Turning over a new leaf

Posted on by
16

000

Autumn is a season of consolidation and resolution in many traditions. For me, it is a time to reflect on the year that has passed, to consolidate losses and gains, and to make room for something new. I have a lot of energy in autumn and prefer autumn cleaning to spring cleaning and autumnal resolutions to new year resolutions.

The thing that inspires me about autumn is that ‘back to school’ feeling, which I never lost, and the opportunity to give birth to new ideas and to learn, study and gather information. It is about resetting the clock and planting seeds for the future.

Taking time-out is a big priority going forward. After a busy year, I’ve learned it’s OK not to do everything all the time and that taking time-out to catch-up is much more productive. That’s a lesson I’m putting into action on my blog by posting fortnightly and spending the week inbetween to read the blogs I follow, or go for a walk with my camera, or blend my aromatherapy oils.

Another leaf I’m turning over is to be more prepared. Having a sudden proliferation of bees took me by surprise in spring. Next season I’m going to be ready. That starts with consolidating this year’s bees.

This afternoon at the apiary I cleaned up. I scraped wax off crownboards, cleared roofs of old paper and debris, rearranged hive boxes, filled feeders with sugar syrup, wiped varroa boards and stuffed leaves into entrances to prevent robbing.

001

002 003

Our tidied autumn bees from far left: Queen Myrtle’s hive on a double brood and one super, with heavy stores; Queen Chili’s hive on one brood, light on stores; and Queen Chamomile’s hive on double brood, modest stores. The bees have done better than last year but will still need feeding, insulation and generally ‘keeping’ over winter.

The bees consolidated, I then took time-out to stroll around the apiary and take pictures of mushrooms, or are they toadstalls?

004 005 006 007

By the time I returned to the apiary table, the crowd was getting restless… and hungry. ‘I hope that’s cake you’ve got in that bag,’ said John Chapple. I was sorry to disappoint him. Elsa had made tea and I enjoyed time spent just sitting and listening to everyone chatter, before coming home to write this post.

Happy autumn everyone!

Next post: 5 October ‘Street lights’

Upcoming posts in 2013:
26 October 2013
9 November 2013
23 November 2013
7 December 2013
21 December 2013

Beautiful Hereford

Posted on by
27

IMG_9774

As autumn suddenly arrived last week bringing fog, rain, chill winds and giant house spiders, I reflected on one of the best summers in recent years. The sun shone on May’s bank holidays, a heat wave followed in July, and my winter coat and boots were kept in the wardrobe from early June to late August.

This summer I also rediscovered my own country with two visits to beautiful Hereford, the hometown of my boyfriend John. Herefordshire and The Wye Valley are sometimes called ‘the undiscovered country’ with scenic rural views of quiet farms, wooded hills, and tranquil rivers. The historic cathedral city of Hereford is peaceful and picturesque and provides pleasant walks along the River Wye. ‘Herefordshire Cathedral,’ John told me ‘is home to the 13th Century Mappa Mundi – the largest medieval map of the world.’

003

004

We were lucky with the weather in May and had sunny days to explore the English countryside.

030

020023 025034 035 036

John grew up on a beautiful farm in Hereford and in late August we enjoyed the warm days of harvest, walking through fields of maize corn and picking ripe plums from trees.

IMG_9579

IMG_9580

IMG_9580a

IMG_9604

IMG_9607

IMG_9645

IMG_9649

IMG_9789

IMG_9706

Wherever I go bees are never far! A walk through Queenswood Country Park and Arboretum revealed a ‘Bees in the trees trail’ that we tried to follow…

IMG_9710

IMG_9710a

IMG_9715

IMG_9718

IMG_9744

IMG_9749

IMG_9758

IMG_9780

While a visit to a country fair and falconry display at Oakchurch unexpectedly fulfilled a life-long dream… an encounter with my favourite bird – the owl! John captured all the action.

IMG_9876

IMG_9880

The last days of summer passed almost unnoticed as we walked The Rhea, spied on sheep and herded cattle.

