Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Dance Talkin’ – How the Bees Say It

13 February 2014

Bees?  Are they dancing or are they talking?  Are they talking or are they dancing?  But wait!  They’re doing both! . . . at the same time!  It’s called the waggle dance.  It’s, at least, one of the ways bees talk to each other.  What is the dance like?  Well, it involves waggling.  And, before the dance was understood to be a kind of language, at least one person who saw it, Nicholas Unhoch, thought the bees’ danced just for a good time —  enjoying “jollity.”  Then, Karl von Frisch got the idea that the bees were talking with the waggle dance.  He was a patient man.  He spent years observing and cataloging the “language” of the dance.

The dance is called a “recruitment” dance because the dancing bee is trying to get other bees in the hive to travel to a particular location at which, the waggle-dancer promises, the bees will be rewarded with loads of honey.

The dance language goes like this.  Imagine one of those old dance-step charts, showing footprints, which would be put on the floor to train would-be dancers.  The bee-version would be tacked up on the wall of the hive — actually, attached to the front of the honeycomb.  With bees, dancing is more of an “up and down” affair – unlike the human “back and forth” dance movement.

On the chart, you’ll see one straight line up the center; then, two lines curve out to the right and left at the top and, then, bending down and back inward to reconnect to the bottom of the straight center line. The bee dancer may follow this circuit more than 100 times.

The dancing bee follows that straight center line upward from the bottom to the top waggling all the way. This is called the waggle phase.  Then, when the waggle-dancer reaches the top of the straight center line, it stops waggling and goes to the right and back down to the bottom of the center line.  Then, it waggles its way back up to the top and, turning left this time, stops waggling as it goes back down to the bottom and repeats its climb to the top waggling all the way.


But what does the dance say?  Well, first, it’s about direction.  If the bee waggle-dances absolutely straight up from bottom to top, before turning left or right, it means that, when the recruited bees leave the hive, they will find the honey by going in the exact direction of the sun in the sky.  If the “waggler” dances upward at even the slightest angle to the right side or the left, that is the exact angle to the right or left of the sun in the sky that the other bees must fly to find the honey.

Not only are waggle-dancing bees really good with angles, but these bees know how the sun moves.  Even if the bees linger in the hive for a long time after seeing the dance, it won’t throw the waggle dance directions off a bit.  The bees will compensate for the sun’s change of position by making the precise corrective adjustment necessary to locate and, then, follow the correct direction.

But knowing the direction of the honey is only half of what the recruited bees need to know.  To find the honey, they also need to know how far they’ll have to travel in that direction..  The distance is just as precisely communicated by the waggle-dancer but, now, with the timing of the waggling performance.  The longer the waggle-dancer takes to dance up the straight path from bottom to top, the farther away the honey will be found.

There are many small variations in the waggle dancer’s moves and each one means something.  But the dancer isn’t a commander, but a recruiter.  So, the message in the waggle dance isn’t a command.  The waggler is just “selling” it’s find of honey to the other bees in the hive.  But if this is salesmanship, do the bees in the hive ever “pass” on whatever the waggle- dancer is “pitching?”

Yes, just because a bee waggles doesn’t mean that the other bees must follow.  The first and greatest challenge is competition.  When I first heard this description of what happens in the hive, it reminded me of a row of pitchmen at a circus or fair.  There may be several, or something like a row of, bees each doing its own waggle dance, at the same time.  Each hoping to recruit it’s fellows to the hoard of honey that particular dancer has discovered.

As long as were discussing sales, you might wonder if there’s an art to sales even among bees.  Do some pitches work better than others?  Do some wagglers not just offer the steak, but “sell the sizzle?  (Better: Do some bees not just offer the honey, but sell the sweetness?)  But, even with bees, enthusiasm sells.

The more excited the bee is about the honey source, the more rapidly it will waggle, communicating its excitement about its find to the recruit-able bees in the audience.

Somehow, I can’t help imagining that I’ve seen this excited waggle in other . . . creatures.  When my dog hears the jangle of its leash, he runs back and forth between where I’m standing and the door, excited to be going outside.  I think I’ve seen him definitely waggling.

But back to bees.

