Honey thieves recently targeted a Whole Foods in La Jolla, California. They are specifically going after the NZ native manuka honey, which the store sells for around US$60 per small jar, and which is now kept safely concealed at the store checkouts -you have to ask specifically for it if you want to buy it. Over the past few years, manuka honey has become a darling of the natural foods world, bolstered by celebrities such as Dr Oz and Gwyneth Paltrow, who have evangelised about the honey's supposed healing powers. The honey can be wildly expensive. Here's why. It's from NZ, so that's exotic if you're in the US. The bee has to travel 6km to collect the honey. It's really rare honey, only about 1 per cent of world honey is manuka. It has a short harvest because the manuka flowers are only open for 12 days. And helicopters are needed to collect the honey. The protection of the honey is also a big deal, so people don't try and copy or pass off other products as manuka honey when they're not.
No alarm necessary at number 39
Spotted in Epsom. A passerby thought it was a statue ... until it barked.
Warramaba virgo is a grasshopper species in Australia that is all female. They reproduce by parthenogenesis - the egg divides into multiple cells without any sperm. Species that do this are pretty rare. The advantage of this reproductive scheme is efficiency. Parthenogenic species can dispense with sexual selection rituals and mating itself, which are exhausting, time-consuming, and leave species vulnerable to predators. Just like in human dating, that becomes a drag and a time suck and potentially dangerous. The downside of parthenogenesis is that every offspring is a clone of its mother, which can lead to a lack of genetic diversity and allow harmful mutations to flourish. However, there is plenty of genetic diversity in Warramaba virgo. Scientists have traced the origin of this grasshopper species back to about 250,000 years ago, when it came about as a hybrid of two other grasshopper species. That hybridisation may have given it long-lasting genetic diversity.