IMG_9913

IMG_9915

IMG_9931

IMG_9936

IMG_9978

IMG_9980

And as we drove back to London, the first day of autumn ended with a spectacular sunset.

IMG_9989

Next week: autumn bees, mushrooms and raspberry cake at the apiary (although you may first read a preview on Emily’s blog!)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Walking in her footsteps

Posted on by
8

20130831-084944.jpg

The summer was too good to last and when rain broke through the gathering clouds last Saturday, the bees were spared their Apiguard treatment for another week.

Bank holiday Monday was a different story: blues skies, warm sunshine and a light breeze. As we were south-west, John and I decided to explore Carshalton, a sleepy suburban area in the borough of Sutton, Greater London.

Carshalton is situated in the valley of the River Wandle, which is the source of the village’s ponds and springs. Pretty parishes, country pubs and cottages populate this peaceful place.

image

image

We planned to walk around a beautiful park spotted on the map, but when I saw the sign ‘Honeywood Museum’ and ‘Ecology Centre’ it was game over.

image

Sutton Ecology Centre is a nature conservation area open to the public seven days a week. The grounds offer an educational wildlife trail to explore and learn about native habitats.

The centre is part of a fantastic project to encourage biodiversity gardens. Illustrated information signs were dotted along the trail to show people where to spot wildlife and how to create spaces for native habitats in their own gardens. Dragonflies flew over reeds, hoverflies dangled in the air and butterflies fluttered among trees. It was a pollinator paradise.

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

We did eventually discover the park that we set out to find, populated by picnickers and squirrels, and also followed the streams and bridges across the River Wandle.

Later that day my mum sent a text that said: ‘Your ancestor called Sarah was born in Carshalton in 1848 and married William Parsons. Parsons was my grandmother’s maiden name.’

‘Emma’ and ‘Sarah’ are old family names, and as I reflected on the day having walked in the footsteps of my ancestor I wondered if Sarah Parsons had stopped beneath the same shady trees of the churchyard looking out across the ponds.

image

Next week: as I’m still on the move – Bees in the Trees!

Let them eat cake

Posted on by
10

It felt like old times at the apiary today. An overcast, grey Saturday afternoon found a group of old and new beekeepers huddled at the apiary table and waiting for Elsa and Clare to pour tea. Emily had baked delicious chocolate-and-nut muffins and I had to be quick to take a photo before they disappeared.

So this week, back by popular demand of fellow blogger Rolling Harbour, we have cake…

photo_2

A new visitor asked: ‘So is this what you do every Saturday?’ Yes – before we had four hives. Emily and I reflected that a better summer for the bees meant less tea and cake for beekeepers.

This year’s long warm summer has seen our bees boom and we’ve been very lucky with our windows of sunshine at weekends. However, as if on cue, it started to rain today as we walked the group of beginner beekeepers to the hives. We were only able to show workers crawling over the crownboard before big wet drops of rain forced us to close up.

A usual day at Ealing apiary then – tea, cake, rain and bee talk…

photo_1

Next week: Apiguard and honey.

Autumn is coming

Posted on by
29

000

Last post Emily and I were in the thick of it. We had to abandon combining two hives as angry bees got the better of us.

So the following Tuesday evening we met at the apiary and pulled on bee suits over smart work dresses and heeled shoes. Emily was wearing a beekeeping jacket that left her legs perilously bare – but it was the mosquitoes, not the bees, who feasted.

Rose’s colony was more bad tempered than ever and, although we couldn’t find the queen, we were almost certain the colony was queenless. The bees have been trying to supercede Rose since spring and our artificial swarms only delayed their efforts to overthrow the reigning monarchy.

We laid a sheet of newspaper over the brood box of Chamomile’s colony and moved over Rose’s colony, then left the apiary hoping for the best. Emily revisited the following week and removed the newspaper, which was mostly chewed away by the bees. All seemed well. In the time the bees had eaten through the newspaper they had gotten used to each others’ smell and were one happy colony. This was also an indication that Rose had gone as the two colonies were more likely to fight if two queens had been present.

