How Bees Work

honeymaking fool. How you doing well, sir? How are you? I'm pretty good. It's a little early, uh it is, it is, but you're feeling good. Yeah, man, I love recording in the mornings. Yeah, been up since six am reading about bees. Yeah. Well this is ah I can amazine. You could. You could have gotten up at four or five because it's like the most extensive article in the universe is how bees work. It's Tracy Wilson joint and so it's thorough and exhaustive and exhausting. But it's a

good one. Dude. I love bees. Yeah, I hate bees. Do you really why? Because they sting, they hurt, they make me get up at six am. You only they're fascinating creatures. Uh yeah, de Meal like them. Okay, well you got to talk about him anyway. How about Um. I don't really have much of a an intro, which is probably for the best because this is a really long episode. There's a lot of facts, Yeah, there are in parts and things. Let's talk bees, man, how long

have they been around? Bees have been around for a gazillion years. Uh, they've been around for a long time. Ancient Egyptians um in fact, that there were sort of magical creatures that the sun got rock cried down upon the earth. Yeah, which is fanciful, and that's where bees came from. But that's not where they came from. Uh. The San people think that we came from bees of the Kalahari. The San people. Yeah, yeah, they have this creation myth that a bee was carrying a mannis across

the desert, got tired, died. Before it died, it laid some eggs in the mantis, and then that became the first human and that's where we came from. Not buy that really? Sure? Why not? Uh? A lot of people used to think that um, including beekeepers that they reproduced spontaneously they didn't like have intercourse to do so. And this was true until the mid six hundreds when a very cool dude named jam swimmer Dam examined bees under

a microscope and saw a little reproductive parts. Yeah, we got all wrong, he went, and I'm Jams swimmer Dam. That's a pretty great name. It's a great name. That's a good at that. Uh. Is that what he was? It's gotta be, you think swimmer Dam Jam swimmers am probably so. Uh. And there are like twenty species of bees, but we're going to concentrate mainly on honey bees mostly a little bit of what are the other ones? Not the bumble bees, but well we'll talk a little bit

about bumble bees too. Yeah, pretty much those two. Yeah, but mostly honey bees. They're the most studied. I think they're the most fascinating. But social and nons and I don't want to say anti social solitary solitary bees and anti socials may be a way to describe it. But

those are two two categories that we're going to dive into. YEA, So, surprisingly bees go back even further than the ancient Egyptians, The oldest bee fossil that they found is about a hundred million years old, and they think that at some point around then during the Cretaceous period, bees diverged from wasps, not necessarily from washp. It doesn't mean that um bees evolved from wasp but then possibly they shared it a common wasp like ancestor I but that was creepy man,

And I'll bet it was like eight ft long too. Yeah. And this is about the same time too, not coincidentally, when flowering plants started doing their thing. Before this, if you wanted to, you know, do the the tree thing, you had to plant thing, you had to do like what conifers do, dropping your cones and counting on the wind and nature to do your work, which may or may not work. But thankfully bees came along and they said, hey, you know what, we can help take your pollen, Mr flower. Yeah.

So so bees and flowering plants angiosperms coevals, and that was a big step for bees. They're kind of like the uh sweet philosophy majors of the wasp family. Uh. They just went off and became herbivores, whereas their wasps, their wasp relatives are wasp cousins were carnivores, and not only carnivores, carnivores that used ovipositors to you lay their eggs in other animals. Yeah, that's gross, it is and it's very aggressive. Um. But as we said, bees became herbivores.

They just go around to flowers. All they want is to be left alone, collect pollen and nectar and then uh, you know, pollinate flowers along the way. And they're very happy with their lives like that. They they're into the pan flute and birkin stocks. Do you think these are like hippies a little bit? Yeah, you've never been attacked by a dozen hippies, actually more than a dozen. I was stung a dozen times. Is that what I told that story before in the Colony Collapse podcast when I

was tagged in the head and face twelve times. Oh yeah, that brings about one of my worst days, very painful. Um. So let's talk about parts. The bees body is pretty remarkable. Um. It's kind of exoskeleton made of chiten kitan, movable plates of this kitan. Yeah, it's almost like a suit of armor. It sounds like, Yeah, that's pretty neat. Uh, they've got, like we said, a lot of hairs all over their body,

