There is no more tender moment in The Odyssey than when old Argos greets his master, who returns home in secret after two decades away at the Trojan War. You don’t have to be a dog lover to be moved by the scene, nor a literary scholar to recognize a passage of extraordinary genius. After battling monsters, enemies, and temptations, Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca disguised as a destitute beggar. Through his own fatal errors, he has lost every one of his companions and returns alone. He comes incognito to reclaim his kingdom and be reunited with his wife and son after his palace has been overrun by arrogant suitors competing for Queen Penelope’s hand. As he approaches his home, Argos struggles to raise himself from the manure heap where he has been abandoned, neglected, and covered with fleas. “He wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but he no longer had the strength to move towards his master.” Odysseus instantly recognizes his old hunting dog. Fighting back tears, he cannot show affection lest he betray his carefully concealed identity. Dog and master mirror one another. Their days of glory as hunter and warrior are long behind them. Both bear the weight of age, hardship, and loss. After a brief reunion seen by no one else, Odysseus follows his former swineherd into the palace, while Argos quietly dies, having lived just long enough to see his master return. The image of a faithful dog patiently waiting for years has lost none of its emotional power after nearly three millennia. Anyone who has been greeted by a dog at the front door after even a short absence can understand why this episode still resonates so deeply. The contrast is striking. Most of the human inhabitants of Ithaca have abandoned hope that Odysseus will ever return. His household has fallen into disorder, his wealth is being squandered, and his authority mocked. Argos himself becomes a poignant symbol of the neglected kingdom—once noble, now left to decay, yet still capable of recognizing its rightful master. Reading this episode again for the first time since boyhood, in Emily Wilson’s magnificent modern translation, reminded me why Homer remains timeless. My anticipation for Christopher Nolan’s IMAX adaptation next week is immense. If he does justice to the meeting between Odysseus and Argos, I suspect I shall struggle to keep a dry eye.
Curiosity can mean many things. It gives the brain an appetite for discovery. It helps wild animals survive. It sometimes gets them into trouble—after all, what happened to the proverbial cat? And in other creatures, including humans, curiosity can occasionally be downright annoying. When the screen on our Ring camera suddenly went blank, I went outside feeling more annoyance than curiosity. A cable swung in the breeze where it should have been attached to the satellite dish. It had happened before. The culprit had vanished, but I hardly needed Sherlock Holmes to identify the suspect. It had a long reach, formidable claws, and an irresistible attraction to anything novel. We had caught the guilty paw before. Our game camera had photographed the very moment it was torn from the tree to which it had been fastened. You guessed it. Bruin had paid us another visit. Fortunately, the repair was simple, and I found myself laughing at the mischievous rascal. I was far more forgiving than if he had broken into the car or the home (see examples on YouTube). His actions reminded me how deeply curiosity is woven into the lives of wild animals. That raises an interesting question. Has domestication reduced the need for curiosity in dogs and cats? Over thousands of years, humans have protected them from many of the hazards that once demanded constant vigilance and exploration. They no longer need all the survival skills of their wolf or wildcat ancestors. Yet they have evolved other abilities, particularly in understanding and communicating with humans. Domestic animals may not be less intelligent; rather, they have been formed by a fresh environment. It is important not to confuse curiosity with intelligence. An animal—or a person—can be highly intelligent without being especially curious, while another may eagerly investigate everything without showing an exceptional reasoning ability. Curiosity and intelligence often reinforce one another, but they are distinct traits. Perhaps the conspicuous curiosity of certain animals can lead us to overestimate the breadth of their intelligence. Octopuses are undoubtedly among the most cognitively sophisticated invertebrates, yet part of their reputation comes from the striking way they explore and manipulate unfamiliar objects. Psychologists increasingly recognize that human intelligence has many dimensions: logical reasoning, spatial ability, social understanding, emotional intelligence, creativity, and practical problem-solving, among others. Curiosity is not usually considered a form of intelligence in itself. Rather, it is the engine that drives learning. Without curiosity, knowledge stagnates. Curiosity fuels adaptation, creativity, scientific discovery, and social understanding. When it is suppressed, personal growth suffers. Looking back, much of my education in junior school—and even later—seemed overly prescriptive. We memorized facts to pass examinations and were sometimes discouraged from asking difficult questions about the nature of Nature itself, and at precisely the age when young minds are most eager to explore. Wherever questions are discouraged or forbidden, accepted knowledge begins to fossilize, and progress slows. Every field—education, science, medicine, philosophy, and religion—depends on the willingness to question established ideas. Personal experience is often a more powerful teacher than second-hand knowledge. Alice took a considerable risk when she followed the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole. Yet by becoming “curiouser and curiouser” in a world that didn’t make sense, she adapted, learned, and matured. Lewis Carroll understood that curiosity is both unsettling and transformative. As for our bear, he was fortunate that the cable carried only a signal and not a dangerous electric current! On that occasion, curiosity brought him nothing but disappointment. Yet over millions of years, that same impulse has undoubtedly helped bears discover new food sources, avoid danger, and adapt to changing environments. Curiosity carries risks, but evolution has repeatedly found it worth the gamble. Some would call it anthropomorphic to suggest that a bear can enjoy discovery. We cannot know exactly what another species experiences. Nevertheless, many animals clearly seek novelty even when there is no immediate reward. Crows investigate unfamiliar objects and fashion tools. Dolphins explore their surroundings and invent new games. Primates experiment, imitate, and learn from one another. Even our dogs and cats eagerly inspect unfamiliar sights, sounds, and scents. Curiosity appears to be one of Nature’s most successful strategies for thriving in an unpredictable world. This also highlights an important difference between living minds and today’s artificial intelligence. Modern AI can answer questions, recognize patterns, and generate remarkably sophisticated responses, but it does not possess curiosity in the biological sense. It has no intrinsic desire to explore, no sense of wonder, and no satisfaction in making a discovery (or proof-reading this article!). Animals investigate because they are internally motivated to learn about their world. Their curiosity is a product of evolution. Ours became the foundation of science, art, and civilization itself.
