Columbus Surpassed: Biophysical Aspects of How Stingless Bees Place an Egg Upright on Their Liquid Food

The highly eusocial stingless bees (reviewed in [1, 2]) constitute a phylogenetically old group [3] within the Apidae. Probably related to this ancient origin is their mass provisioning of brood cells: they deposit all the food on which the larva will develop into the brood cell, prior to oviposition and subsequent closure of the cell. The other social members of the Apidae, the honeybees and the bumblebees, regularly visit the larvae in their cells to administer small amounts of liquid food at a time. This system is called progressive provisioning. Mass provisioning is practiced by almost all the other bees. However, while most of them have a solid type of larval food, the stingless bees produce a liquid food. In relation to this, their cylindrical brood cells are constructed vertically and are often arranged in horizontal combs. The food, regurgitated from the stomach, consists of a mixture of pollen, nectar, and glandular secretions [1, 2, 4]. After the workers have put this liquid food into the cell, the queen oviposits. Her egg, with its elongated shape, stands upright on the fluid

Unraveling the complexities of enacting change in undergraduate medical curricula

In medical schools, significantly revising an undergraduate medical curriculum has become a frequently recurring process. Those processes take a lot of time and energy of many stakeholders. We tend to spend considerable time on the content and pedagogical designs of our curricula, while often neglecting the importance of the organizational processes. In order to support future change processes, this thesis focusses on better understanding the complexities of enacting change in undergraduate medical curricula. The role of change leaders, educational scientists, governance and context were investigated. The results showed that change leaders experienced the curriculum change processes to be highly dynamic and complex, in which the involvement of a large and diverse group of stakeholders plays an important part. One of these stakeholders, the educational scientists, do not always seem to be optimally engaged in curriculum change processes, which is inconvenient in the light of utilization of available resources. The ways in which governance is structured at the teacher level also influences how the change process proceeds, and how well it succeeds in achieving the desired changes. Additionally, awareness of differences in organizational contexts seems to be important when implementing (transnational) educational changes. We conclude that curriculum change processes are the shared responsibility of different stakeholders, and not of just one leading person. Therefore, the emphasis should be more on the formation of teams in the organization. Furthermore, we suggest exploring the possibilities of a threefold leadership team, which includes expertise in the field of medical content, education and organizational processes