For a complete change of pace, this week I thought I would babble on about the mighty barbecued hamburger and the darling dainty damselflies, both sure signs that summer has arrived in Yellowknife.

I reckon that if a person paced themselves correctly they could survive June, July and August in Yellowknife eating nothing but free hot dogs and hamburgers. It seems that every other day there is a free barbecue going on somewhere in the city.

Now I am not suggesting that existing only on free barbecue would be healthy or desirable, I am just suggesting that it might be possible. It would be interesting to know just how many burgers this city goes through in the summer season. I am sure it is a staggering number.

Now it should be obvious to anyone who eats a typical hamburger that they are not made out of ham, so you might wonder where the name comes from and who invented them.

Researchers have delved into this question and apparently the first time the word hamburger appeared on a restaurant menu was at Delmonico's restaurant in New York City in 1826. The name goes back to Germany where meat cooked in the Hamburg style meant ground-up or minced meat cooked in a patty. Before modern meat grinders came along, turning slabs of meat into a minced or ground up form was a rather labour intensive and time consuming operation.

So the next time you chow down on a burger remember the name comes from Hamburg, Germany and modern meat grinders are instrumental in producing the billions of burgers the world consumes in a year.

But wait, there's more.

The hamburger or at least minced meat can trace its origins back to the 1200s when Genghis Khan and his Mongolian horde spread terror and chopped meat throughout the known world.

Now, back in those days they didn't have triple A, grain-fed Alberta beef which comes from cattle whose main form of exercise is waddling up to the feeding trough. The meat they had came from lean, mean, tough and stringy animals.

The horde of course did a lot of looting and pillaging for food but they also needed something they could eat while on the move.

Someone discovered, I assume by accident, that if you put some cut up slivers of meat underneath you horses saddle and rode around on it for several hours or days the pounding tenderized the meat.

The horses sweat also added salt and this helped to preserve the meat and I am sure added a certain amount of flavour to it. So when a member of the horde got hungry they just reached underneath their saddle, pulled out a chunk of meat and had a meal. Yummy.

Maybe someday we could get the riding club to do an re-enactments of this for us to try. Next time you have a burger think of the horde who invented minced meat and spread the concept to Germany where the idea of turning it into a burger and cooking it came into being.

Then I think we should thank the Americans for making the modern hamburger and turning it into a summer staple and worldwide phenomena.

Someone asked me what all the little blue flies you see around this time of year were. They are damselflies, related to dragonflies but much smaller of course. When sitting, their wings are parallel to their bodies as opposed to dragonflies which have their wings out flat.

They are your friends because they eat small insects, including blackflies and mosquitoes. They also lay their eggs in the water and their young also eat mosquito and blackfly young. The damselflies seem to hatch out earlier in the spring than dragonflies.

If we had to pick a territorial insect I would vote for the damselfly.

They are pretty, they mark the beginning of summers warm weather and they eat mosquitoes, so what's not to like.

• Walt Humphries is a well-known Yellowknife artist and prospector