a little fuzzies that they collect. The pollen help regulate body tempt keep it cool or warm, depending on what's going on. And uh, like a lot of insects, they have, they're divided into little sections the head, the thorax, and the abdomen in this case, and the brain is in the head. And it's not a big brain, no, but it's pretty awesome. Well yeah, because it's specialized. So bee brain has about nine and fifty thousand neurons. It seems like a lot for a small insect. It does a

small brain, right, Um, but apparently it's not. And uh, the reason why we know it's not because just based on the number of neurons, bees should be incredibly stupid and very simple animals, and they're not. The reason why is because the neurons in a bee's head are extremely specialized, and rather than being recruited by some like executive function like we have in our frontal lobes, their neurons kind of act on their own and communicate with other neurons

to carry out a very specific activity. Right. So this division of labor in the brain allows these to do a lot of stuff that it would require a bigger brain to to do normally. It's pretty ingenious. Yes, that's right. These are pretty smart when they figured out how to do this to themselves. Uh. They have a couple of a century into the uh five eyes. Three of them are simple, a silly, and then two compound eyes and they have lots of repeating parts called omata I think,

And they can actually see polarized light. They specialize in patterns and humans can't do that obviously because we would be like, just try the predator. Maybe that what that looks like? That's thermal imaging. Oh yeah, that's right, it's normal polarized to be. Um, you more polarized glasses, like your your polarized sunglasses. Remember this for I got the ravans. Yeah, instead of ravan, it said polar that's what you get for eight bucks. It's cvs. Is they worked? Do you

have them forever? Yeah? Until they broke. So that's how you saw polarized light. Bees don't even need sunglasses from cvs. They just see it naturally. And the reason this is important is because um, as we'll see later on, they used the sun to navigate and being able to see polarized light. That means they can see clear through crop clouds when it's overcast and know where the sun is. That's right, very important. Uh, Like a lot of insects, I've got the little mouth parts. You know, we've talked

about mouth parts. I think in uh please maybe flies, flies, flies and fleas. Uh. They have the jaws or the paired mandibles, the tongue with the colossa, and then the lips which are the labor room and the maxilla, and they support the probiscus, which I think most people know is the the pollen sniffing device and collecting. Yeah, well what I mean sniff, I mean sniff it up in there. Yeah, it's like an r varts trunk pretty much, but in

instead of huffing ants, that huffs nectar. That's right. You've got two pair of wings, you got three pair of legs. The wings are actually part of the skeleton, which is kind of cool. And and so if you're a little boy that's tearing wings off of a bee, you're actually breaking its skeleton. You need to spanking, You needed to get stung. Oh yeah, that's how you learned that lesson

poetic justice exactly. And Uh. They the row of books called the hamuli connect the wings, so they are just beating together in synchronicity, but they don't connect all the time. They're not fused together. The wings are separate front four wings and rear wings are separate. And then when they really want to get going and flying, they hooked together using the hamuli. And that's to fly though, right, to really take off. Oh Like, they have different speeds of

flying and they connect or disconnect depending on that. Tracy skipped that part so much for thora. Uh. And then you got the legs, which um, starting from the body working out, you have the coxa, the tric canter, the femur, the tibia, and the tarxas a k a hip, thiah and put and that's the body for the most part. Yeah, but the legs are also kind of specialized. They're almost like a Swiss army legs. It's pretty cool. They've got

different kinds of hair. You've got brush hair, comb hair, depending on the kind of pollen you're collecting, and then basket like hairs that hold pollen. You've got a pad and a claw so you can like grab things. You can strangle other bees if you want. Um, and this is kind of cool. There's a small groove in the arm, in the leg for scraping pollen from the antenna. And then lastly there's a press on the bottom for packing pollen into things. That's pretty neat if you ask me,

that is pretty neat. Swiss army leg. Don't you call the what I call it very nice? Should put a pattern on that. So yeah, so chuck. When you you know, when you accidentally squish a bee and you look down at it and it's guts are everywhere, it's not red. The blood isn't red. And actually it doesn't necessarily have what we would call blood. It's called hemo lymph and it it has oxygen just suspended in it. It doesn't have red blood cells, which is why be blood hemolymph

is clear. Yeah, you don't see a lot of insects with red blood, do you? Only only Americans red blooded insects. Of course, we can't overlook the stinger um that is, uh where the bees abdomen is, and it's an appendage and like we said before, it's a egg depositor, an ovipositor, and then the lancets will sting you and deliver venom.

