L's Bees Science

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HERE is a bizarre example of the interaction between humans and nature. It involves a species of Brazilian bee which has probably existed for hundreds of thousands of years, and a chemical invented only a few decades ago.

Males of the species Enfriesia purpurata spend their lives flying from flower to flower, collecting the attractive-smelling substances they produce (and incidentally pollinating the flowers).

Soon after the launch of a malaria-control programme in one area of Brazil in which the walls of houses were sprayed with the insecticide DDT • (sounds prettyunhealthy to me), the residents noticed that these bees were visiting their houses and spending a lot of time on the DDTsprayed walls. They noticed because of the incessant buzzing of the bees, loud enough to be a serious disturbance.

Researchers, intrigued by reports of unusual 'bee-haviour" caught some of the bees and analysed them. They found that the bees were collecting the DDT in pouches on their back legs, obviously finding the smell rather nice!

The amounts collected were quite incredible -some 5-10% of the weight of each bee - and even more incredible, the DDT was causing no ill effects in the bees.

While 6 micrograms (millionths of a gram) will kill your average honeybee, E. purpurata males were happily flying around with an average 2000 micrograms of DDT.

What do they do with #? No one knows yet, though the bees seem to break down the DDT and may use the products as territorial markers or sex attractants.

Is this phenomenon anything more than a curiosity? Well, how about unleashing a swarm of DDT-collecting bees into environments polluted by DDT (which is after all a persistent insecticide, causing lots of damage to harmless animal life)? And perhaps we can find mutations of this species that are attracted to other polluting chemicals (like dioxin)

The possibilities are endless!

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Socialist Organiser, Thursday 17 June 1982 Page 12 troops move in against Hitler, 1944. (Above) Dimitrov On the centenary of Georgi Dimitrov, often best remembered as a servile hack of Stalin's Comintern, JOHN RILEY points also to some of his strengths.

JUNE 18 marks the centenary of the birth of the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov, the hero of the Reichstag Fire trial of 1933.

In Bulgaria, where Dimitroy is very much a national hero, (eulogized as such by the Zhikov bureaucracy), massive celebrations are planned to commemorate this event but in many other countries his name is, or should be, rememberd.

This is because Dimitrov, although very much part of the Stalinist monolith of the '30s and '40s, has distinctly separate claims to fame which do deserve a measure of respect and attention from socialist revolutionaries everywhere.

He was born on June 18 1882 in the village of Kovachevtsi which is some forty miles to the South West of Sofia. His working class family moved quite soon after his birth into the slum district of Youchbounar in Sofia, and at the age of 12 Georgi became a printer's apprentice in the Bulgarian capital.

Almost from the start of his working life, Dimitrov was involved in intensive class struggles when he organised an apprentices committee to support the 1894 Sofia printers' strike.

In the late 19th century the Bulgarian working class were forging their own trade unions and, in 1900, Dimitrov became an early member of the Company of Printing Workers. In 1904, at the age of 22 he became one of the founder members of Bulgaria's TUC - the General Workers Trade Playing a leading role in the two big miners strikes in Pernik in 1906 and 1908 helped him to be considered for the position of secretary of the GWTU.

He was appointed on the recommendation of Georgi Kirkov, the brilliant revolutionary journalist who was one of the Bulgarian Workers Social Democratic Party (Left Socialists) leadership at the time. Dimitroy joined the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party in 1902, at about the same time the party was splitting into two factions -one proletarian, the other petty bourgeois and revisionist. (As Trotsky noted in his Balkan War correspondence, this apparent propensity for splitting was just one of several interesting political/ cultural similarities with the Russian Social Democrats).

Advertisement I Socialist League Having avidly studied and indeed applied the works of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov the young Dimitrov sided with the proletarian Tenyak (orthodox) faction in opposition to the class collaborationists of the Obshtodeltsi (Common Cause)..

