The Birds and the Bees

I wonder why that's a euphemism for explaining about sex to a child. Birds and bees do it differently than people, and it's human sexuality that the parent is trying to explain. Ms. Tichy started out with single celled creatures and worked her way up through plants, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, but that was a science class, and most of us already knew how it worked with people. If a parent taught it that way, the kid would lose interest before they got to humans, and the parent would have to start all over again. Be that as it may, I seem to remember that the bees in the museum had access to the outdoors. I think the bee display was built into an exterior wall, and the bees could come and go at will.

Human females expel their unfertilized egg about once a month, but they only produce one egg a month. I don't think eggs can be made in a single day because a human female is not fertile every day of the month. Chickens typically lay one egg a day but, since they can't produce a new egg from scratch every day, they must use the "pipeline" method so that there is always a new egg in line to replace the old one that is going out. The pipeline has no way of knowing if there is a rooster hanging around, so it keeps cranking out eggs so there will always be one ready if a rooster shows up. The eggs need to be fertilized before the hard shell forms, but they can't be fertilized if they're not mature, so the only one that can be fertilized today is the next one in line after the hard shelled one is expelled.

From my experience with the broody hen, and the information that I got from the guys at work after the fact, a dozen eggs is about all a broody hen can take care of at once. Because our broody hen had about three times the optimum amount of eggs under her, she couldn't take care of them properly, and only one of them ultimately hatched. Some bird species only incubate one or two eggs at a time, but chickens, grouse, and pheasants commonly have a dozen or so eggs in their clutch. The only way they can accumulate a dozen eggs is one egg a day for a dozen days. Modern chickens seem to want to give their eggs to a designated sitter, so their wild ancestors likely had some sort of communal system of incubating their eggs, although the exact workings of it have been lost in the shuffle as people selectively bred chickens for increased egg production. Be that as it may, the nutrients that go into egg production are not wasted. If the mother bird is not getting sufficient nutrition, she will not produce eggs, so the nutrition that goes into egg production is surplus to the maintenance of the mother bird's health. I seem to remember reading that human females who have an eating disorder sometimes stop having periods, which means their egg making operation has shut down, so chickens are not the only creatures whose egg production is dependent on good nutrition.

Surplus production is a common thing in nature. Some species overproduce more than others, but they all have to make more babies, eggs, and sperms than they need because some of them will not survive. The surplus material is not wasted, it all gets recycled one way or another. When we say that something is wasted, what we really mean is that it is lost to our use. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody salvages the wood, it will eventually be reabsorbed into the ecosystem. It might take a hundred years, but trees don't care about time.