Immortality

Nikolai Viktorovich Nasonov was born in Moscow in 1855, and died there in 1939, so he will have seen Russia at war with Turkey (successfully driving the Ottoman empire out of the Balkans) and Japan (by whom it was comprehensively defeated). He also saw the assassination of two Russian Emperors and two communist uprisings, the second of which established the Bolshevik government. The first world war and the Russian civil war after the revolution took place when he was in his 60s. Finally, he experienced the brutal rise of Stalin and the Holodomor famine in Ukraine. His life ended after the rise of Hitler, just before the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Nazi invasion of Poland. Quite a lifetime

Throughout all this, he seems to have maintained a quiet life working as a biologist, based in Moscow but visiting other European cities. He reached the highest levels of his discipline and his death was marked by a brief obituary in Nature. Much of his work was on the anatomy and morphology of insects though, oddly, mountain sheep and ostrich are also mentioned

His research degree (PhD equivalent) was on evolution, with particular reference to either ants or anteaters, depending which source you choose. Since ants, like bees, have males with only half the compliment of chromosomes - they develop from unfertilused eggs and have no father - their evolution would be the more interesting of the two, I think. But did science know this in the late 19th century, before Crick and Watson? Probably not

At some point he must have worked on honeybees, because he gave his name to a gland on the back of their abdomen, located in the gap between the final two segments. I wonder if he realised this is the principal reason his name would still be known, 170 years after his birth. He thought it was a sweat gland but a British scientist in the early 20th century worked out it produces a cocktail of pheremones. Bees leave these on flowers, to tell other bees they have visited, but they also produce it, and fan it into the air with their wings, to provide guidance for other bees to the whereabours of the hive entrance

That is what these bees are doing: raising their abdomens, exposing the Nasonov gland and 'fanning' the pheremone with their wings. This is because some lump of a human has opened their hive, looked at all of the combs and taken away one of the boxes of comb that has been there all winter. The result is a lot of disruption, and bees that were snug inside the hive finding themselves left outside. This is their way of getting everyone back in place 

The season is officially begun. Five hives contain five queens with acceptable colonies - though one is rather small and struggling to get going. The incessant rain has left some hives damp, and actually visibly rotting in one case (fungal fruiting bodies on the outside!) I have never seen slugs inside a hive before, but there were several large ones in a couple of hives. There is evidence of one hive having hosted a mouse for a while - some damaged comb and the beginnings of a nest. Thankfully now gone and the comb will be scrapped. Time to get planning