Baffled By Biology?

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash I’ll hold my hands up and say it – I’m scared of bees. Yes, I know it’s silly, they’re kinda cute and they’re incredibly important pollinators, but stinging, flying insects are a still a no from me. Despite this fear, I do think that bees are pretty darn cool! Honeybees, of the genus Apis , are eusocial insects, meaning they have a high level of organised sociality. The characteristics needed for an insect to be considered eusocial are as follows: Cooperative brood care Division of labour (reproductive/non reproductive groupings) Overlapping of generations But we’ll cover the whole eusociality thing in more detail some other time (it’s fascinating!) Honeybees are actually able to communicate through two forms of dance, known as the waggle dance and the round dance, which are currently the only forms of symbolic communication known to exist in invertebrates. The waggle dance is used to point other members of the hive to valuable reso

Photo by Thomas Lipke on Unsplash The well-known Ebola virus, Zaire ebolavirus , is one of six species within the Ebolavirus genus. Originally named Ebola haemorrhagic fever, after the Ebola River, the virus first cropped up in 1976 with outbreaks in Nzara, South Sudan and Yambuku, Democratic Republic of Congo [1] . The virus has reappeared frequently in the years since, with the 2014 epidemic in West Africa and the more recent DRC 2019 outbreak. The natural hosts of Ebola are thought to be fruit bats within the family Pteropdidae, with the virus entering the human population through close exposure to the organs, blood or bodily fluids of infected animals including fruit bats and non-human primates. Upon infecting a human, the virus is transmitted through a population via contact with the blood/bodily fluids of an infected individual and contaminated objects [1] . The Ebola virus has an incubation period of 2 to 21 days, meaning symptoms appear within this time-frame follo