Walking along the River Severn on a lazy
Sunday just gone, it was hard to ignore the weather - which was milder, the
water – which was lower, and the trees – which were blossoming. By no means was
this the ‘boom of summertime’, but it was something of a rumble at least. Something I've never really thought about is
how plants and animals just seem to know when spring is here.
Apparently, plants know the time. The
Mother Nature Network tells me how…
‘Plants have genes that suppress flowering and growth, and
these genes are time sensitive. Plants actually register how many cold days
have passed, and when enough have gone by, the genes are temporarily
deactivated, allowing flowering and growth’.
It turns out that there
is an actual in-built timer which counts the days of winter and has pretty good
judgment of when the cold season is ending. The widely accepted reason for this
is that plants can measure how long the days are through their window for
photosynthesis; as the window gets bigger, plants begin to flower to aid
pollination. Likewise, the colder
weather and shorter days lead to the suppressing of blossoming. It’s a very
clever design! ‘I Always Wondered’ gives this more scientific, humorous
explanation which brings me on to my next subject…
‘One particular species of plant, arabidopsis or ‘thale cress’, had its entire genome
sequenced in 2000. Scientists discovered a gene that they, in a fit of
creativity, named ‘COLDAIR’, or in Latin frigida (seriously). COLDAIR
gets switched on after that long period of freezing temperatures and
progressively turns off a gene responsible for inhibiting flowering, over a
period of six weeks.
Then bees do it with
them. SCIENCE!’
So, where do the bees come from? Where do
they hide away all winter? Do they migrate as birds do? Do they hibernate? No.
They form a ‘winter cluster’.
Besides sounding like a seasonal breakfast
cereal, this is another amazing natural mechanism that ensures the survival of
our honey bees. According to the Gardening website ‘Dave’s Garden’…
'Honeybees stop
flying when the weather drops below 50 degrees. The worker bees huddle around
the Queen bee at the center of the cluster, shivering in order to keep the
center around 80 degrees. The worker bees rotate through the cluster from the
outside to the inside so that no bee gets too cold.’So that's where spring goes when it's not on its way!
