The Future of Bees

we hope he's having a wonderful time there. We're pretty sure he is, according to social media, being chased by bees, which has so much to do with our topic today. We are talking about the future of bees, barring any any terrible future be tragedies, which I seriously am I'm hoping will not occur. Bees are awesome and we hope that they will have a very bright future. There's some slight concern about that, but also that they can be

used for these incredible technology purposes. Yeah. In fact, we were inspired to do this episode by a Facebook message we received from a show listener named Taylor. Yeah. He sent us a note and explained that he is a technician who works with bees in his field, and I'm going to quote part of his message here because it was so exciting. Okay, here we go. Bees have an unimaginably keen sense of smell, so keen that they're able to detect compounds at levels our five thousand dollar machine

can't even get close to. Our team has trained bees to sniff out chemical markers of plant and human pathogens in the lab, as well as invasive weeds and insects on the landscape while listening to this podcast, because he was he was writing in about a podcast about having additional senses in which I had mentioned being excited about bees. While listening to this podcast, I was conditioning a group of bees to detect and respond to the trail aramone of argentine ants so they can be used to locate

their nests. We work with a team based in Montana called B Alert Technologies. There's a company in Montana called B Alert Technologies, y'all who have famously trained bees to sniff out land mines by training them on the scent of TNT, much like they do with dogs. Currently, only be sense of smell is better, and they don't trigger

the landlines when they stand on them. In Sentinel are another B training company who are based in the UK, and I believe are working on border security applications for B based bio sensors. He also linked us to this hilarious promotional video for the in Sentinel B Sniffer. Yeah, it's it's basically a B dust buster, um like like this thing that is filled with bees. And we'll talk about it more at the end of the podcast. The company might not exist anymore. Yeah, I'm not sure about that.

One little note. The g c m S machine, the machine that Taylor mentioned, that's a gas chromatography mass spectrometry machine, which is a type of machine that's used to sort of like take a sample and figure out what are all the different chemicals inside it. Sure, it usually gasifies or basically burns a sample in order to pick out what's in it. Right, And so what Taylor was saying is that the bees can sense chemical compounds better than

this really expensive machine. So let's talk a little bit more about why bees are really cool in terms of both their amazing anatomy and also their their place in this proverbial circle of life on planet Earth. You know, I saw a movie called The Happening that was somewhat interesting. I have not seen that film. Actually, well, I won't spoil it for anyone, but there's a certain kingdom of life. Not going to say which one, but it's not animals that try to kill everybody. But there's a quote at

the beginning of the movie. We're saying something like that if the if the bee were to disappear, humanity would be extinct within some short period of time, like a couple of years. Uh. That's perhaps overstated, but not entirely completely off base, all right, because about a third of the world's food supply is created when honey bees pollinate those crops. Um. Some crops in fact, depend entirely on bees for pollination. Almonds are the prime example here in

the United States. Without bees, we wouldn't have California almonds, No, I know, right, Almonds are a huge part of my personal well being, so they're they're very important. They are very important. But if you want to know a lot about bees, I recommend the article how Bees Work on How Stuff Works dot Com um a k A. Our parent company UM, which was written by the esteemed Tracy V. Wilson. Who currently podcasts on stuff emised in history class, and

who says, and I quote, bees are the greatest. Well, she's right, she is, She's always right. Um, So cool things about bees cool be effects. They can remember patterns like colors that that signal food sources, and recognize symmetry, a thing that is normally reserved for higher life forms than insects, those little insect brains. Right. Um. They can navigate by the sun, whether it's cloudy or not, because they can detect polarized light, so even when the sun's

not out, they know where it is. Um. They have an internal clock, and they communicate via dancing. Um. They've got yeah, yeah, they they've got they've got the round dance, which is for nearby food and basically just says like food, y'all go out and smell for it. Um. And then they've got the waggle dance for far away food, in which they indicate the direction of the food that they have found in relation to the current and changing position of the sun. That's pretty cool. I can't do that.