There are “Do Bees” and “Don’t Bees.”  Bad behavior isn’t restricted to humans.  Overly enthusiastic waggling bees occasionally get out hand when it comes to sales.  When competing with their fellow wagglers, the dancers will, sometimes, disrupt their competitor’s dance.  Their competitor, in turn, will fight off the disruptor.  I can imagine the whole hive dissolving into the bee version of a barroom brawl.

But what about the potential recruits?  Do they watch dutifully to determine the best source and carefully note the direction and distance to the honey.   Surprising, like children in school, a few do, but most don’t.  Whether day-dreaming or quietly buzzing with their friends about hive gossip, many miss the waggle message completely.

Then, what happens when these inattentive bees are jostled from their distraction by the need to search for honey?  Well, they may lag, just a little, until the swarm forms.  When it takes off to find the next meal, these less informed bees will just follow along behind the swarm to find the honey.

What happens if a bee lags even longer and misses the direction of the departing swarm?  Not to worry.  Some bees just fly out of the hive and look around on their own hoping to catch a lucky break and find some honey by chance.

In spite of the “Don’t Bee” slackers, the waggle dance is important to the survival of hives when honey is hard to find.  When supplies are short, the scouts who come back to the hive to waggle-dance are the chief sources of information about honey location and, often, the only available sources of honey for the hive.  Only in good times can some bees slack off and others go their own way when gathering honey.

After the swarm follows the waggler and gathers a lot of honey, the bees will return to the hive loaded down.  Then, the returning bees pass their honey to receiver bees.  The receivers, in turn, seal the honey in the comb for storage.

But what happens if a swarm comes back loaded with honey to find all the rest of the bees are leaving to gather yet more honey, themselves?  Well, the load-carrying bees have to stop the departing bees from leaving because they are needed as “receivers.”  How do the loaded bees get the message across?  Another dance.  The “tremble dance” is used to recruit receiver bees for unloading and storing the honey brought back to the hive by bees carrying a full load.

And there are more dances.  If a bee gets infested with mites, or just covered with dust, it can do the “grooming dance.”  That dance recruits other bees to help the mite-infested or dusty bee get rid of its mites or clean itself up.

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

Thursday, July 24, 2014

How do the Bees Feel?


13 March 2014

Researchers are asking a lot of questions about animals lately.  Are animals self-aware?  Do they think?  And these questions are reaching beyond animals to insects as well.  Do bees have personalities?  And, now, do bees have feelings?

It’s no surprise that this type of research tends to raise more questions than it answers.  Tests seem to show that bumblebees have no individual personality.  But even if bumblebees are conformists to a fault, could honeybees be non-conformists?  And, even if honeybees don’t have individual personalities, could hives or even swarms of bees have distinct personalities?   The idea of a group of bees having a personality seems “way out there” until you find out that beekeepers have always reported that, as a group, the bees of different hives, in many ways, behave quite differently from the bees of neighboring hives.

But the question of bees having feelings seems like a tough one to test.  However, finding out whether or not bees become moody may not be as tough as we thought.  It turns out that when human beings and animals are in bad moods, they tend to make negative judgments.  In other words, we’re all a bit pessimistic when we’re in a bad mood.

But let’s begin at the beginning.  One characteristic of feelings is that they change.  If a person or animal always feels exactly the same way, they can’t really be said to have feelings.  Now, let’s substitute the word “mood” for feeling.  Why?  Moods, by definition, change.  So, the word “mood” is a little more precise than the word “feeling.”

Now, how can you tell if an insect has moods?  Maybe, by using the same test that is used with animals.

The trick of the test involves negative judgments.  Human beings and animals evaluate and react to situations differently when we’re in a good mood than when we’re in a bad mood.  A good example is a decision based even odds – a coin toss.  Would you bet on a toss of a coin?  Your odds are exactly as good as they are bad.

I’ll guess that if you’re asked to bet money, but trying to be frugal, going through hard times, and are a bit short of cash, you’ll pass on the bet.  On the other hand, if you’ve got plenty of money and have just had a few really good breaks, you might just take the bet.  Why?  Your mood.  You’re feeling lucky.

So, for our test, we need four things.  First, we need to find the equivalent of a coin toss for bees.  Second, we have to offer the bet to the bees and see how many take the bet and how many refuse the bet.   Third, we have to find a way to change the bees’ moods.  And fourth, we have to offer those same bees the same bet, again, and see if their changed moods affects their willingness to take a chance..