003

A Saturday went by as we shopped for wedding and bridesmaid dresses for Emily. Today was the second Saturday of the August and the apiary was lovely and peaceful as the association held its monthly scout hut meeting. However, we had both forgotten to bring a smoker and the noise of irritated bees soon filled the air.

Myrtle’s colony was well behaved and, as we’ve never smoked these bees, we were able to check both brood boxes and spot our shy queen. I’m rather proud of Myrtle. She is in her second year of being a queen and is still making nice, well-behaved bees.

001_a

Chili’s and Chamomile’s colonies were much feistier. They are the daughters of Rose, the queen of the colony we bought from Charles. We managed to check a few frames before they let us know that we should have brought a smoker. All seemed well inside the colonies though. We have three strong hives and apparently enough honey stores for winter. Myrtle, Chili and Chamomile are our autumn queens – an interesting blend of essential oils, I might try it!

At this time of year the bees start to prepare for winter. The queen lays less and the workers bring home propolis to insulate the hive. They are more protective of their honey and on guard for robber bees, wasps and other pests who might want to steal their precious stores. This can make them less tolerant of beekeepers too.

Emily spotted drones being pushed out of the entrance by workers and a few wasps were buzzing around the roofs and floors.

Autumn is coming.

Useful links

A useful strategy for dealing with autumn wasps entering hives via @DrBeekeeper on Twitter: The Battle of Wasps attacking Bees http://bit.ly/15k9a9r 

What is a swarm cell and what is a supersedure cell?

Posted on by
32

photo_4‘What is a swarm cell and what is a supersedure cell?’ is a question I am often asked by beginner beekeepers at the apiary. Simply put: they are both queen cells but they can be built by the bees for different reasons – to swarm away from the colony or to supersede (replace) the queen.

There are general guidelines to help identify swarm cells from supersedure cells, including:

  • As a general rule swarm cells usually hang from the bottom of the frame and supersedure cells appear nearer the top or on the sides; although sometimes queen cells are found top, bottom and sides which isn’t much help.
  • If the queen cannot be found, and there is no sign of eggs or larvae, it might mean the bees are building supersedure cells to replace her; although you need to be very sure that the queen isn’t present.
  • If only drone is being laid, you may have a drone-laying queen that the bees are trying to supersede.
  • If a colony is bursting at the seams and the queen is present and appears to be laying well then it seems likely the colony is trying to swarm.

This is not an exhaustive list and the bees don’t always follow the books. Last week Emily and I found queen cells in Rose’s hive that we took down because, after carrying out checks, we couldn’t determine whether these were swarm or supersedure cells.The colony is small, with plenty of room for the queen to lay, so there was no need to swarm; that said, small colonies are known to swarm and when it isn’t advantageous for them to do so.

photo_5This week we found ’emergency’ queen cells built in the middle of a frame (above), which made it clearer that the bees were trying to supersede the current queen, Rose.

We found the queen too, and young larvae (no eggs), but the workers were moving quickly across the frame and were restless, which can be signs that the queen is failing to hold the colony together as a ‘cohesive whole’ and that the workers are not happy with her. Sometimes workers will try to replace what seems like a perfectly good well-laying queen, but this is because the bees know, or sense, something about her that beekeepers don’t.

With four colonies at Perivale apiary – one strong colony, two weaker colonies and a nuc that needs a hive – the way forward seemed clear. Her workers were trying to overthrow her so we should combine our two weaker colonies – Rose’s hive and, the newly named, Queen Chamomile’s hive – which would give us a second strong hive and provide a spare hive for Chili’s colony.

However, the way did not go to plan.

We had successfully checked Queen Chamomile’s hive, and found and marked the queen (a bright yellow dot as I didn’t have this year’s red pen), and had inspected Rose’s colony and caged the queen (you can just see her inside the cage below) so we knew where she was and could remove her when we needed to. When combining hives there should be only one queen to unite the two colonies.

