Word: nectar
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...world, brought out a new alphabet which it believed would be more universally pronounceable. The old and the new : OLD NEW Able Alfa Baker Bravo Charlie Coca Dog Delta Easy Echo Fox Foxtrot George Golf How Hotel Item India Jig Juliett King Kilo Love Lima Mike Metro Nan Nectar Oboe Oscar Peter Papa Queen Quebec Roger Romeo Sugar Sierra Tare Tango Uncle Union Victor Victor William Whisky X Ray Extra Yoke Yankee Zebra Zulu The U.S. will probably swing over to the new words by 1952's fall. Until then, risking confusion, the American pilots can spell out messages...
...Research Department, Rothamsted Experimental Station, tells how he and colleagues anesthetized worker bees by putting them in jars of carbon dioxide or nitrogen. The bees soon recovered, but with changed personalities. Young workers that had been tending the baby bees forsook their charges and started gathering nectar, to be stored up in the combs and made into honey.* Older workers, that had been gathering both nectar and pollen (for baby bees), usually gathered nothing but nectar thenceforth. The gassing caused both age groups to ignore the colony's system of cooperative reproduction. Only one emotion remained: greed for more...
Beeman Ribbands is well pleased with his discovery. In some localities, he says, bees pay altogether too much attention to raising their young, and produce too many of them. He thinks that if whole colonies are doused with carbon dioxide, they will stick more strictly to business, gather more nectar, lay up a bigger crop of profit-making honey...
...Nectar is a dilute solution of various sugars. Bees put it in uncapped comb-cells, evaporate it to honey by fanning it with their wings. If it contains too much sucrose (cane sugar), which would make it tend to crystallize, the bees add an enzyme (invertase) from glands under their thorax. Thus the sucrose is turned into levulose and dextrose, which taste almost as sweet...
Glad Tidings. There the bee unlimbers its sense of taste, which is specialized to test the quality of nectar. A sugar content of 5% does not interest a bee; such nectar would spoil in the hive before it could be concentrated into long-keeping honey. A 20% sugar content is satisfactory, and 40% makes the bee wildly enthusiastic. It sucks up some nectar and marks the flower with its own scent from a gland on its abdomen. Having thus staked a claim, it heads back to the hive to spread the glad news...