From the poison sac in a venom gland. And once again, these wasp like ancestors, they think that's where the bees got the venom, and it's just a leftover trait from that, even though they didn't go on to lay their eggs in meat. Right, That's which is why the wasps evolved venom to subdue their prey while they were laying eggs and eating them and all that stuff. And bees, like you said, had it left over, but they just have it for defense. Yeah, and I guess it was obviously

a trait worthy of keeping. And uh like, if I had a stinger and could inject people venom, I'd keep it around, use it on occasion. You'd be like, come on, evolution, just let me have it. There are stingless bees though, um, quite a few species, and they don't have stingers at all. No, and they were very handy among the Maya until very recently for beekeeping because you just stick your hand in there and be like, I'm taking your honey, and what

are you gonna do? Nothing, that's great because you're a stingless bee. They couldn't even bite or anything. No, they just stand idly by. That's their thing. Um, so check. There's a lot of there's a lot of stuff that a bee produces there, like pubescent children. They just produce all these different things with all these different glands all the time. They're secreting stuff all the time. But it's

very useful stuff, that's right. Uh, and then chuck. You know how when you get stung sometimes you hear or you've heard a bee will die after it stings you. Yeah, I think most people think that all bees die when they sting you. True. No, it depends on the type of stinger they have. Honey Bees, for the most part, except for the queen honey bee have barbed stingers, and if a bee has a barbed stinger, it is gonna

stick in you. If you're a mammal, a bee can sting other insects with a barbed stinger and live after singing repeatedly. If it stings in the mammal, we have this um fat, meaty flesh that the barbed stinger hooks into, and when the bee flies away, it leaves its stinger and it's abdomen and guts stuck in you and so it dies, which is why if you have a barbed stinger, you can only sting once, but some bees do have smooth stingers and and sting mammals as often as they like.

I wonder how often that how long that takes for the be to die, because you know they're stinging and they fly away. I wonder if it's like a few minutes or a couple of hours, or if they just like I would think, pretty quick quietly and bleed out or but I mean, how long does it take a bee to bleed out? I don't know, probably not hemolymph out. But I know when I've been stung, I see him fly away, and they look like they're doing all right to me, And right when you turn around, they just go.

I guess I'm gonna trail the next bee that stings, follow it. You're gonna check it. You gonna check it, all right. So you want to talk about some juices and stuff, some venom, Yeah, we should talk about venom. Remember the difference between venomous organism and a poisonous organism is venom is produced in the body poisons outside, right, that's right, uh, And a be's venom uh basically destroyed cells.

Like it's pretty hardcore stuff. It's a good thing. It's in small quantities probably, I can imagine if it was larger quantities could be pretty destructive. But they have peptids and enzymes break through the fat linings of the cell, destroy the mass cells. Uh, and that releases histamine. This is where we get into like whether or not you're allergic. You could be in big trouble. Yeah, because histamine that's part of your immune response, which is a good thing.

You know, you want that, right, And histamines open the blood vessels so that you can get your antibodies, your immunes, your immune cells to this site much more quickly. But if you have a b allergy, your immune system is too large, it's too big a response. Your blood vessels dilate so much that you lose blood pressure and fall over um, which is called anaphylactic shock. That's right, and

that can kill people dead. And if you are allergic to bees, you uh almost in the likelihood have an epinephrine shot with you because it's dangerous stuff and that will constrict the blood vessels and save your life hopefully, right, if you get it in time. I imagine it depends on the person. Fingers crossed fingers crossed um. So, like we said, there's twenty thousand, approximately twenty species under the super family Appodia or a Podia. How do you say that.