We were going to give Rose, and the frame with the emergency queen cells, to another beekeeper at the apiary who has a queenless colony. Rose may not be a very good queen and the queens who emerge from the emergency cells may also not be very good, but we could at least give them a second chance to prove themselves with another colony.

photo_8Unfortunately as we moved Rose’s brood box over the queen somehow escaped from her cage and the operation had to be abandoned; it was unlikely we would find her again after having been caged once that day and we couldn’t risk combining the hives while both queens were present. The hives had been open a while and the bees were irritated from the manipulations, so we put everything back as it was with the help of Jonesy and a beginner beekeeper. For now queens Rose, Chamomile and Chili would have to wait. At least we had reached a decision about what to do.

Emily went for a well-deserved cup of tea and I had to scoot off, but we are revisiting the bees on Monday evening to try it all again. In some ways this is better; I am finding that with four colonies and a lot of beekeepers, and beginners, at the apiary each week that it is a challenge to make our own decisions about our hives (when, being beekeepers, everyone else has a different opinion about what to do) and to carry them out. It is my fourth year as a beekeeper and it may be that next year I will be ready to spread my wings and leave the apiary completely.

Any bee-loving vicars or gardeners in Northolt who have a spare patch of earth to share with a beekeeper and her bees?

Do visit Emily’s blog to find out how good was the tea and cake, and if anything happened next.

Bee surprise!

Posted on by
9

I always have fun showing people the secret world of bees, but when I got a text on Friday evening from Kimberly Hannaford asking if she could visit the bees on Saturday I knew it was going to be an exciting day.

That was where it all started.

I knew Kimberly and Cameron through my boyfriend John, and because his friends Nina and Gavin were also curious about bees I asked if they wanted to join us. John hadn’t yet visited the bees and this weekend we were meeting up on Sunday.

It was the second Saturday of the month, which meant Ealing beekeepers would be sitting in a circle discussing bee matters at a scout hut in Southall. The apiary would be free of the usual hustle-and-bustle of tea-and-cake crowds and beginner beeks looking over our shoulders and asking questions. It was also hot and sunny. A perfect afternoon to show new friends the bees.

I arrived at the apiary at one o’clock to meet Andy who would unlock the apiary hut where we store spare bee suits for visitors. This eerie object in a bubble was sitting on a side bench.

bees0

Something suspiciously wasp-like at the apiary.

An abandoned wasp nest. When Andy arrived he explained that it had been found by one of the beekeepers who decided to bring it for show-and-tell. Thankful it wasn’t full of wasps, I took a photo for an obligatory tweet.

Kimberly and Cameron arrived a short while after and were eager to get started. ‘It’s like a secret world,’ said Kimberly as I led them along the overgrown leafy path to the apiary hut and gave them bee suits to put on while I lit my smoker.

Here’s a photo of Cameron looking like a proper beekeeper.

bees08

One of us is either very tall or very small! Image courtesy of Kimberly Hannaford

Smoker lit and suited up, I invited Kimberly and Cameron to follow me into beeland.

I decided to start with Myrtle’s hive as her bees are gentle. This hive is on a double brood box after this year’s long, cold spring delayed the colony from completing the Bailey comb change. I showed Kimberly and Cameron the entrance to the hive then opened up to inspect the top brood box.

There was nothing much to see other than worker bees filling up frames with nectar and capping the comb, while fat drones munched on honey stores. As these are well-behaved bees, I let Kimberly and Cameron hold a frame so they could feel the weight of the honey stores. Here they are probably holding around 600 honeybees between them.

bees1

As a beekeeper whose head is crammed full of bee facts it is always difficult to know exactly what people are interested to see and hear. I talked a bit about the honeycomb which is made by wax secreted by the bees. I pointed out the uniform-sized cells built using hexagons because this shape is the most efficient in nature – holding the highest volume of nectar while using the least of amount of wax.