That's cool for many reasons. Number one, that that's pretty advanced in terms of sensing where things are and being able to communicate that. Number two, that's very social, right, right, being being able to remember that and wanting to go back to to your hive and tell a whole bunch of other things about it so that they can go out and do that thing. That's really good for everybody. Yeah.

I think it's just amazing that we have like communities of bees that communicate with each other that well, when when a bee is such a you know, it was an insect right there, there are I found out during this research some I mean actually a lot of bees. I think only fifteen of the world's population of bees live in hives like this. The rest of them are rogue bees that might that might hang out around a couple other bees for kind of like protection services and

stuff like that. But they yellow sharks. Yeah. Yeah. Furthermore, bees have, as Taylor said, an incredibly good sense of smell. Um. They can positively identify substances in the air at a few parts per trillion. I don't think I can do that. We know humans cannot. You cannot do that, Joe, neither can I. Um. And and bees and another thing that

probably you don't do. Bees make honey from flower nectar by swallowing and regurgitating it a whole bunch um, thus sapping the water content from about in the nectar two about which winds up in honey um, and also adding enzymes from their mouths that help kill germs, which helps give honey that terrific antibacterial property. So it is true that honey is be vomit. That's delicious. It's the tastiest be vomit. So so so these these are reasons why

I'm completely obsessed with bees. Well, I really like bees too, But Lauren, what is the outlook for bees? Are they going to remain happy and healthy and buzzing about on our planet as they do? Now there's some concern about that. Um, there's this you guys might have heard in the news, something called colony collapse disorder. Um, and worry about what this thing could mean for for agriculture and for even the environment of the entire planet at large. Um And Okay, So,

so here's the deal with colony collapse disorders. Since two thousand six, honey bee keepers have been reporting record numbers of be losses every year, like thirty of their hives. Though the average is on the lower end of that, still, it's really significant. UM. According to the U s d a B. Populations in the US have declined from some five million hives in the nineties to only about half

of that today. And this isn't from poisoning from insecticides, for example, which produces really telltale signs a k. A. Giant piles of dead bees right around the hives, but but from this thing that we're calling colony collapse disorder

or sometimes disappearing disease. And that's because the signs of this aren't dead bees but rather missing bees UM and worker bees specifically, the queen and her male drones will still be occupying their hives, and the honey will still be plentiful in those hives, but the workers just sort of leave or or get lost during the winter season. Come spring, the colony dies. Okay, so this is sort of like if you're out on the ocean and you

find a cruise ship floating there. It's not like you find it full of dead bodies and all their money missing. It's like the ship's just empty. It's like Roanoke. Yeah, yeah, it's just everything's gone and no one knows why. So spooky UM. And there are records of this going back through time, with specific episodes having been recorded in uh the eighteen eighties, in nineteen o three, in the nineteen twenties,

and in the nineteen sixties. But it started becoming more widespread in the nineteen eighties, which happens to be round about when a bunch of new pathogens and pests entered the United States. So do we have any idea what's

causing it? Potential causes that have been looked at have included, um, a whole bunch of different stuff, okay, pesticides, parasitic intestinal mites, UM, particularly cold winters, viruses, UM, contaminated or or scarce water supplies, pollen or nectar scarcity, UM or kind of bad pollen like sort of nutritionally cheap pollen, the twinkies of pollen, um, and and various stressors to to the hive, like like overcrowding or being moved around too much. So the message