Let's go with a Podia. And depending on the bee, you're gonna have a different kind of nest. But they are similar, you know, in a lot of cases. So we'll break it down into honey bees and bumble bees for the nesting purposes and for social those are they're both social. That's right kind of bees they are. So, uh, you've got um among honey bees. You have a perennial nest. She is always around. It's kind of cool. They build the same nest and for life. Yeah, I love that, uh,

and for generations um. And they build it by secreting um stuff out of their glands because bees are like the pubescent children human children of the of the insect world. They're always secreting stuff out of their glands. But they make good use of it and one of the things that they use it for is wax to build nests. Yeah. And these are all ladies, by the way, It's a very important point. Yeah, these are all little women workers.

And the reason why is because male bees for the most part, are around to fornicate and that's about it. In fact, they don't even have a lot of the parts that you need to be a real bee, but to collect pollen or anything like that. They're there to reproduce and that's it. Yeah. In fact, they will even get kicked out of the hive if things get a little too crowded and food is scarce or winners coming. The women will say, all right, it's time for you

guys to leave. You know, you can't stay here, that's right. I wonder what they do. They probably say, I'm in this thing you if you don't get out of here, no owner. What the males do, though, they go off and die. They die, They form their own little like boys club. I have the impression that male bees are kind of too oh fish to think of that kind of thing dummies. Yeah. But so if you see a bee collecting pollen, yeah, in almost every species, that's a

female bee. If you see a bee stinging you or feel a beasting in you, that's a female because the stingers an ovipositor, which makes it a female parts right. Um. But as we were saying, the nests that are built and maintained and uh stocked um are all done by females with the honeybee. That's right, and it's perennial. Yes, and uh, in that little nest, if the queen bee is, the queen bee will be delivering a queen substance. It's a pheromone. And if it did, another secretion, another secretion.

If and if the little lady be start getting less and less of this, they'll say, you know what, we need to split up and make a new queen and a new hive. And let's just go ahead and start this process now. And let's pick a new queen and start feeding her royal jelly. Another secretion and um, raise her right right on this royal jelly. So with the about half of the workers and the old queen take off and found a new um hive. I guess there's

too much pressure on the new queens. So yeah, like we got this place built for you, you just grow up and take care of it. And that's what happens. The new queen grows up and and the hive basically divides like a cell into pretty pretty cool yeah um solitary or not solidier bumblebees found they found annual um nests and basically that idea too though diggs every year it's not getting attached to something. Yeah. Um, so they in the In the fall, the queen mates, spends the

winter underground. In the spring, she lays some eggs that turn out to surprisingly mostly be females, if not all females, and they help her build a nest. In the summer, she lays some more eggs. Those hatch into males. Those males fly off, and all of the male bumblebees. Somehow scientists haven't figured out how they do it. They figure they get a uh, they say, hey, we're all gonna be over here to mate this Friday. We'll see you

guys there. Then all the queens from all the individual nests for miles around come over and everybody copulates, and then they leave the scrunchy on the door. Yeah. And then that's that ye, And that's the cycle starts a new the female lays eggs or goes back underground for the winter. That's right. And these are the social bees, Like we said, um, However, less than fift of bees are social, even though they're the ones we usually think of. More as far as like hives and nests and things.

My favorite are the solitary bees. Why because they're doing their own thing. My my really favorite reason why. It's because the different ways they make their home. Yeah. I just think it's really cool. Yeah. So, like social bees are are known from the type of hives they have, that's kind of how they divided. But yeah, the way that they make their homes. For solitary bees, that's yeah,

that's a good definition. And solitary bees they'll get together on occasion if they need to, like band together for defense or something, but they generally do their own thing. Um. So some of the different ways that these guys can make homes, like carpenter bees, which are my favorites. Um they bore holes in wood and unpainted like raw wood, and they usually are like the spitting image of a bumblebee. But if you see a bumble bee going into a hole in like your door jam, that's a carpenter bee.