A worker bee stood accommodatingly on top of a frame and waved her nasonov gland in the air, which gave me the chance to talk about the pheromones she was emitting to help guide home foragers.

‘Do the bees get too hot?’ asked Kimberly and I explained how the colony controls the temperature by shivering their wing muscles to heat up or cool down the hive.

This all seemed to impress. ‘Bees are like a super race,’ said Cameron.

Things were more interesting in the bottom brood box where the queen was hiding. We could see larvae curled like pearly white crescent moons inside their cells, biscuit-coloured capped brood and differently coloured pollen that the bees had head butted into cells. I also spotted a worker bee walking across a frame with shiny red propolis on her legs and told Cameron and Kimberley how they use this sticky tree resin to insulate the hive.

Half way through the box I heard Nina and Gavin arrive and left Myrtle’s hive half covered, and Cameron and Kimberly to chat to Jonesy, who was checking his hive, while I went to get out more bee suits. Stepping past the green-netted honeybee area, I stopped in my tracks – there was a surprise visitor – John standing laughing at me.

I wasn’t expecting to see John in a bee suit this weekend – but here he is suited up and taking a photo of me.

bees2

It was the best surprise and I couldn’t have been more happy. See…

bees7

By the time everyone else was suited up, Myrtle’s hive was getting impatient and starting to whine. The queen was unlikely to show herself now as they don’t like the light. So I smoked the colony and closed them with John’s help lifting up the heavy brood box.

We had a look inside Queen Chili’s nuc next. These bees are livelier and disappointingly their tiger-striped, red-dotted queen was nowhere to be seen. This nuc colony is growing fast and will have to be moved into a full-sized hive soon.

The afternoon was getting busy. Some beginner beekeepers had arrived, not realising that the apiary was usually closed on the second Saturday, with lots of questions to ask about artificial swarms, queen cells and drawn-out frames in supers. Kimberly and Cameron had to leave, and Emily had arrived along with another beginner beekeeper.

John took this video of us inspecting Queen Rose’s colony and captured the moment of the afternoon’s second surprise – queen cells!

Emily found around four to five queen cells in Rose’s hive. This was unexpected as the colony was a recent artificial swarm and quite small. With plenty of room for the queen to lay there was no need for the colony to build swarm cells. And with the discovery of young larvae suggesting the queen had been present at least three days ago (it takes three days for an egg to hatch), but being unable to find the queen, it was difficult to tell if these were supersedure cells.

‘If the colony is planning to swarm the workers may have starved the queen so she’ll be smaller and more difficult to see,’ said Emily. We decided to check the hive again for the queen using a method John Chapple had taught us by sorting frames into pairs and each taking turns to check every frame.

John took over my camera to take photos as we searched for Rose.

bees4

bees5

It was some bee-action for John, Gavin and Nina to watch. ‘Could the queen have flown away?’ asked Gavin. I explained that the queen is fed and cared for by the workers so she is unlikely to abandon the colony.

We didn’t find Rose but we did find a worker bee chewing away the wax capping of her cell and about to emerge to see the world for the first time. It was a bit of an Attenborough moment.

Without knowing for sure what the bees were planning to do, and without having a spare hive or nuc or being able to find the queen, we decided on a temporary measure of taking down the queen cells. This would buy us time by either preventing the bees from swarming or to find evidence next week of supersedure.

bees3

bees6

By this time I had been in my bee suit for about two hours and was really hot. So I left Emily to close up Rose’s colony and to check the final hive – our weakest colony with the unnamed queen – while I joined the others at the apiary long table to enjoy her homemade biscuits. That done, there was nothing else to do but go for a pint in Ealing.

It was a really lovely Saturday afternoon of bee-ing and I think everyone enjoyed it. Here’s a group shot taken by Kimberly.

bees09

Image courtesy of Kimberly Hannaford

Life in beeland, as of July 2013

Posted on by
2

The story so far – catching up on our adventures in beeland with this lovely post from Emily!

