5.20.26

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Marcia for RADIOI, and today I will
be reading National Geographic Magazine dated April twenty twenty six,
which is donated by the publisher. As a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of

(00:22):
the article I began last time, entitled Living History by
Richard Hahniff. For a moment, she relishes how it is
all working out. Then just a thought, she wonders if
they could take a few of the smaller pterosaurs from
the ceiling and hang them in the cafe instead, possibly
before the opening. I love the idea that you're bringing

(00:44):
people's eyes up every time they walk into a room.
The model maker in from New Zealand to finish the job,
doesn't say no. Shortly after, the missing Diplodocus arrives and
steps up on to its plinth in the atrium. Triceratops
will be late, and the staff moves in temporary substitutes.

(01:04):
Manning calls this dinosaur tetris. Then, four days before the opening,
a last minute guest enters via the shipping bay door,
accompanied by a diplomatic entourage. It's the world famous Lucy
or her fossilized remains, among the earliest known members of
the family tree that also includes Homo sapiens. Her three

(01:24):
month visit is a gift from the Theiopian government, worked
out just a few weeks before opening night, goes off
without a hitch, and the people who built this museum
get a chance to preen a little in the applause.
What other natural history museums have taken centuries to accomplish.
They have achieved in just five years. There is still,
of course, fixes to make, still specimens to excavate, a

(01:48):
choir or exhibit, still scientific discoveries to be made. In
the morning, they will wake up to the new reality
of the museum and research center they have built. Moving fast,
being high impact and making a statement was never meant
to end with opening day. Next a mask made for
the top of the world. On his first climb in

(02:11):
the Himalaya in nineteen sixty, Thomas Hornbein was left gasping
for air. The thirty year old American and future National
Geographic Explorer was a fit, capable climber. The problem was
his chunky multi valve oxygen mask. Hornbein, an anesthesiologist, set
out to design a better one. By chance, he met

(02:32):
a man who could manufacture it, Fred Maytag, Appliant's magnet,
and a patient at the hospital where Hornbeinn was a fellow.
The result was made from a single piece of rubber
with just one valve, and it was simple to d ice.
Hornbein breathed easier with it in nineteen sixty three, when
he joined the National Geographic sponsored First American expedition to

(02:54):
Summit Everest. He died in twenty twenty three, having watched
his Maytag mask and help a generation of mountaineers reach
new heights. This by Eric Wills. The next article is
from the May twenty twenty six National Geographic. The Sneaky
Genius of Nature's brightest thinkers by Hannah Nordhaus. We know

(03:17):
that bees are the pollinators that feed the planet. What
science is now learning is that their far smarter that
we ever imagined. Here's how that discovery could change what
we think about one of the world's most important animals.
In a mountain valley in northern New Mexico, both humans
and bees were preparing for winter at Adelina Lucero's Adobe

(03:39):
home in the Native American community of Taos, Pueblo, a
huge pile of firewood laid beside two stacks of rectangular
beehives caked with red propolis, a resinous mixture that bees
used to sale their homes for the coming months of
cold and scarcity. Indigenous beekeeper and National Geographic explorer Melanie

(03:59):
Kirby donned a lightweight mesh veil and pried open one
of Lucero's hives, pulling out the hanging frames and examining
them to locate the colony's queen, which was twice the
size of the workers. This is our mother breeder, she said,
as Lucero looked on. She survived many seasons. That's sadly uncommon.
These days. Bees around the globe have been dying off

(04:22):
in massive numbers, suffering in onslaught of woes, parasites, pathogens, pesticides,
dwindling habitat. We've learned of these declines mostly from honey bees,
whose lives are intertwined with human agriculture, because bee keepers
haul millions of hives to pollinate everything from almonds to apples,

(04:42):
as well as dozens of other fruits and vegetables, along
with the twenty thousand plus other bee species. They helped
pollinate roughly a third of the planet's food supply and
ensure the reproduction of more than three quarters of all
flowering plants. While we know less about wild bees, population
surveys indicate that bees worldwide are in decline from solitary

(05:04):
species like leaf cutter bees that nest alone and pollinate
a few preferred plants, to social ones like native bubble
bees that live in colonies and collect nectar and pollend
from nearly any flower they encounter. In April twenty twenty five,
American beekeepers reported that fifty five percent of their colonies

(05:25):
had perished over the previous year, their worst loss as ever.
Kirby's honey bees, however, are thriving. She spent the last
twenty years working with her farming partner, mart Spitzig to
breed and raise colonies cleverly branded longev bees that are