As tough as all this sounds, Geraldine Wright and her colleagues at Newcastle University in the UK found a way.

Bees have an excellent sense of smell and are quickly and easily trained to associate particular smells with particular things.  Wright’s team, headed by Melissa Bateson, first, found something honeybees love, surcose (sugar), and something bees hate, quinine.  Then, they found two substances with very different smells, octanone and hexanol.  The octanone was paired with the much loved sugar and the hexanol with the hated quinine.  The bees were trained to associate the smells with the substances that they loved and hated.

Then, the researchers combined the chemical smells.  When the well-trained bees were exposed to a combination of half octnone (lovable sugar) and half hexanol (hated quinine) half the bees “took a chance” and tasted what they hoped was sugar.  The other half passed, not willing to risk licking the hated quinine.

The researchers had their “coin toss” – a choice with even odds.  Now, that the bees’ reaction to the half and half solution was known, the next trick was to put the same bees in a bad mood.  This isn’t as hard as it sounds because there are different types of bad moods.  It wasn’t necessary to depress the bees by having them watch a sad movie.  Substantial stress will produce a bad mood more surely than anything else.

Labs have chemical mixers mounted to benches.  These mixers are machines that violently vibrate/shake containers to mix their contents.  With the menacing name, vortexer, I get the impression that these machines are a bit like paint mixing machines at the local hardware store.  Few could disagree that shaking a group of bees in a container in one of those mixers would leave the insects quite “stressed” – a very bad mood.

After a stay in the mixer, the bees were presented with the half and half solution again.  Many more bees passed on the “chance” for sugar than had before.  So, changing the bee’s mood, changed their “feelings” about taking a 50/50 chance to get some food.   After the “mixing,” the bee’s weren’t so anxious to take the risk.  This seems to indicate that bees have moods – feelings.

Of course, there are a lot of questions about the reliability of the results.  Could the apparent “mood” be an automatic response based on hormonal changes or hard-wired neurological reactions?  These researchers, however, expressed cautious confidence in their results.   Also, the researchers made a surprisingly compelling argument that much of the doubt about the “feelings” of bees may be the result of a subtle prejudice.

The researchers pointed out that if, instead of bees, the subjects of the experiment had been dogs, cats, horses, parrots, cows, or pigs, the conclusion that the experimental subjects had feelings would have gone unquestioned.   Why?    Well, when testing animals with which human beings have had a close historical relationship, not only are results indicating emotion and intelligence readily accepted, but researchers are willing to make far reaching assumptions based on little more than their personal instincts about particular behaviors.

Jason Castro in his excellent article, Do Bees Have Feelings, refers to this argument as a plea for consistency.  We often ascribe emotions to dogs, such as happiness, fear, or anxiety with little, or only intuitive, “evidence.”  However, even strong evidence indicating that an insect has feelings is met with hairsplitting reservations.

The conventional wisdom has always been expressed as follows:  Unless we discover a way to speak directly with animals, we can never be sure if animals experience emotions in the way that human beings do.   However, whether I am in a good mood or a bad mood, I’m less pessimistic about finding the answer to the question of animal and, even, insect emotion.  I think that there is a preponderance of evidence sufficient to accept the hypothesis that certain animals experience certain emotions.  And, although more research is needed, these first tests, alone, strongly argue that insects, honeybees, experience moods.

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Bees – Little Robots or Thinking Beings?

16 January 2014

Could bees be more intelligent than we think?  We’ve been hearing about a lot discoveries in the area of animal intelligence.  However, it’s one thing to speculate about the intelligence of birds and even octopuses, but insects?

Well, at least one group of scientists has tried to “look into” the question.  I say “look into” because, with insects, it’s difficult to come up with anything even remotely resembling a standardized test.  So, the researchers began by biting off a piece that scientific testing “could chew”: Do bees have individual personalities?

A research team at the Queen Mary University of London designed an experiment in which they observed the foraging preferences of bumblebees.  However, the experiment was not designed to test the general foraging preferences of the bees, as a group, but the individual preferences of the individual bees.   In other words, let’s look past the swarm and ask: what’s on the mind of “the lone bee in the crowd”?