I like carpenter bees. I think it's cool. And they get the little tool belt. Yeah, they always have a pencil behind their ear. Yeah, And they're always late and the job is never done on time, and they'll tell you straight this is gonna cost two or three times when I originally estimated exactly. I just think it's cool that they can actually bore into the wood like that. It's amazing. And they're always like perfectly little round holes too, I know. Like what's surprising is they use their eyes

to bore a little laser shoot out of them. Wow. I don't think I knew that. Tracy skipped that too. There are the plaster or bees. Um, they dig little holes and tunnels and line them with another secretion. That's sort of like blaster makes sense. The leaf cutters, what do they do? They use those uh those um grasping claws, remember, and then they bite leaves apart with their their mouths and line their nests with them because they like to

be nice and comfy. Mason bees. Used to be a mason bee yeah yeah, um, and I would secrete something from my jaws that basically was like mortar and put sand and pebbles together and make a nest. It's a strong nest. This is like basically the three pigs of the bee. We're going from, like we're going from leaves to wood yeah, wooden sand yeah. Nice. The carter b that's they like furry wooly parts of plants. And that's basically they're like the Bob Guccioni bees. Yeah, they wear

silk robes and stuff like that. Uh. And then my favorite thing is when uh Tracy points out a few species actually will like check out an empty snail shell and say, that looks like a very nice little apartment. I'm just gonna move in there. And you want to move in, Let's just divide it up with more secretions and you take that half will make it a duplex. Yeah,

that is really cool. Or others will go into an old ant hill or termite hill or wasp nest and be like hello, and if they hear back hello, Hello, Hello, they'll they'll say, well, this is where I'm gonna lay my eggs. It's already built. Yeah. And the cuckoo bee, these guys are dumb. They go they're parasitic bee, not in that they eat other bees, but that they um, they lay their eggs in other bees nests and just say cyanara and they rely on their pollen. It just

it's like, I feel like they're dumb. They're like they can't figure it out on their own, so they just kind of sneak in there in the dead of night even do their thing. Sweat bees, remember those little guys very aptly named. They are after you're that. I thought that was sort of a wive style. It's not. No, they're sweat bees, that's right. The orculd be is another good example of coevolution. Um. They think that the or

could be with its extremely long probe. Probiscus um basically evolved to get the nectar out of orchids, which keeps its nectar very deep in the flower blossom. Evolution scaring in the face. Uh the scariest bee? Josh? Is there such thing as a killer bee? Uh? No, that's kind of a media hype. I mean, any bee, especially if you had a bee allergy, could kill you. Um. But

what are killer bees? So back in the fifties seven in Brazil, some apiarists, some beekeepers, imported some African honey bees and they got loose, and they went and made it with the European honey bees that were already in the area. And what you had was Africanized honey bees, which are virtually identical to European honey bees, but they are far more aggressive, especially if they think you're messing with their hive. And you know, like Africans and Europeans

mating that makes them aggressive. That's just interesting how you combine those two and all of a sudden they're just piste off. But then at some point the media got ahold of it as they started to approach from Brazil upward toward America. Yeah, we have some here right in the States. Yeah, they made it to Texas, Florida, I believe, maybe in Georgia, California, Arizona. I bet there's some in South Georgia, and um they the media went crazy over

killer bees. That seems like a seventies thing. I sort of remember that. I thought it was eighties. Was there was there a movie or something? Oh, I'm sure, swarmy movie. I think there had to be, or there should be, um so reproduction, the fun sexy stuff. This is actually really fun, I think because bees can live up to five years some of them. Honey bee. Just I think that's the queen. Just the queen. Okay, that makes sense because I didn't get because it's Tracy also said that

some of them don't even lift through the winter. I guess it just depends, right, That's why I think it was the queen that she was referring to. Up to five years. Yeah, for an insect. I mean she's well taken care of. She doesn't have to do a lot, that's right. The males, like we said, are the there there too to deposit their male parts in, and unfortunately they don't leave with their male parts. Yeah. Depending on the species of bee, they may much like a stinging

a mammal, once they copulate. Does that work for bees? Copulation? Yeah? Um, they leave there, like you said, their man parts in the female and die as a result. They feeling takes it more than he leaves it was there, right, I don't know, I just have a feeling. The female bees just seemed like they they're the smart one. Yeah, exactly, like I have your you know what's it called? Your um not a penis? No, it's not a penis. Their endo fallus. I've got your ends and I'm not giving

