January 26, 2013 • 43 mins
With less than a million neurons in their tiny heads, bees shouldn't be able to do much more than eat, sleep and reproduce. And yet, bees are capable of high functions like population economics and navigating by the sun on overcast days. Learn about these fascinating insects, including what a stinger really is in this episode of Stuff You Should Know.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camry.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and you put us together,
(00:20):
give us a little nextar let us um collect pollen
with the hair on our bodies. And you have stuff
you should not be a lot of pollen, you know. Yeah,
honeymaking fools. Yeah, you would be best at is Ronny Williams.
Oh man, that guy's scary. Yes, you would be a
honeymaking fool. How you doing well, sir? How are you?
(00:43):
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
(01:04):
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
(01:25):
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.
(01:49):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:36):
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
(03:00):
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
(03:22):
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
(03:42):
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,
(04:03):
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
(04:24):
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.
(04:49):
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.
(05:13):
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
(05:33):
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.
(05:57):
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,
(06:19):
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,
(06:43):
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
(07:04):
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
(07:24):
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
(07:46):
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
(08:08):
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
(08:30):
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
(08:53):
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
(09:15):
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.
(09:37):
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
(09:58):
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,
(10:18):
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
(10:42):
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
(11:03):
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
(11:24):
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,
(11:46):
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
(12:09):
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,
(12:29):
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
(12:51):
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
(13:14):
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
(13:36):
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
(13:58):
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.
(14:20):
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
(14:45):
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,
(15:06):
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
(15:29):
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
(15:51):
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
(16:12):
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
(16:35):
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
(16:57):
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
(17:20):
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.
(17:41):
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
(18:04):
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
(18:28):
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
(18:49):
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
(19:10):
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
(19:33):
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
(19:56):
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
(20:18):
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.
(20:39):
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,
(20:59):
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.
(21:22):
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.
(21:43):
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
(22:06):
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
(22:28):
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
(22:51):
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
(23:11):
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,
(23:33):
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
(23:53):
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
(24:15):
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
(24:37):
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
(25:00):
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
(25:22):
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,
(25:45):
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
(26:07):
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
(26:29):
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
(26:51):
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
(27:14):
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,
(27:35):
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,
(27:57):
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.
(28:18):
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,
(28:40):
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
(29:01):
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,
(29:21):
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
(29:42):
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,
(30:05):
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
(30:26):
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
(30:49):
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
(31:11):
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,
(31:32):
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,
(31:53):
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
(32:16):
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
(32:37):
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
(32:59):
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
(33:19):
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,
(33:41):
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
(34:02):
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
(34:23):
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.
(34:46):
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,
(35:08):
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
(35:31):
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
(35:51):
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
(36:13):
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
(36:35):
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,
(36:57):
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
(37:19):
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
(37:40):
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,
(38:02):
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.
(38:23):
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
(38:45):
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
(39:06):
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
(39:28):
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.
(39:48):
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.
(40:10):
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.
(40:32):
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
(40:53):
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
(41:15):
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
(41:38):
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.
(42:02):
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
(42:25):
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
(42:47):
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
(43:08):
how staff works dot com. H brought to you by
the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camry.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and you put us together,
(00:20):
give us a little nextar let us um collect pollen
with the hair on our bodies. And you have stuff
you should not be a lot of pollen, you know. Yeah,
honeymaking fools. Yeah, you would be best at is Ronny Williams.
Oh man, that guy's scary. Yes, you would be a
honeymaking fool. How you doing well, sir? How are you?
(00:43):
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
(01:04):
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
(01:25):
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.
(01:49):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:36):
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
(03:00):
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
(03:22):
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
(03:42):
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,
(04:03):
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
(04:24):
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.
(04:49):
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.
(05:13):
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
(05:33):
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.
(05:57):
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,
(06:19):
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,
(06:43):
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
(07:04):
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
(07:24):
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
(07:46):
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
(08:08):
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
(08:30):
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
(08:53):
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
(09:15):
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.
(09:37):
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
(09:58):
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,
(10:18):
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
(10:42):
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
(11:03):
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
(11:24):
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,
(11:46):
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
(12:09):
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,
(12:29):
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
(12:51):
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
(13:14):
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
(13:36):
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
(13:58):
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.
(14:20):
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
(14:45):
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,
(15:06):
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
(15:29):
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
(15:51):
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
(16:12):
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
(16:35):
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
(16:57):
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
(17:20):
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.
(17:41):
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
(18:04):
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
(18:28):
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
(18:49):
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
(19:10):
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
(19:33):
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
(19:56):
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
(20:18):
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.
(20:39):
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,
(20:59):
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.
(21:22):
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.
(21:43):
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
(22:06):
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
(22:28):
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
(22:51):
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
(23:11):
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,
(23:33):
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
(23:53):
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
(24:15):
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
(24:37):
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
(25:00):
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
(25:22):
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,
(25:45):
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
(26:07):
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
(26:29):
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
(26:51):
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
(27:14):
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,
(27:35):
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,
(27:57):
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.
(28:18):
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,
(28:40):
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
(29:01):
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,
(29:21):
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
(29:42):
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,
(30:05):
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
(30:26):
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
(30:49):
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
(31:11):
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,
(31:32):
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,
(31:53):
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
(32:16):
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
(32:37):
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
(32:59):
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
(33:19):
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,
(33:41):
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
(34:02):
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
(34:23):
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.
(34:46):
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,
(35:08):
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
(35:31):
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
(35:51):
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
(36:13):
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
(36:35):
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,
(36:57):
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
(37:19):
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
(37:40):
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,
(38:02):
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.
(38:23):
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
(38:45):
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
(39:06):
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
(39:28):
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.
(39:48):
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.
(40:10):
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.
(40:32):
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
(40:53):
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
(41:15):
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
(41:38):
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.
(42:02):
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
(42:25):
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
(42:47):
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
(43:08):
how staff works dot com. H brought to you by
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