The team of researchers, Helene Muller, Heiko Grossmann, and Lars Chittka, released bumblebees into an enclosed space with artificial flowers of different colors.  The idea was to see if individual bees had their own individual favorite colors.  Do some bees prefer one color while some of their peers prefer other colors?   The researchers measured how quickly individual bees approached flowers of a certain color, and how long individual bees stayed at flowers of a certain color.

In a paper published in Animal Behavior, the team reported finding no difference among the individual bees’ observed “preferences.”  The result suggests that bumblebees do not have individual personalities.   Of course, this doesn’t end the investigation.  There may be future studies with other tests based on other criteria.  But, for now, if you’re in advertising and bumblebees compose your target market, it makes no difference what colors your product comes in.

One interesting aspect of the experiment or, perhaps, interesting aspect of bee species, themselves, is the difference between the hive-less loner — the bumblebee – and its more social cousin — the honey bee.  All bees are social, but bumblebees live in relatively small groups in nests, which are abandoned and rebuilt in another location on a yearly basis.  These bees tend to forage for food alone.  In contrast, honeybees live in densely populated hives, which will remain their home from birth to death.  Honeybees travel and forage for food in swarms.

What difference does sociability make?  Well, maybe none.  However, the development of human intelligence has long been attributed to the necessity for social interaction.  In other words, because humans developed social groups in order to survive, they were compelled to develop intelligence in order to interact with other members of the group.

If the relationship between intelligence and social interaction were the rule, the loner bumblebee subjects of this latest study would be the “less intelligent” species when compared to their more social cousins, the honeybees.  So, maybe the colored flower test should be performed on the honeybees because these bees are more social.  That means they must be more intelligent.  Right?  Well, maybe it’s not that simple.

Perhaps, human intelligence did develop in response to social interaction with the result that human researchers assume that this is the only way intelligence could develop.  The social interaction “rule” has been seriously challenged by the high levels of intelligence displayed by one of the most unsocial animals on earth: the octopus.

Octopuses have virtually no social interactions with members of their own species.  These creatures, literally, meet their peers only briefly to eat them or mate with them.  Both process result in the death of either one or both of the guests at the party.  (With octopuses, mating is followed by the swift death of both participants.)  That’s the social life of the octopus.  Period.

Perhaps, just because human intelligence developed out of the necessity for social interaction, human researchers have a built-in prejudice in favor of social intelligence.  And, perhaps, it was just this prejudice that blinded human researchers to the clear displays of octopus intelligence – at least until relatively recently. 

What got the unsocial octopus noticed?  Its use of tools.  The octopus displays an amazing repertoire of tool selection, retention, and use and, also, displays a remarkable ingenuity in its interactions with its inanimate environment.  So, social intelligence certainly isn’t the only type of intelligence.

Given the amazing intelligence of the loner octopus, perhaps, the more intelligent bee species would be the (relatively) lone bumblebee.  Forced to develop its individual initiative through ages of lone-foraging, perhaps, the bumblebee has developed a resourceful intelligence.   But is intelligence the same as personality?

While no one knows the answer to these interesting questions, the “The Best Bees Company” added some interesting suggestions based on their own interactions with bees and bee keepers.

In their experience, different hives seemed to have different “personalities.”  The honeybees of one hive “hoarded” pollen – gathering and storing it in large quantities.  But the bees of another hive seemed to prefer gathering and storing more honey in preference to pollen.  While noting that these and other differences could be attributable to different environments, or even genetics, the authors make an interesting suggestion with an added question.

Could individual hives, rather than individual bees, develop personalities?  As the authors put it, could there be a “personality” distinct to each hive’s “social super organism?” 

From yet another angle, could the “whole” be more than the sum of the “parts.”  That is, could the “whole,” a hive or swarm, consistently develop and display particular behavior patterns distinct from other hives and swarms.  In contrast, could the “parts,” alone, the individual bees, display no apparent individual behaviors?


Well, all of these are interesting questions.   Experienced observation together with the earliest research predictably seems to provide many more questions than answers.  At this point, the puzzle boils down to a simple question.  Are bees (and all insects) are, intellectually, “little robots” or “thinking beings?”