it back exactly, and now you're dead. That's right. Um. So with funny beest specifically, I think the queen bee is the only one that lays eggs. Is that correct? Um? No, the queen uh honey bees. Females will lay like a few eggs during their lifetime, but the queen bee lays thousands. Okay, all right, so it is possible for a honey beat okay, but for the most part carrying on the hive that's up to the queen, right, um. The and then once an egg is laid, it goes through the same stages

that like a caterpillar. Well yeah, I never knew that either. So, like you lay an egg and it hatches into a larva, which looks like a little worm, a little sick, gross white worm. Um. And it's fed by workers for a couple of days, fed royal jelly, which you said they secrete from their heads, right, yeah. Did I don't think the regular bees get the royal jelly? Do they for the first two days, for just two days? That if you want to make a queen, you feed that be.

You feed any female larva um royal jelly the whole time until you're raising her, Yeah, until she spins a cocoon, so they get royal jelly. A couple of days they they molt um. There, the workers seal off the honeycomb, which is an egg chamber in this case. Yeah, each little one. Yeah, those like build a little door basically, yeah, and it's one per no more, that's right, no less, uh, And then the larva spins a cocoon and eventually emerges

as an adult. And I've heard tell that the first thing a bee does when it's born is clean out its egg chamber for the next bee. They're very busy and tidy and like, yeah, they've got a lot of stuff to do for sure. Uh. And here's the other cool thing. Males will get a little bit larger cell. But the queen can actually decide whether or not to

have a male or a female. Yeah that's remarkable. Yeah, because a queen will collect sperm enough for her lifetime and one shot, yeah, and one mating season because I understand it. And then you know what I mean, Um, she'll dole it out depending on what kind of uh bees the hive needs at any pointing. So what's the what's the magic sauce thing? Uh? What how she does this? Um? She stores all right? If she uses stored sperm to

fertilize the egg, then she had this female. If she leaves egg unfertilized, then it's a male, right, So it's up to her. And what's crazy is this? This? It all depends on what kind of state the hives in, Like do you need more workers to go gather more food, um, or do you need more males to reproduce? It's pretty cool. Yeah, how they strike that balance with that tiny little brain, I guess years of experience. How do they pick the queen too? Do you know that? I don't know. Is

it just random? And then they start him on the royal jelly and that just gets the process. That's the impression that I have that as long as it's a fertilized egg that will become a female. Yeah, then I think you could feed any of those royal jelly. It's probably one of the queen's daughters though, as opposed to one of the few of the others. Don't you think, uh, keep that royal bloodline intact? Yeah, I would think. You know, yeah,

that's just a guess. I bet somebody knows. I mean, what if what if they accidentally raised the cuckoo bees egg as a queen cheese? What a colossal nightmare that would be? Um? Okay, So the the little eggs hatch and the little worker bees they have different jobs according to their age, but they are going to be taking care of the young at this point. Um, they're going to be feeding them pollen or be bread, which is pollen and nectar mixed together. It sounds delicious, actually it is.

And there's you know a lot of people think that bees are just only after nectar. No, they collect pollen on purpose as well, and they use it to make bee bread. That's right, and be bread does sound very delicious. Uh. And so as you get older, though, you're gonna have different jobs. And um, at first you're a nurse, and then, like you said, once you get little older, you might be a maide or a butler and clean on not butler, I guess it made and start cleaning out the other, uh,

you know, the other empty cells. Even though you said they're supposed to do it yourself, I guess they. You know, some are lazy, maybe some some other worker bee has to come behind and take care of their business. They're like, I'm gonna keep my eye on you, exactly. And then they also learned at that point out to forge for food and make honey. And this is where things get kind of fun. Those are and those are the oldest ones. Yeah, the oldest ones are the scouts and the ones that

forage or the oldest bees in the hive. The followers. Yeah, um, and to say, real quick to first chuck um that that was social bee reproduction. UM. Solitary bee reproduction is very sad. Sometimes in some species the mother lays an egg, seals up this um whatever cheese used as the nest with a little bee bread, a little honey whatever, and then takes off and dies and they never see their little baby bee. That is said, and that sad. So uh.