The services of bees have been valued for millennia. In the early Middle Ages, they provided honey for sweetening, mead and beer, wax for candles, sealants, and much more. The only benefits never mentioned then are pollination services, the prime reason we celebrate them today. So critical to the local economy, laws were enacted to protect bees in medieval Ireland. The Bechbretha set out rights for ownership and compensation. This fragment of an English illuminated manuscript dates to about 1200 AD. It depicts bees as moral examples. They are hardworking and live peaceably with neighbors in a hierarchical society. Sermons were preached, praising their virtues in churches, though riddled with myths. The Big Bee was a king without a sting (more noble!) and his subjects were born in the carcasses of rotting oxen!
The top boxes in my hives felt heavy during an inspection, so it was time to harvest honey on Saturday. I only have two hives, more as a hobby than for honey that’s mostly used as gifts. Imported honey brings down the price in stores, one of the most adulterated products on the market because it is hard to detect dilution with sugar water. Trust local honey. After extraction, I return the wet frames for bees to clean in the hive. I don’t take the comb because they invest more energy in making wax than honey (7:1). Honey was the only sweetener available in medieval Europe, but beeswax was more valuable for making candles in churches and monasteries, and so much brighter and cleaner than tallow candles. Before harvesting a frame of honey, it should have every cell in the comb capped with white wax. Frames are left in the hive if they have any brown caps that mean larvae inside. After perforating caps with a prickly roller, the frames spin for each side using a motorized honey extractor (centrifuge) or, if you have few frames and like the exercise, a hand crank. Honey oozes out of a port in the cylinder’s base through a fine mesh to filter scraps of wax before decanting into jars. If honey is too runny in a humid spring, it may develop mold. No problem this year in a drought. Our product came out deep golden and viscous, not needing to be dried to concentrate it. Bees hate to see (or smell) a beekeeper coming to rob their store, although I only take a fraction. My PEP protected me while a cloud of insects buzzed around. I didn’t get stung. But two days later, in another part of the garden, they found me out of my beesuit and got their revenge!
We know it’s April in Virginia when our car changes color under a coating of yellow pine pollen. The finger-writing on the car’s hood on the second day of pollen fall soon disappears under new layers, like the first footprints in snow vanish under fresh falls. This event coincides with our peak allergy season, but don’t blame pines just because they produce the most abundant pollen. Their grains have a couple of bladders for buoyancy needed for wind pollination. But large size prevents them from descending deeply when we breathe, and, equally important, their smooth surface isn’t sticky. Easily blown off the hood. Pine is an exception among wind-pollinated trees (and grasses) that are responsible for most seasonal allergies. Trees like birch and alder, and species of oak. Their grains are smaller, so they descend deeper down our windpipe, and sculpted or wrinkled surfaces stick to mucous membranes. Birch seems an exception to the rule until you notice the smooth triangular grains have points that make them prime allergy triggers too. We are hardly affected by pollen transmitted by insects, birds, and bats. Maple, cherry, hornbeam, dogwood, tulip poplar etc. Each pollen grain looks like a work of art under the scanning electron microscope. Their forms are unique to the species, which makes fossilized grains valuable in ecoarcheology. That raises the question why? Like so much in biology, the answer is natural selection. Wind-pollinated grains are produced abundantly to ensure some land on female targets that match their contours, and small enough to drift far. On the other hand, animal-pollinated grains are adapted by co-evolution between the plant and animal vector for sticking to particular wings or feathers, etc. Admire the beauty of the pollen story when you stop sneezing!
Roger musing about Peace with Nature 