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Zombie Bees Again?! – Spreading to Vermont

13 February 2014

The New York Times broke the story in late 2012.  There are zombie bees.  Discovered in California in 2008 by John Hafernik, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, zombie bees keep spreading.

Of course, if zombie bees were going to “appear” somewhere, I wasn’t surprised that it turned out to be California.  Then, they were reported in Washington State.  Why not Oregon?  Actually, they had spread stealthily into Oregon with reports only surfacing well after the “zom-bees” (I couldn’t resist) were a well-publicized fact to the north, in the state of Washington.

But the next appearance puzzled me.  North Dakota seemed like the last place I’d expect to meet a zombie. But that was the next state in which the “zom-bees” appeared. The zombie horror genre had conditioned me to imagine brain-eating zombies in California.  And the “real” zombie lore might suggest the Caribbean.  But North Dakota just doesn’t have the “feel” of a hotspot for zombie anything.  But, now, its becoming clear that  the “zom-bees” feel free to fly wherever they want.

And their latest flight has taken them from South Dakota to Burlington, Vermont.  There, amateur beekeeper Anthony Cantrell began finding dead bees near his home.  One can only imagine his “horror” when he discovered a close match between the behavior of his dying bees and a description on ZomBeeWatch.org, the website belonging Hafernik and his colleagues.  Dr. Van Helsing, er, ah, I mean, Professor Hafernik soon confirmed that, indeed, Cantrell’s bees had been zombified!

The bee version of a zombie needs its own description.  They aren’t really much like the brain-eating zombies created by Hollywood.  And, then, there are the “real” zombies.  At least, the real belief in zombies that goes with a belief in Voodoo. But neither the “zombies” of Hollywood or Voodoo exactly match our zombie bees.  Still, when you hear how zombie bees behave, you’ll understand why “zombie” was picked as the best way to describe the fate of these poor insects.

The zombie bee falls victim to a parasitic fly, apocephalus borealis. The fly lays its eggs physically inside the bee’s body.  Then, the eggs actually affect the bee’s behavior.  However, the eggs and larvae of the apocephalus borealis fly control the bee’s “mind,” only briefly, before causing its death.

Under the influence of the developing fly larvae, the honeybee abandons its exclusively daytime routine and does something a bee doesn’t do  — flies at night.  Just before, and during, this “last flight” into the night, (what Hafernik calls “the flight of the living dead,") the bee begins to move erratically.  It ends its final flight in death.  Only then, do the fly larvae eat their way out of the dead bee to continue their growth to maturity.

Cantrell reported that, at a recent meeting of the Vermont Beekeepers Association, Steve Parise, an agriculture production specialist with the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, discussed the threat posed by zombie bees.  The Agency is considering trapping bees to investigate the zombie bee threat.

The culprit fly was originally discovered in the 1920s, in Maine.  Since that time, it has spread across the United States.  The fly was a known parasite of bumblebees and yellow jacket hornets.  But zombification of its host wasn’t part of the parasitic process.  And the fly left honeybees alone.  At least, it did until 2008, when the fly changed.  Now, the fly is more than just a honeybee parasite.   Not only do the fly’s eggs and larvae feed off the honeybee, they turn the victim into a zombie.

The End?

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois


Thursday, July 3, 2014

The Bee’s Brain — the Zombie Apocalypse, but with Bees?

19 December 2013

The New York Times broke the story in late 2012.  There are zombie bees.  So, Night of the Living Dead might be a true story!?  Yeah, but with bees instead of people and . . . substantial script revisions.

If zombie bees were going to “appear” somewhere, California does seem like the most appropriate place.  Then, the zom-bees spread to Oregon.   Then, Washington State.  And, then . . .

The zom-bees suddenly arrived in a fourth state, North Dakota.  North Dakota?  It just didn’t seem right.  The zombie horror genre just hadn’t conditioned me to think of North Dakota as a sort of hot spot for zombie anything.  Still, the bees can go where they will.  If, as zombies, they still have a will of their own.

Anyway, the short answer is:  Zom-bees are with us.

When you start to talk about zombies, the first question is, “What kind of zombies?”  It’s not so much that there are different varieties of zombies as there are different versions.  There are horror movie zombies, the zombies of folklore, and the "real" zombies – or, at least, “real” in the sense that a lot of people alive today absolutely believe in the reality of zombies.