Bees find their food in pretty remarkable ways. That can smell like really really well, and like we said, they can recognize color patterns and things, and they have their solar compass, so this allows them to see where the sun is. They also have an internal clock, so when they go out the scout bees and find the food, they know, all the sun's right there, and I flew three yards. Now I'm flying back and the sun is

right there. So they can actually use those together to pinpoint or pinpoint for the others where the food is because they're going I'm back to tell everyone, hey, and they you know, let them taste like this is what you're after. Taste a little bit of this and now come with me. By way of this dance, they can remember and judge and measure where they went, where the food source was, but then they also can communicate it

like you sit through dancing. UM. And if food's really close by, they'll just basically run up a vertical wall of a honeycomb, which they call it the dance floor. UM, and we not just us. It's called the dance that's what people who study bees call it. UM. And they basically just run up or down in the direction of the food source in relation to the sun, not in relation to the hive. When they go out, they'll be like, Okay, the sun's over here, it's it's in this direction. That's

pretty cool. Yeah, that's called a round dance. And they depend on their sense of smell because they don't get super specific with the round dance. They're like, I'll get you out there and then you'll know trust me exactly because bees can smell from meters away, which is that's a really far distance. How small bees are. UM. And when the when the food is a little further away,

they do the actual waggle dance and UM. Basically this is running again in a in a line in the direction of the food and then making these little um circles in opposing directions at the end of the line. So it will run up and then go to the left in the circle, and then run up and then

go to the right in the circle. Um, and that tells everybody where the where the food is, and then the quality of the food source, how tight the circle is, I think kind of says it's really really good, or if it's a big loping circle, mamb like it's okay, we've had better. And then the bees also flapping its wings at the same time, and all the bees that have gathered around, like you said, um are called followers.

They're the oldest ones in the hive, and they're taking all this information in and a specific group of them are going to be directly behind the bee while it's doing this waggle dance wind, yeah, flapping its wings, and that wind is going to tell them about how long they need to travel for. And then all the bees take off. When they get to about the right area, they go into like a search pattern until somebody finds it, and then they start making trips back and forth. Yep.

I mean they're delivering a lot of information here, very specific information. And um, they make about a dozen trips. Each bee can carry about half her weight in pollen or nectar, which is amazing. And then um, when they come back to unload the stuff, there's more communication going on because the little unloaders that are back at the hive will behave differently according to how much uh more food they need. If they're like, come on, come on, give it, give it, give it, that means keep going,

keep going. And then they're like, yeah, yeah, I guess I'll take it since you brought it. But we're really doing okay, They're like, all right, well, I'm not going to get anymore if you're just not going to be excited about it any longer, Let's just find some men to have sex with, right, Or let's turn this next there into honey, yes, just because for storage per this honey has far less volume than nectar. It's basically concentrated nectar, so you can store more of it, right, that's right.

So they transform nectar into honey in a in a kind of a gross way. Um, they regurgitate it over and over and over, which evaporates the water out of it. And um, they also flap their little wings to I guess use air to do the same thing. And so honey is a bunch of regurgitated be stuff. Because there's it's the vomit. Yeah, I mean there's be stuff in

there as well. Yeah, it's not just nectar like they're stuck in the moisture out, but they're also adding enzymes and stuff their own from their body to make honey. It's not just dehydrated nectar. It's it's honey is a different thing that's made by this stuff, but it has some pretty amazing properties to it. Um. One of the things that's added during this regurgitation process is called glucose

oxidase and UM. When it's fed too young to the young, it's broken down into glucosset, which gives them tons of energy because there's a lot of sugar calories in in honey. But it's also broken down into um hydrogen peroxide, which is one of the things that gives honey. It's anti microbial antibacterial properties, and that's why humans have been using it and eating it for thousands and thousands of years to treat wounds. Occasionally, it can be good in a

pinch if you're a survivalist, especially an open wound. UM there. So, I mean you've heard that honey is um like it keeps forever. Basically Obviously it doesn't keep for everybody will keep a very long time. That's one of the big reasons. Another reason is that um it has a high asmotic pressure and it's hygroscopic, which means it wicks moisture out of the air around it, and since it has a