Pioneered

The Tesnyaks were led by Dimiter Blagoev who had pioneered Marxism and Social Democracy not only in Bulgaria but also in Russia (in 1884 he established the St. Petersburg Social Democratic Circle, for which he was deported by the Tsarist authorities). Like the Bolsheviks the Tesnyaks opposed " imperialist wat from the standpoint of proletarian internationalism, but in Bulgaria's case the Great War was preceded by the two Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

These wars stemmed from the Balkan Peninsular's artificial division into six independent, but not viable, states by the imperialist intrigues of the British, Russian, Austrian and German ruling classes.

With the decline of Turkey in Europe the tiny based congresses into Slav socialist rallies, addressed by foreign delegates such as Leon Trotsky. To the mystical Pan Slavic war cries of the Balkan kings, the party of Dimitrov and Blagoev replied with resounding calls for peace and a Balkan Federation of States.

These calls for proletarian unity against imperialist war were continued by the Tesnyaks during the First World War when most other socialist parties, except the Bolsheviks, caught war fever.

During World War One Dimitrov was elected an MP for the districts of Vratsa and Troyan and remained an MP till 1923.

As part of a Parliamentary socialist grouping, he attached his name to a document appealing to the Bulgarian working class, urging it to struggle against Bulgaria's involvement in the imperialist war.

Mutiny

In August 1918 Dimitrov was arrested and jailed for inciting servicemen to disobedience around the time of the Vladya soldiers' mutiny for an end to the war BUSES amongst the mutinous soldiers at Vladya and were sectarian in their attitude towards the Peasant Agrarian This sectarianism towards the peasants did much to isolate and bring about the defeat of the massive railway and postal strike in 1919/20 (which Dimitrov had led).

In 1919 the Agrarian Party were • elected into governmental office. Dimitrov went to some trouble to persuade the BCP to be more flexible in its approach to Stamboliisky's Peasant government but was unsuccessful.

In this period Georgi Dimitrov attended the early, still revolutionary, congresses of the Third International (the Comintern). His hazardous journeys to these congresses in tiny fishing boats, braving Black Sea storms and Romanian gunboats are straight out of the adventure comics.

In the Soviet Union he met Lenin who spoke of the need for the BCP to force closer links with the peasants in Bulgaria. This advice. was not heeded by the party who missed a golden opportunity for revolutionary action and Nazis in the September of 1923.

After the defeat of this uprising, Dimitrov and the insurgents escaped into Yugoslavia.

For the following ten years Dimitrov moved under false names all around Western and Central Europe. He spent much time engaging in activities for the Comintern and its trade union organisation which were increasingly falling under the thumb of Stalin's bureaucracy.

Coordinating

A Bulgarian Party in exile was formed and Dimitroy worked at coordinating Balkan Party grouping within the International. His most important position in this Stalinist International was that of head of the Western European Bureau.

As the bureaucracy began to take more and more control in the USSR, Dimitrov toed the line - making a speech as early as 1926 denouncing "Trotskyism"

and "Zinovievism" in Germany (which was the centre of the Comintern's Western European Bureau).

At the same time he appears to have shown some degree of independence from Dou the Nazis who were the lesser enemy!)

Ultimately this juni did much to pave the for the Nazis coming to e toral power in January 19 Hitler needed to consolid this parliamentary success finding a suitable route the establishment of fascist dictatorship his business backers needed crush the working class.

The powerful Gern labour movement was dc at this stage but not out." burning down by arson the Reichstag building ( German parliament) on February • 1933 provi Hitler with his much nee excuse to rush thro draconian 'enabling a banning all left wing opp tion parties.

The Communists 1 immediately blamed for attack on the symbol German democracy. H claimed the fire was to a signal for a Commi uprising in Berlin and o German cities.

Of course this wi true, the fire was acti started by the Nazis mentally retarded yo Van der Lubbe was cor into starting the fire Nazi conspirators who followed this up by obs ting the fire brigade's ar