On the top of the heap, in terms of popularity, is the Hollywood horror version of the brain-eating zombie.  However, many of the characteristics of these, oh, so familiar, zombies were made up by Hollywood writers.

Digging deeper, we reach the cultural folklore of zombies together with anthropological explanations of that folklore.  Many believe that what are taken to be zombies are persons who are drugged with a special concoction that, either by its very nature, or through precision dosing, so depresses vital functions that the victim is mistaken for dead and buried.  The perpetrator, then, digs up the depressed, but still living, body of the victim and either fools or drugs them into a life of servitude.

However, the “true believers” in zombies will tell you that specially trained and/or gifted “Voodou” (Voodoo) practitioners have the ability to reanimate a dead body and control it like a robot.  The belief is that the victim’s soul, consciousness, or spirit has permanently departed, but their body remains as a sort of biological robot under the complete control of its “bokor.”

But what about our bee zombies?  Well, actually, their zombification resembles none of the above.  However, what happens to these bees is so zombie-like that, maybe, there no better or readily understandable term to describe what’s happening to the poor victims.

Unlike the zombie of Hollywood, folklore, or Voodoo, the zombie bee falls victim to a parasitic fly, Apocephalus borealis.  The fly lays its eggs physically inside the bee's body.  The eggs, in turn, affect the bee's behavior.  The process is not too unlike what was presented in the 1982 film, StarTrek: The Wrath of Khan, in which “indigenous eels” of Ceti Alpha V are introduced into the brains of the crew members, characters Chekov and Terrell, by the character Khan — maddened by his years in exile.  The film’s eels enter the ears of their victims and, reaching their brains, render them susceptible to mind control.

However, unlike Star Trek’s eels, the eggs and larvae of the Apocephalus borealis fly actually control the bee’s “mind” only briefly before causing its death.  Then, they consume the bee’s physical remains.  From another angle, the action of larvae in “eating their way out” of the dead bee’s body reminds one of another Hollywood creation, the mythical earwig.

The earwig is a real and mean-looking insect, but it doesn’t enter the human ear, burrow into the human brain and lay its eggs.  All of that was an old and almost forgotten “urban legend,” until it was featured in the March 1, 1972 episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (Season 2, Episode 60, “The Caterpillar”).  However, even this apocryphal version of the earwig had no ability to control the mind of its host.  So, zombification was not part of the earwig repertoire.

But a New York Times article that announced the arrival of the zombie bees, asked, “Whose in charge in [the bee’s] head”?   Why?  Because the fly larvae, inside the bee’s body, directly affect that honeybee’s behavior in disturbingly zombie-like ways.  

Under the influence of the developing fly larvae, the honey bee abandons its exclusively daytime routine and does something bees don’t do  — flies at night.  Just before, and during, this “last flight” into the night, the bee begins to move erratically.  It ends its flight in death.  Only then, do the fly larvae eat their way out of the dead bee to continue their growth to maturity.

Hollywood has never quite dealt with this exact kind of zombification.  Of course, the zombie bee might be a good subject for a (not so) new and (not so) different kind of zombie movie.
 
Maybe the zombie-making flies enter a hive belonging to beekeeper, Ms. Red Queen, owner of Raccoon Apiary.  Realizing the problem, she uses an insecticide to kill all of the possibility infected bees in that particular hive.  However, these flies are “mutants” and have laid mutant eggs in the bodies that hive's bees. Instead of just eating the infected bees, these mutant fly larvae reanimate the dead bees into murderous zombie bees worthy of any respectable (or not so respectable) Hollywood production.

One of the infected hive's bees, Alice, is accidentally outside the hive (or something) during the spraying of the insecticide.  She survives and re-enters the hive to discover zombified bees trying to escape and infect the apiary’s other hives.  She engages in a heroic struggle to contain the zombie bees and the infection they carry only to awaken from a coma outside the hive days later.  She sees only a single obviously dysfunctional bee.  Bees communicate through their flight patterns or “dances.”  And this lone bee-dancer just flies, again and again, in the same pattern – repeating the message: “The dead buzz.”  See: Resident Evil

Many sequels could follow.

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois