Hairy Bees (Not Hairy Knees)

I don’t have much in the way of hair. In my 20s and even into my 30s, I’d spend a stupid amount of time fashioning my hair – and money. But it became evident that it was retreating and then one day at the barbershop it got a bit shorter than I would normally have it and it didn’t look too bad. And then the next time I went the full hog and shaved. For a long time I paid someone to shave my head – which is a bit silly because there’s no skill involved and you can save money by doing it yourself. Now I sometimes treat myself to a haircut (a lovely Romanian lady called Claudia) but usually I do it myself. But I say I have no hair – that’s not quite true. I have little hair on the top of my head, but the less it grows up there, the more seems to sprout in other parts of my body. Especially those places where hair has never grown before. I don’t understand the logic of hair in ears, but I’m very good at growing it. My back is another place?? And in the past year I’ve successfully grown a beard – something I failed to do any time before my 40s.

(c) neurotypicalbeekeeper

Autistic people have sensory issues which make having a haircut something like torture – like being pricked by a pin millions of times and all the time you have to remain still. But people need haircuts – or at least most do. At first Harry would have to be held down whilst the barber did his/her job. It was traumatic for everyone involved. Some barbers specialise in difficult children, and sure enough they were better, but no one had the patience/skill/commitment to be able to handle Harry. Until we met Susan. Susan is a men’s hairdresser who happens to have a son of her own who is on the spectrum. She has the patience of a saint and knows how to avoid (which is the real skill) pushing the wrong buttons. After three years, we’ve finally reached the stage in which Harry will sit still in the chair and let Susan do her stuff, even moving his head to one side or the other when asked. Susan is incredibly good at her job and I love her for it. She doesn’t understand, I’m sure, but just something like this makes a massive difference for autism parents.

 

Bees are quite hairy as well, and lose their hair as time goes on. The great “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” that is nature means that bees go from flower to flower to flower and pollen gets attached to the bee’s hairs and then is passed to the next flower. How did that happen? Was evolution aiming for that, or is this just a step on the road to something else? And it didn’t happen overnight, so how did evolution encourage bees to grow hairs, before the pollen was being passed by hair? The truth is probably the pollen stuck to their skin and then hairs was just an improvement, but who knows. But just like humans, bees go bald. I don’t know if their hair falls out because of age, or because of the constant rubbing on flowers and within the hive.

 

Anyway, the result is a very bald bee, who stands out because she’ll be quite shiny. It looks odd. But then, maybe so do I with my own shiny bald head. But the one thing I don’t know is, if as the bee goes bald, does their hair start growing more on other parts of their body?