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| Pedigree of a Drone |
I'm sure you know that but do you know this? The top row of the chart bears an amazing resemblance to an octave on the piano keyboard. Each row, from the bottom up, represents in turn: a single note; a horn fifth (popular in ancient Rome); a major triad (causing such alarm to the early Christians); a pentatonic scale (of Oriental fame); a diatonic scale (major, of course); and a chromatic scale. Thus we have the entire history of harmony summarized in a beehive. No wonder bees hum!
Now if you want to know what the future has in store for music, just extend the generations upwards.
Okay, I know it's contrived -- but it's still rather amazing, isn't it?
I think that the figure was created by someone how knew music script because it is possible to rotate the various elbows and still maintain the validity of the genealogy. Is that not true? It is only this configuration that gives you the piano scale.
ReplyDeleteAbout the next generation, is it not true that there are cultures that use 1/4 notes in their singing, is it somewhere in Africa?
The genealogy figure is fascinating but it is for the males only. I wonder if something is missing. It has to do with inbreeding, new queens with the drone brothers. We have to draw the figure for females. Then we would see how far apart the brother and sister (queen) are. Two other things may be important,
-- The queen could of course mate with a drone from another family, the non-issue case.
-- The queen is carrying male/female genetic material, which is years old; she could be four or five years old. She will have produced something like 20 to 25 generations of workers and drones in that time (assuming a generation is 21 days; 15 generations if we assume a generation is 50 days). The female children have genetic material from the queen’s parents. The drones have male genetic material from the grand father who may be ten or more generations back.
Yes, there is something funny going on. This figure does not clarify it. The female children should be added and it should be noted that the black boxes live 50 days, one generation, while the white boxes live 15 generations. Image if our fathers lived 60 years and our mothers lived 900 years and had children the whole time after mating once with our father, who is not really our father but only our sisters' father. We are related to our grandfather who died 900 years ago, the day he 'married' our mother.
[I define a generation as the life span of the workers and drones, assumed to be the same. I take the generation to be about 50 days and that the birthing takes place over 150 days each year, in the spring and summer. Hence, three generations per years for five years.I do not know the life span of the drone. It is certainly less than 150 days. Their life expectancy is likely longer than the workers.]
Nature has done something to prevent genetic complications arising from inbreeding. For example, does something happen in time, to the queen’s ovaries and the retained sperm, which decreases the likelihood of genetic problems with inbreeding? What would happen if the queen were changed every two or three months? [It could be 'arranged'] Would there be genetic defects in the colony? The experiment would have to be done in a confined space (a green house) so that the new queens would be forced to mate with their drones.
I have not given this whole matter a lot of serious thought. I need to know more about genetics etc.
Dr. M. (apiarist)
I did say the bee chart was contrived, didn't I? There are 4096 different ways to arrange the 12 "elbows." I'm sure I could have come up with any diatonic mode, Aolian through Mixolydian. My choice of the Ionian mode (major scale) is cultural: it all starts with middle C.
ReplyDelete(There already are Western composers who write quarter-tone music and special four-valve horns to play it. You can find midi files of this music on the web.)
This was a "pedigree" chart showing the antecedents of one particular individual. It's not a family tree. If you feel inbreeding renders the chart invalid, consider that most hymenoptera use parthenogenesis to predetermine the sex of their offspring. This include solitary wasps and bees where inbreeding is presumably rare.
Parthenogenesis favors inbreeding. The wasp, bee, or ant queen may include fatal genes in her genotype. It's not a problem because they are overridden by corresponding good genes from her father. The haploid drone, with only one set of chromosomes, can't have any fatal genes or he'd be dead, so it's safe for his mother to mate with him. Animals above the level of amphibian each have two fatal genes, on average. If you had a child with your mother, there is a 1 in 8 probability of a fatal gene alignment. We diploids avoid inbreeding for that reason. Paradoxically, many plants go to the other extreme to deal with self-pollination. With polyploidy, fatal genes are masked by the abundance of DNA from several generations of ancestors.
Richard Dawkins is an excellent source of information on genetics, especially The Selfish Gene (1976, second edition 1989).