Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb. And this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in no mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time. I'd like to briefly return to the world of Marvel Comics to discuss a rather unique supervillain, Swarm, as described in the book Monsters Creatures of the Marvel Universe,
explored by Kelly Knox. Swarm is just your average former Nazi scientist and acupuncturist consumed by a swarm of radioactive bees at a meteorite crash, transforming him into a sentient swarm of bees. He manifests as a man shaped swarm
with stylish purple gloves and a ragged purple cape. The character dates back to nineteen seventy seven, created by Bill Mantillo and John Byrne in the Pages of the Champions, and I think it's safe to assume that this one was inspired by the old Suit of Bees stunt, as well as the curious properties of you social bees, because that's the really interesting thing about the whole proposition here.
The former Fritz von Meyer again, now known as swarm, is said to exert control over the bees, and his consciousness is shared among the thousands of bees that make up his bee bod. It's a fantastic concept, but it also touches on the fact that bees do exert a form of emergant intelligence and are often discussed as a super organism and as a cognitive entity. Swarms exhibit properties that are not shared by the individual organism, but are rather exhibited by the larger group, such as the ability
of a beehive to thermoregulate. Is pointed out by a Kadam at All in of Biofilms and Beehives published in the journal Biofilm in twenty twenty two two. When temperatures drop, bees move in closer to better share their heat with adult bees on the outside, shivering to reduce additional heat, and then moving into the interior of the mass to warm younger bees that lack the ability. As the title of the paper implies, the authors compare bee swarms to biofilms,
multicellular communities of bacteria or fungi. Marvel swarm kind of stands as an attempt to take the inhuman intelligence of bees and put it in a human wrapping, something that is fantastic and certainly fun, but in a strange way a little easier to fathom. While it's impossible to truly know what it is to be another organism, much less a honey bee or a swarm of honeybees, fantastic treatments such as Swarm allow us to imagine our way a little bit closer to the reality. Tune in for additional
episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact as Stuff to bliw your Mind dot com.
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