I'm getting is that we really have no idea. Yeah no, no one's been sure which of these are which combination is causing this particular phenomenon. Okay, well, oh yeah, So I'd imagine that all of these things might be partially true, but we don't know the main cause. Oh sure, and you know, any one of these will certainly cause damage to a hive. But but why bees are just disappearing like this has generally been a mystery, so we still

have no idea. Well, as as of May nine, a report was published in the Bulletin of Insectology, which is a thing that exists, which is very exciting to me. I mean, it was published by a team of researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, and they were talking about this research that they did in which they introduced non legal levels of particul pularly suspected insecticides to a few b colonies and also studied some some control colonies. Okay,

so so good research practices. Yeah. And in one group of the insecticide exposed colonies were lost due to this colony collapse disorder. And in another study of the insecticide exposed colonies were lost. So I imagine that was a lot more than the control groups. Yeah, the control groups were not lost at all. Zero of them experienced colony collapse disorder. Um. One of the control groups in that

study died due to a mite infestation. UM. But overall, other than that, the pathogen and parasite levels across the studying control groups, which contradicts previous ideas that insecticides are responsible for UM for making bees more susceptible to to disease or to these stomach mites. So what on earth are these insecticides? They're from this one group of insecticides called neo nicotinoids, which yes, are related to nicotine and UM and include a few very commonly used pesticides here

in the US. At any rate, because they've been banned starting as of December for a two year research period in the European Union due to this suspicion that they're harming honey bees, which are important UM. Also that this research that the kids at Harvard were doing indicates that colder winters might be part of it UM as keeping bees warm and neutralized, full of full of good, happy, healthy food fed yes well not just fed, but fed with the right kinds of nutrients has had good anecdotal

results among beekeepers there. There's apparently like a b protein shake sort of thing. It's called it's called Mega bee. It was it was developed. It was developed by the U. S d A's Agricultural Research Service. I know, right, beef up your buzz. You need to be on the marketing team for this chick. Um. So we're laughing a lot because bees are a little bit hilarious. Um. Also, the word be is really hilarious. You just append the word be too, basically anything like mega, and it suddenly becomes

really terrific. But this entire thing is very, very sad and very scary. And I mean because I certainly don't want almonds to go away or any of the other important crops. I don't want bees to go anywhere. But if they do, do we have any kind of backup plan? That's what I wondered when Lauren said we were going to do this episode. So I actually looked up artificial bees, and what do you know, Bull's eye artificial bees. Yeah.

So the March issue of Scientific American had an article by Robert Wood, Radika nag Pool, and guyon Way where these three scientists discuss their work in creating artificial bees. The goal is to create a b sized flying robot that can be programmed to work together with thousands of others to form an artificial hive and autonomously pollinate crops.

Their project is called Robobes, which I don't know if they have to feed the robo bees megabe, but hopefully they just have to feed it oil can huh Yeah, I mean I don't imagine that these robobes also create honey. It's probably just the pollination service, right, I don't know. I mean the crazy things we're doing with robotics these days.

I didn't see any mentions of honey. But so instead of building thousands of a little like quad rotor drones, they're actually trying to mimic the muscle movements of real insects. So these artificial bees will have airfoil wings that flat based on actuators designed to work like muscles. And if you didn't see, because you don't have video of this,

I was just flapping my arms. Obviously, the bees need some kind of guidance system and behavior control, so we're talking about environmental sensors and a navigation computer, and of course every robot needs a power source. All of this on a flying robot it's like the size of a coin. Yeah, that's a pretty ambitious project. I'll be very interested to

see where they go with it. So this is actually really cool for the fields of robotics and miniaturization and it's even gonna be really interesting for the things we learned from trying to perfect algorithms to mimic like the emergent behavior of a bee colony, right, because I think we're saying earlier it's a it's a very social insect, right, So I'm thinking we're probably gonna learn a lot about

bees just by trying to mimic bees. But also the the project's Harvard website mentions that these could be used for search and rescue, hazardous environment exploration, military surveillance, high resolution weather and climate mapping, and traffic monitoring. So I don't know, maybe there's just overshooting, but that's what they claim. But no, Hey, you know, i'd say that's really cool.

