With the feast day of St. Hilda behind us, it's been time to butcher lambs. The first (Oscar) was done today, since his cousin (Willoughby) was too wily. Our neighbor sells the skulls, so we needed to clean Oscar's.

Our neighbor throws her rams' skulls to the chickens, and after my viking wife shamed her ancestors by refusing to assist with the process, we did the same. They have been hiding from it since this morning. Outfaced by dermestids--a sad day for team Vertebrata.

MENO: I should say that in so far as they are bees, they don't differ from one another at all.

Plato, Meno, 72b, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie

"An Inordinate Fondness for Wasps" is a damn good title.

Here is the paper itself.

>We challenge the oft-repeated claim that the beetles (Coleoptera) are the most species-rich order of animals. Instead, we assert that another order of insects, the Hymenoptera, are more speciose, due in large part to the massively diverse but relatively poorly known parasitoid wasps.

Two new species of pseudoscorpions discovered in Grand Canyon-Parashant. GC-Parashant is still decidedly not well known to anyone, and it's no surprise there are still new things to be found out there.