Sting Beans

The Texas Mountain Laurel is a common landscape plant here. It is a tall shrub with nice purple flowers in the spring. Hidden inside brown bean-like pods are toxic bright red seeds. Griffin found out a secret about these at summer camp. Kids call these seeds "sting beans". They rub the seed on concrete and then shock their friends by touching them with it. Apparently the friction of rubbing the seed on the ground makes it unexpectedly hot for a few seconds.

Griffin experimented to find out exactly how hot. He tried rubbing the beans on different surfaces. He found that the damp new seeds did not get hot. He used a point and click thermometer to quickly measure the temperature. It was meant for measuring body temperature so it maxed out around 110 degrees. Maybe an infrared thermometer like the one we saw on TV in an episode of Dirty Jobs would work better. They used it to figure out where bees were living inside a wall by looking for hot spots.

Griffin also had an adventure in economics with the Mountain Laurel seeds. One kid at camp had a plant growing at his house, and he brought a bag of the seedpods to Griffin. That made him the manufacturer. Griffin took the pods home, opened them, sorted and counted the seeds, and put them into sandwich bags. Then he sold the whole batch of seeds to his friend Austin for a dollar. Griffin called himself the wholesaler. Then Austin sold the beans to other kids for 50 cents each. Austin was the retailer.