But what we hope is that we don't have to use something like that for pollination, right, because hopefully these new findings out of the Harvard School of Public Health well will lead to the discovery of the particular mechanism responsible for colony collapse. You're talking about the study from this year you mentioned earlier, correct, right, not the Robob's research. Well, I mean either either way, but at any rate, a lot more research is certainly going on. Um, there's there's

a project for smart hives. Okay, it's this open source bee hive project. It was funded just the spring through indie go go, and it offered a few things to help small time beekeepers both succeed and connect with each other for larger research purposes. So first, it offered hives um either either pre fabricated flat pack hives on delivery or blueprints for hives that can be plugged into computer numerical control systems, which are automated machining tools that will

create the pieces for you. So it's basically like ikea bee hive, right um. And then also in addition to that some some open source sensor kits to assess hive health and activity and also to connect up to database to track larger trends throughout a population. That's really cool. Yeah. There's also a group of researchers from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and they've been taking this a step further. They've they've been gluing these tiny r f

I D sensors two bees. No, I assume you don't actually mean gluing. Oh no, I totally mean gluing, like like with glue. Oh yeah, they're really small sensors. They're like two point five millimeters square, which is about one tenth of an inch, and they weigh only five milligrams, which is about of a bees total carrying capacity, So there's still plenty of room in there for pollen and whatever.

It's like having a tiny backpack. Okay. And and the the idea here is that they'll be able to monitor and model be behavior and then watch for abnormalities and identify causes and maybe even stop problems with a hive before they get so serious and cause a collapse. So how they do this? All right? The r f I D chips will transmit data to to a logger when they come in close to one, and not like a guy who's cutting down trees, but but you know a data logger okay? Um? And how how how you glue

a sensor to a bee? I'd imagine first you stop feeding the megabee because let's face it, somebody on megabee. Nobody's gluing nothing to me. Brother. Oh yeah, no, you don't want to hulked out be when you're trying to glue something to it. Absolutely not. Um. Well, okay, so

so first you're gonna put them to sleep temporarily. By refrigerating them, you drop their their internal temperature down to like like five degrees celsius or forty one degrees fair in hight for about five minutes, and it just kind of takes a nap. And then and then you shave the bees. You have to shave them to save them. Well, I apparently, especially young bees are really quite hairy, which can cause a problem with the glue. So if somebody was going to put duct tape on my face, I

wanted to shave my beard first. Absolutely, That's exactly it. Okay, So so you you shave the bees and then you use tweezers to glue this tiny little sensor to its back. It's it's serious, wonderful research. And they're and they're looking

to improve upon the process that they already have. Okay, they're they're looking to miniature as the sensors um and also increase their their capacity so they can track stuff like temperature and atmospheric compounds and even generate the energy that they need to operate and transmit this data long distances rather than just off a you know a little kind of fist bump r f I D thing um from the energy of the beating wings of the insect. That's pretty cool. I gotta say, gluing things two bees

to save the bees lives by learning about bees. It's a good project. Now I want to know something else, Lauren. Yes. Taylor mentioned in his message to us the inspiration for this show that bees could actually be used for a

lot more than just making honey. So so, bees have this really strong sense of smell, right, and they can be trained to stick out their tongue or Okay, it's it's technically their their nectar collecting tube a k a. Their proboscis um when they detect an odor that they've been trained to associate with a food reward, and that odor can be any number of things, like like drugs like methampthetamines, are cocaine, or chemical residue left by or used in bombs. This is exactly, well, it's not exactly.

This is similar to the way that you would train dogs to sniff out these these common things, except their bees. Except their bees. Is it harder to train bees than it is to train dogs. It's actually really easy to train bees. They are so excited about food that it's really quite easy to get them and they and they have such a good sense of smell that it's quite easy the two. I mean, once you train them for one thing, I think I think it's hard to train

them for something else. Yeah, so Taylor actually sent us a video. We mentioned it earlier in the episode. I think of this one. Particular companies UH promotional video on YouTube for how to use bees to sniff things. And they load bees into these cartridges like Ammo cartridges, little cassette tape boxes sort of, and they stuff them in a thing that looks like a dust buster. Gently, they gently stuff, they don't stuff, they place them in the thing.