Emily Scott's avatarAdventuresinbeeland's Blog

The story so far… Emma and I started the year with one hive, headed up by Queen Myrtle. We then bought one colony, were very kindly given another, and split the colony we bought into three as swarm control in May. That makes five hives! Inspecting has become quite different. Although we turn up at 2pm, often we hardly get time for a cup of tea and suddenly it’s 4.30, everyone is leaving and we’re still finishing off our inspections.

Hectic for sure. The good news is, the Bailey comb exchange that seemed to go on forever is very nearly completed in Myrtle’s hive. Looking back at my blog posts, in ‘Exams over – and the Bailey comb exchange begins…‘ we started the Bailey comb exchange on 26th March. They just seemed to draw out the new brood comb very slowly, even though we fed sugar syrup. Also we…

View original post 609 more words

If I could turn back time

Posted on by
22

When I started this blog as an online journal of my exploration of aromatherapy and later to share my adventures in bee-world, I promised myself not to shy away from writing about good and bad experiences. Because sometimes in life things do go wrong.

However, I made a decision several weeks past, which once I realised what I had done, left me paralysed with self-doubt and unable to move forward. I found it difficult to write after the impact fully hit me around two weeks ago.

It was a decision made at a time when I should not have made such a huge choice about my life – whether to go right, left or stay on the same path. My uncle’s death was only fading from my mind while my grandmother’s terminal illness was looming large, and my parents were understandably too preoccupied to talk things through as we would normally. Looking back, I don’t even recognise the person – me – who made the decision. That said, the decision was mine to make and I must accept full responsibility.

The right choice for me, I know now, was to stay on the same path and continue to move towards a goal that I have wanted for many years and that I may have been close to reaching. Instead I strayed off the path and once I realised this I found it very difficult to accept and to just get on with things.

But I can’t turn back time. My only choice now is acceptance, to believe that everything happens for a reason, and to hope that there is something new and positive on the horizon that I can’t yet see.

I have allowed myself two weeks to be sad and that is all the time I will allow.

Life has thrown much bigger things at me in the past and I have survived them all. So I will survive this and I will get back on track at some point in the future. Till then, I’m going to do my best to stop neglecting the parts of my life that I love – the amazing, incredible people who surround me, my bees, my blog, my photography…

My friend Lisa told me that transformation is often painful – like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis because its wings must be tested to be strong enough to fly. This is my period of transformation and it has been painful, but soon I will be strong enough to fly high again.

And my next post will be much happier! It’s all about a wonderful surprise this weekend – from someone who is very right in my life – that has put a huge smile back on my face.

Monkey Bones

Posted on by
15

001

Deep within the greenness of the rainforest, a very long time ago, lived a group of chimpanzees. They travelled through the trees and climbed down from branches to forage on the forest floor. On the hottest days the females lay on mossy rocks beside narrow streams to feel the cool spray of the water. Crouched high above the rest of the group, a baby chimpanzee watched his mother and aunts, and looked beyond his family to the darkness between the trees. The sound of a cracking twig and the rustle of leaves attracted his attention and, unnoticed by his mother, he clambered across the rocks and disappeared into the trees never to be seen again.

That is, until a small skeleton of a baby chimpanzee was crated from the Horniman Museum to the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London. Standing erect and staring out behind a glass case on the marble hall, this little chimp led an ‘exploration of ideas’ at the evening lectures ‘A race of mankind’: Chimpanzees and anatomy at the RCP.

I went along to the talks on Monday 24 June to see the most recent unusual monkey from the Horniman Museum on display at the RCP.

‘Some of you might remember a monkey who was here last year who was so popular that we couldn’t resist getting another,’ said Beth Wilkey, assistant curator at the RCP. She was, of course, referring to another weird monkey that I blogged about: Monkey-fish.

‘You may think: what has a monkey and physicians got in common?’ Beth introduced the evening’s speakers, Dr Bernard Wood of the George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution, and Paolo Viscardi of the Horniman Museum, who would tell us.

