a degree or two of 36°C. Whether it’s –40°C outside the hive or 40°C, the bees regulate the same hive temperature. Honeybees are the only insects in the Northern Hemisphere that can and do keep themselves active and heated up throughout the northern winter. In winter, they are able to regulate their microclimate, protecting themselves and their developing young. Should any one bee leave the communal group in winter, it would, like a cell taken outside an animal’s body, die almost instantly by freezing. And if by some miracle it survived the cold, starvation would inevitably kill it. Yet, if a physiologist were to isolate a single honeybee and compare it with any one individual of thousands of other bee species, he or she might not detect anything remarkable. It is only in the context of the colony that much of the marvelous is revealed.” See you next winter! TO READ PREVIOUS ENTRIES, CLICK “READ MORE,” SCROLL DOWN, CLICK “NEXT”