These are trained bees that have been trained like the Pavlovian reaction, like smelling cocaine means that I'm about to get food, So they stick their tongues out hungrily when they smell cocaine. And then you can stick this dust buster full of trained bees into a bag and say like does this have drugs, bombs, or aliens in it? Whatever it is you've trained them to sniff that. That's what this video proposed. I thought it was really cool. It almost seems like a hoax. It's so weird. Yeah, well,

I think it's real. Now, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure it's real. Um. And the and the way that this kind of be dustbuster works is that you use digital imaging on the inside, you know, you know, you get like a little digital camera right up in all the bees faces, um and and then use pattern pattern recognition software to tell when they're sticking their proboscus is out. Okay,

becam be cam probos cam. But and they're not the only people who have been working on this, Okay, So even if that video is just too good to be true, there are other companies that are actually definitely doing this. Yeah, Like DARPA has funded projects into this kind of thing. They they funded a project that trained bees to swarm around bomb chemicals instead of flowers. Um. In small areas, you can just watch them and see where they go.

But in large areas, they fitted the bees with we little radio transmitters so that they could try get from a distance. That's that's some metal gear, solid stuff. And and right, I mean, you know, you know, bees have an equal sense of smell to dogs. Some some people claim that they're a little bit better. I have not read research confirming that specifically, so I'm not going to say one way or another. But you know these are

maybe less good save for airports. Um, I wouldn't want to swarm of bees in an airport personally, why not? I just think dogs are a little bit more friendly in that kind of case. Actually, I do want a swarm of bees in an airport, but I don't think that everyone would. I don't think that everyone shares my deep love of bees. But bees would definitely, for example, be better at finding land mines than dogs, because it is very sad when a dog steps on a landline.

Nobody wants any of that, right. Um, And there's there's other research still being done. Um, okay, So so a couple of years ago, we found out that there's a compound in the breath of lung cancer patients that dogs can identify. We don't know what that compound is. Science has not figured out that thing. But but but dogs can positively identify lung cancer patients once they have been trained on what that breath thing smells like. Bees can

do the same thing. And a Portuguese designer by the name of Susannah Sarees during Dutch Design Week introduced this this glass cancer breathalyzer. Um, it's got this breath tube that that connects to a small inner chamber which then opens out into a larger outer chamber filled with bees. So so you you put these bees in the outer chamber and they they have been trained to detect whatever this chemical bio marker is, and so when they smell it,

they swarm into that smaller chamber. So you can just watch them, and when they swarm, you're like, oh, I'm really sorry, I have a diagnosis for you. Um, which is bizarre and okay, not on the market because it was a design concept rather than actual medical device being aated. But how cool is that? Well? I like the idea of biosensors in general, and it's cool that we can use bees in in just this way. I've never even thought about bees as biosensors before this. We did a

podcast one time. I think about microbial bio sensors, but bees, I mean bees? Um. I think that shockingly enough. That is all we have to say though about bees on this particular date. But we really want to give a shout out to our listener Taylor for inspiring this episode and for sending us a really interesting note. Yeah, thank you so much. Oh, and we do we do have one more thing. Actually, this is really important to to

our producer, editor Noel Um. Rather than doing a lyric at the top of the podcast, Noel really wanted us to say that Forward Thinking is the podcast that looks at the future and says So that would have happened, but we didn't want to scare you first thing at the top there, so we decided to put it back here. I hope that we have not scared you too terribly now. That was Noel's lovely tribute to everybody's favorite be torture scene from the two thousand six remake of the film

The Wickerman starring Nicolas Cage. What a what a wonderful thing. Well, if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email us at f W Thinking at Discovery dot com, or you can visit our website f W Thinking dot com, where we have links to. Our social media accounts are Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus. Our handle is f W Thinking or some variation thereof that. That is what it is, precisely, no

variations involved. And you can also on that website check out our podcasts and videos and blog posts and all that good stuff. Probably less about bees than we have talked about right now, but many other interesting topics, So thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,