Word: nectareous
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...apple orchard. They have settled into the hives, and, with a single-mindedness that is funny and impressive, go about the business of their miraculous, strange little universe. I watch them with almost parental affection--the buzzing, teeming clockwork, the workers cleaning cells, guarding the front door, foraging for nectar; the short, fat drones, fatherless and stingless and indolent, swaggering about, hoping to get lucky with a virgin queen...
...world is in danger of losing the Sun Crest peach. Extravagantly juicy with a nectar that perfectly balances acids and sugars, it boasts a yellow skin with an amber glow. But because it is soft and easily bruised, it is unattractive to supermarkets, which prefer hearty produce bred to travel well and languish indefinitely. Grown in California's San Joaquin Valley, the Sun Crest is picked only in midsummer and sold primarily at roadside stands...
...Nectar in a Sieve...
After the butterflies were relocated to long tubes of bridal-veil material, the kids gingerly placed them on sponges filled with honey and water, then took delight as the creatures learned to go to the nectar on their own. Two days before their release, the students ever so carefully attached tiny tags to their hind wings--tags that a University of Kansas professor would use to monitor their migration to Mexico...
...test of his model, Montague created a computer program that simulated the nectar-gathering activity of bees. Programmed with a dopamine-like reward system and set loose on a field of virtual "flowers," some of which were dependably sweet and some of which were either very sweet or not sweet at all, the virtual bees chose the reliably sweet flowers 85% of the time. In laboratory experiments real bees behave just like their virtual counterparts. What does this have to do with drug abuse? Possibly quite a lot, says Montague. The theory is that dopamine-enhancing chemicals fool the brain...