Sue Hubbell, author of A Book of Bees And How to Keep Them- a delightful book which has as much to do with naturalism and our place in nature as it does about bees -- lives in the Ozark mountains on some 95-100 acres where she maintains 300 beehives throughout the surrounding hills. She writes extremely well, and in this book she reflects on nature's intricacies and "queerness" and man's place in the world. She (and the reader) become captivated by such oddities as the chigger whose chewing on the human for food causes an allergic reaction which leads to its destruction; i.e. the human scratches killing the chigger, clearly a case of "lack of host adaptation" or evolutionarily speaking a Terrible Mistake. In a very Gouldian chapter she muses, with the help of her entomologist cousin, on moth ear mites and bats and their inter-relationship. Bats love these moths, but the moths have evolved the ability to hear the sonar emissions of the bats and thus can evade the oncoming enemy . The mites which need to survive in the ear of the moth (I never really thought of moths having ears) cause hearing loss in the moth which would be evolutionarily a dead end but curiously the mites live and attack one ear only thus preserving not only the moth but the mites as well. Hubbell ponders the human's psychomythology toward nature. We fear bats, spiders, snakes; an irrational fear, which leads to more misinformation about these creatures because we fear to observe.
Her part of the Ozarks is populated, as is much of the South, by the brown recluse spider, known for its venom. After being bitten one day on her way to a swim, and suffering no more than a mild reaction she ruminates on the fear of her friends. They refuse to come to the Ozarks, yet the venomous nature of these spiders was not commonly known until the early hazard since they inhabit the same kinds of places humans enjoy. Coexistence has been successful for thousands of years. Why worry now? Of course, a major benefit is the reduction in the tourist population. We live in a world that is not only queerer than we think but queerer than we can think. The human is part of all this, and being human we insist on meddling and interfering; but, having a mind we can hopefully recognize that some meddling causes more reverberations throughout "the whole" than others.