002

‘When physicians were polymaths’

Dr Bernard Wood traced the history of comparative anatomy (the study of anatomy between species) and molecular biology by pioneering scientists, and fellows of the RCP, who studied the close relationships between modern humans and primates.

Starting with Charles Darwin’s Tree of Life that shows how all species on Earth have evolved from common ancestors and are closely related, Bernard pointed to the tips of the tree and its neighbouring branches: ‘All the animals that are alive today are on the top branches, and the lower branches show all the species that have existed and are now extinct.’ Humans belong on the same branch of the tree as apes and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, and we share a common ancestor who lived around 8 million years ago.

From the origins of mankind, we were taken back to a time when our understanding of our place in nature was a blank canvas waiting to be painted by minds burning with scientific curiosity. Such a mind was RCP fellow Edward Tyson (1651–1708), widely considered to be the founder of modern comparative anatomy. A fellow of the then College of Physicians, Tyson was an anatomy reader at Surgeons’ Hall – and maybe not a physician at all: ‘He spent most of his time cutting for surgery, so if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then this guy’s a surgeon,’ said Bernard.

There was, frankly, nothing Tyson wouldn’t dissect, Bernard commented. But it was his dissection of a chimpanzee in 1698 which led him to write Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man (catchy title), the book that was the common link between the skeleton on loan and the evening’s lectures. Tyson’s exploration of the anatomy of the chimpanzee, particularly the brain, resulted in his conclusion that humans and chimpanzees were closely related.

The exploration of the similarities in anatomy between humans and apes continued with RCP fellow Emil Zuckerkandl (1849–1910), a Hungarian-Austrian anatomist who made significant contributions to the field of morphology (the study of the structural features of organisms such as bone, organs, muscle and tissue). ‘Although dissection seems old fashioned and low-tech, it is still going on,’ said Bernard on why dissection was crucial to our understanding of the human body and of evolution.

With a better understanding of what monkeys and physicians have in common, we moved on from the discussion of physicians as polymaths – exploring our place in the great scheme of things – to another perspective of the evening’s fascinating specimen.

003

‘The monkey tree puzzle’

‘He’s a rather nice little specimen,’ said Paolo Viscardi of the Horniman Museum, whose talk also opened with Darwin’s Tree of Life, or ‘the monkey tree puzzle’.

Paolo traced the paths of curious explorers of the past who collected and brought back strange and wonderful objects from different parts of the world. Their discoveries and accounts of what they had seen were collected together as ‘cabinets of curiosities’, which would eventually become vast repositories of our knowledge of natural history – or museums.

An illustration of Ole Worm’s cabinet of curiosities showed that when you have a lot of stuff you need a way of grouping and storing it. ‘I say this from bitter experience of working in a museum,’ said Paolo. These early collectors’ attempts at categorising their collections could be seen as steps towards modern taxonomy.

It wasn’t until Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), Swedish botanist, physician, zoologist and reputed father of modern taxonomy, that we looked at ways of logically categorising species: ‘He grouped humans with apes and sloths!’ Paolo explained how we continue to group things – building bigger and bigger categories by looking for similar characteristics through comparative anatomy.

Paolo’s exploration of comparative anatomy and theories of evolution led to the famous evolution debate at Oxford University Museum in 1860 where eminent scientists and philosophers argued about Darwin’s recently published On the Origin of the Species. There was a heated exchange between two scientists Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley: ‘Wilberforce asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he was descended from apes.’

These various ideas on the origin of mankind and of our close relationship with apes has captured our imagination for centuries from King Kong, to Tarzan, to chimpanzees dressed up as humans. Paolo finished on the star of the show, the unusual baby chimpanzee skeleton standing on the marble hall about whose origins ‘we don’t know very much – yet!’ and who will be investigated closely.

‘A race of mankind’: Chimpanzees and anatomy at the RCP

The chimpanzee skeleton is on temporary display at the RCP as part of the ‘Object in Focus’ loan scheme from the Horniman Museum and alongside other rare objects from the RCP’s collection including rare books and a portrait of Tyson.

005