high asmotic pressure, it does it really strongly. So if you're a little nice, um moisturized piece of bacteria UM and you come in contact with honey, it's gonna suck the moisture out of you and kill you. Antibacterial. Wow, Yeah, that's pretty amazing. If you come across a beehive in the wintertime and they just seem like they're all in

there asleep, hibernating, not so, they're still pretty active. They they will leave the hive to poop and pee because well, I guess they don't pee, but they leave the hive to do their business because they don't want to go in their little cell, which again, they're very tidy little creatures. They know not to like wallow in their own feces not feces but bt uh. But they are still pretty

busy there because they have to keep warm. So they and especially keep the queen warm, and so they tremble just like humans kind of shiver just to increase the warmth. Then the summertime they will flap their wings to kind of keep things climate controlled on the cooler side and drip water on the honey comb. That's amazing. They are

pretty amazing creatures. If you and I still hate them, yeah, Oh we should also say, I'm real quick that while the honey has a lot of antibacterial properties and anti microbial properties, one particular bacteria that is impervious to honey's defenses is um Clustridium baculinum AK boculi is um, the bacteria that gives you a boculi is um um. And since it's soil born, uh, it's very easy for sea bachulnum to get into honey. It's in honey. Any honey

you eat is going to have it in there. It's not in large enough measure to affect us, but it could be life threatening to a baby, which is why they always say, like, never give honey to a baby. Oh yeah, ever, you know, I don't think we mentioned either the honey. You know, you have different flavors of honey that depends on what the bee has been Uh, what kind of flowers the bee's been hanging out. It's like orange blossom, honey, it's clover is orange blossom and clover.

So I never knew that either makes perfect sense. Bees. I thought it wasn't like an added flavor or something, you know, like whatever you know will make different flavors of And it was like natural occurring. You're like, when are they going to make bacon honey? Man A bit that's good. Just cook some bacon, put some honey on it. Um um. And you know we had we did a podcast on colony collapse disorder, so I would encourage people to go listen to that as well. It was a

good one in the archives. Um, have you got anything else? I've got nothing else? Okay, bees. If you want to learn more about bees, you should go check out this very thorough um article on how stuff works dot com. Can type in bees and it will bring it up and you can learn even more, including about colony collapse disorder and um be keeping as well. Yeah, maybe we should be keeping one day. Okay, I don't mean a podcast, I mean just started on the side business. Haven't we already?

Did you have like a smoker and everything? Uh? Yeah, TV will tell you I do. Um. Okay, so since I said search bar, I think I did at how Stuff Works dot com and that means it's time for of course listening mail. All right, Josh, I'm gonna call this, uh correction from a librarian. Remember we did our book banning podcast. That's her correction. That's all she said, and that is from Carly. Thank you, Carly. Hey, guys, love your show. As a librarian, I was excited to hear

what you had to say about book banning. However, I'd like to clear up a misconception about the role of a librarian and banning books. You said, if a customer patron approaches the librarian wants a book ban it is up to the librarian to decide this is not. This could not be further from the truth. In the cases, public libraries are run by boards of trustees, volunteers in

the community who set policies for the library. UH. These community members are not librarians, and when someone wants a book removed, they must fill out a form and submit it to the board. Then the board reviews the material in the objection the board of trustees. UH, it is the board of trustees who decides whether or not to remove the item. The board of trustees may consult with others like librarians, UH review, sources, the community at large, etcetera.

But it is not the librarian who decides whether to ban the book. UM, I hope to hear this corrected. She says, it is unfortunate to hear one's profession and misconstrued and an international public forum. So that is from Carly, and she says thanks, and keep up the good work and Chuch, thanks Carly, appreciate that. Um. I think everybody got that. It's pretty clear and concise. It is not librarians in most cases who can carry out the banning. It sounds like she might have been yelled at by

somebody because of our podcast. Maybe well she just yelled at us. UM, if you have a correction for us, we are always very much open to those who we want to hear him so we can pass them along because we like correcting ourselves and getting things right. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know, and you can send us a good old fashioned email at stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit

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