this is your brain on bees

Everything I read this morning seems to overlap the last thing I read, somehow magically picking up a thread that was in the first piece and carrying it through the second, and then from the second into the third.  Like a funny little echo effect, this thematic refrain sets the tone for the day, becomes a lens through which I go looking for the next bit of the pattern to emerge.

First thing I read this morning?  Naturally, a piece about bee brain plasticity, posted to Facebook by the Round Rock Honey Beekeeping Academy, for whom I begin assistant-teaching this weekend (yay!).

Turning Back the Clock on Aging relates new findings that bees who change their social role -- i.e., trade in foraging, an essentially solo late-life activity, for in-hive, more social tasks like caring for young bees, feeding them, cleaning up after them -- reverse the aging of their brains.

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