Pollination

Pollination has been on my mind this week. Been learning about bees. It's not far from the news either, well, in its human form. Yesterday I mentioned an article about a French study showing that in humans, fertility isn't just about females. In the evening I noticed an article about a British woman of 63 who was expecting a baby. Here we go, I thought, stand back and count to ten and some tosser will be poking their nose in. And lo! Just a few hours later, another journo is decrying the couple. Not very joined up thinking in my book. Over the past few months, we have seen that Europe is not re-populating sufficiently to maintain its economies. We know that people live longer, healthier lives nowadays than they have for quite a long time in human history. I wonder if, when the life expectancy was around 45, couples were being criticised for having babies as long as they possibly could, I'm thinking not somehow.

Many families have always relied on the older generation to look after grandchildren, so what's the difference between that and those same people looking after their own children if it's possible for them to still reproduce? The couple in question have grown up children, so if all else fails and they both died before the coming child were old enough to look after her or himself, well, the extended family extends both ways. Certainly in my family, my son Austen is and always has been very actively involved in the bringing up of the younger children and now that they are older and he has children of his own, they do, and I hope will increasingly, help out with their niece and nephew.

Somehow, I think there isn't any real reason why people go into tailspin about pushing back the boundaries of fertility, I think it's just the 'ick' factor. They make up all sorts of reasons why gay couples of both genders can't or shouldn't adopt, have or raise kids whichever way they choose. 'They' have made the same sour face about mixed race child-rearing. It's not nice unless it's a young, straight, same race couple, preferably athletic, good-looking and bright.

In the beehive, well, things are much more straightforward. There's a queen that lays eggs, there are a few drones who go forth and fertilise other hives' queens and the rest are female workers who do...well everything, and into the bargain, if a bee emergency occurs and the queen were to perish in some freak queen bee accident, they could lay eggs and then feed them up with royal jelly to make a new queen. So the drones are either almost useless or they are amazingly important, but whatever, there's not too much that they can do.

Humans of course don't structure their society in the same way bees do, as a species we give birth to more or less the same number of females as males. So human women aren't supposed to do all the work and human males aren't supposed to exist purely for procreation. I think this point was made in the article yesterday.
There has been a tendency to think of fertility as being a 'woman's problem'. Ok, sure, there is an acknowledgement that a man may have too low a sperm count to be reproductive, a very specific problem, but I think the writer is correct to imply that as a general issue, only women are considered to have a limit on their reproductive usefulness to society.

Neither men nor women therefore are just reproductive creatures, we have other functions, skills and strengths to bring to the table. Yes, we need people to breed, but then we need all sorts of other things as well to maintain and progress our highly complex society.

In some cases, men do father children quite late in life, but, whilst these may cause an eyebrow to be raised, in general they are not the cause of rabbid frothing at the mouth of journos and others.

I know full well that I have made similar observations before, not least of all because I can remember Simmi commenting along the lines of not all people who can easily reproduce are very good at bringing children up, and I think that is the point.

Men and women have equal stakes in this to a certain exent. I am not overlooking the fact that a woman risks death every time she conceives, gives up earning power, undergoes irreparable damage to her body and any number of other factors.

In our human society, we spend an awful lot of time and effort trying to force behaviours into the boxes marked 'natural' and 'unnatural'. Both men and women reproduce, both have an optimum span of life for reproducing and both are equally capable of screwing up the outcomes.
But also, as a human society, we have found ways to push back the boundaries of fertility for the species. I bet if bees, or any other species could do that, they would.

One more interesting thing to remember about bees. Their ordinary daily activities result in pollination and the propagation of other species, of flowers and plants, so without them, we couldn't exist. Can anything, anything on this planet say the same about us?