Granelli di Polline

14 October 2023 ecosostenibile

Granelli di Polline

Granelli di Polline is a book, written by Lia Savarino *, where the author has given a new light to that infinite world that often escapes us or which, even as “experts” in the sector, we look at coldly, with a didactic attitude or, worse still, notional: the world of pollinators, that is, of those organisms (mostly insects) which, by “dialoguing” with plants, allow life on this planet to carry out and fulfill its task.
As Professor Gaetana Mazzeo, associate of “General and Applied Entomology” at the University of Catania, perfectly says in the preface of the text, “Lia Savarino has written an act of love”.
In fact, the reader who gradually delves into reading will immediately notice two aspects:
– the first is that the text, using simple language (which is always the virtue of true scholars), is easy to read, engaging and full of elements that bring to light not only the ecological role of pollinators but of all insects;
– the second is that, through the examination of every tiny detail of these little beings, light is shed on that incredible complexity that is the organization of Life itself.
It is precisely through these two aspects that the “act of love” emerges of a person who, even before being the author of a text, is a lover of Life and its depths.
Thus, “with this book, the reader can be led, as if it were a journey, little by little to discover the world of bees and perhaps take inspiration to delve deeper into the various scientific aspects that the author wanted to share…”.
Fourteen chapters to enter, as with a microscope (which the author actually does in chapter 7) into the intimate world of the best-known of pollinating insects: the honey bee (Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758).
But the “microscopic” approach does not stop at the morphological aspects, even if they are often tiny, it goes further.

The countless interactions and different forms of “language” that all insects, therefore not only pollinators, establish with plants and the ecosystem are highlighted; from pheromones, to electromagnetic fields, to strictly electrical signals, a world where communication and languages are much more complex than we imagine.
The coevolution of pollinators and insects with plants and the equally “coevolutionary” history of the relationship between bees and humans is fascinating and often little known.
In the book we perceive, with a gentle style, the intrinsic nature and substance of all living beings, with their role in processing cosmic energies into increasingly diversified forms, more varied in form and substance.
A perfect synchrony with the recent discoveries of quantum mechanics where every day we understand more and more how the reality of which we are made and which surrounds us is a single substance but in three different forms: Information, Energy and Matter. So much so that it can be stated that Matter is coagulated Energy, Information is Energy in its potential state, just as Energy is Information in action. All this fluctuates with its own rhythm, giving life to the vast vital phenomenology of Nature and Reality as a whole.
Thus all bees and insects, with their dances, their biological cycles, their languages, their ecological role, are nothing more than a portion, albeit multiple, of an even more complex part which is Nature as a whole.
Granelli di Polvere is not just an entomology text, which deals in particular with bees and pollinators; it is much more; it is the act of testimony of those who have seen an even greater Complexity in the industriousness of these little beings, testifying to it with a scientific text which, as it is elaborated, is the same act of love that moved Lia Savarino to think of it, write it and share it.

Guido Bissanti

* Lia Savarino was born in Düsseldorf (D) in 1969. Her family moved to Airasca (To) in 1975 and then, in 1982, definitively to Sicily, to San Biagio Platani (Ag), the town of origin of her parents. The territory has a peasant tradition in which activities such as agriculture, pastoralism, small business and beekeeping are still linked to ancient customs. Her father’s estate, a large and fertile plot of land, opens up a world unknown to her: trees, plants, crops, wild flowers of all kinds and small winged insects of various shapes. She thus becomes passionate about the Apoidea whose buzz reaches her ears and caresses her heart. However, her studies took her elsewhere, into the hotel sector and her work even further, into public administration. But the beauty towards this little winged world remained in her eyes. Lia Savarino is not a beekeeper, but she knows beekeepers from various parts of Italy with whom she has the opportunity to discuss the various aspects of beekeeping. With some of them she has her first direct experiences with honey bees. And so she begins to delve deeper, studying its complex physiology and here she discovers a new vision of the little one: a solitary and wild world unfolds before her eyes, followed by gregarious and primitive social forms. She doesn’t even deny the approach with wasps and hornets. She becomes a self-taught scholar of the Apoidea driven only by passion This book, his first ever work, very rich in entomological, historical and ethological information, accompanied by many photographs, aims to be a moment of attention towards pollination, that natural process which allows the production of many agricultural crops and which is carried out by the action of the pollinators and, among them in particular, of the Apoidea.