Imagine there’s no ketchup

IT is a sunny afternoon. There’s a deckchair on the lawn. A tall glass containing an iced drink of some inviting kind—I’m sure nothing stronger than lemonade—stands beside it. The senses are surfeited, eyelids droop. What is the aural background to this scene? Inevitably, the vibrating, bassoon-like note of the gloriously named Bombus (we thank the French entomologist Pierre-André Latreille for bestowing it in 1802; it’s the Latin word for buzz or hum) does her rounds.

Its ‘drowsy tone’, to quote the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem The Humble-Bee, evokes summer days, when nothing much can go wrong and it wouldn’t matter if it did: ‘Wiser far than human seer,/ Yellow-breeched philosopher!’ Emerson was writing after he had lost a useful part of his income in the banking Panic of 1837. Today, in a world of lockdowns and self-isolation, the fascinating bumblebee still has the power to console.

Now, here is