(05:45):
well adapted to New Mexico's high desert and the Rocky
Mountain region. Kirby and Spitzig don't treat their hives with
the synthathetic synthetic chemicals post commercial beekeepers use to fend
off the varoa light in invasive parasite that fees on bees,
weakening colonies and carrying viruses, and is thought to be

(06:05):
the primary culprit in recent die offs. Instead, they wait
to breathe their queens until after they've lived for at
least two years, long enough to prove the bees are
hardy and wily enough to survive on their own. Ten
years ago, Kirby brought some of those bees to Luchero,
who creates candles, balms and saves from the bees wax

(06:27):
she harvests. Kirby's instructions were simple, leave the bees mostly
alone and let them learn to solve the challenges of
their volatile world. And they really can figure things out,
said Luceero. Over the past few decades, scientists have been
learning more and more about the ways that bees figured
things out. They've studied how honey bee foragers fan out

(06:49):
across miles of unfamiliar terrain in their six week adult lifespan,
navigating by sunlight and memory as they visit thousands of
flowers to retrieve nectar for their colonies. They've followed bees
back to their nests and seen how they dance to
tell others where the best flowers are, and how they
make collective decisions to swarm and relocate their homes. Now,

(07:12):
researchers are uncovering remarkable new insights into how these industrious
insects think. The breakthroughs have arrived thanks to a series
of creative experiments designed to test how bees perceive the world,
solve problems, and respond to unexpected situations, and the results
have found that a single bee is much smarter than
almost anyone imagined. These tiny creatures can make the sort

(07:36):
of intelligent decisions that scientists previously believed were possible only invertebrates.
Kirby's study and resistant bees also hint at a tantalizing
possibility for people who are concerned about the insect's long
term survival. As she sees every day in her apiary's
bees can adapt to their increasingly challenging surroundings if we

(07:58):
let them. There was a time not long too long
ago when scientists believed that bees were automatons, mindless robots
whose actions were hardwired into their genes. Even the most
eminent scholars of animal behavior believed that b's actions were
guided purely by instinct inherited through countless generations. Wrote German

(08:19):
scientists Carl von Frisch, who won a Nobel Prize in
nineteen seventy three for discovering how bees communicate. The brain
of a bee is the size of a grass seed
and is not made for thinking, but in recent decades
researchers like behavioral ecologist Lars Chitka have designed a series
of increasingly ambitious experiments that reveal the many ways that

(08:42):
be's brains are indeed made for thinking. In nineteen ninety,
when Chica was studying b neurobiology as a PhD candidate
in Berlin, he led a group of undergraduates to a
gigantic agricultural field to explore how bees estimate distance and
direction in a featureless landscape with no trees, bushes, or hills.

(09:05):
Over a bottle by rishwhisky. One night, they decided as
a joke to design an experiment to see whether bees
could count. We initially laughed it was a ridiculous idea,
he recalls, But the next day they constructed a row
of identical tent shaped objects to act as landmarks for
a colony of high bees going back and forth to

(09:26):
their hive. They placed a feeder filled with sugar water
to mimic nectar between the third and fourth landmarks. Then,
once the bees were familiar with the location of the feeder,
the students buried the tense positions. The bees, however, still
searched for the feeder after the third tent. They seemed
to count the number of landmarks they passed on their

(09:46):
way to the feeder At the time. That raised some eyebrows,
Chitka says, but other labs replicated the results and confirmed
his findings. The success of that experiment, he says, triggered
me to probe even dear deeper into how much intelligence
you could squeeze into a micro brain like that. Now
a professor at Queen Mary University of London, Chika has

(10:09):
become well known for designing studies in custom made testing arenas,
confronting bees with unusual problems that they would never see
in nature. He has switched from using honey bees as
his primary subjects to bubble bees, which live in smaller
colonies that are easier to observe inside a lab. By
introducing bees to challenges that none of their ancestors ever

(10:32):
came across in their evolutionary paths, he says, his team
explores the limits of the insects cognitive flexibility, their ability
to alter their behavior as situations change. His pioneering work
has spurred a growing body of research demonstrating that bees
can recognize patterns, differentiate between symbols, identify human faces, cooperate

(10:55):
on novel tasks, and plan for the future. These unexpectabilities
may stem from the unpredictable world that bees must negotiate.
Foraging insects have to process more complex information than other
insects to retrieve nectar for their colonies. For instance, bees
must search across miles to locate the sweetest and rowdiest blooms,

(11:19):
remember where they are, and on the fly literally perform
cost benefit analyzes to determine whether the energy required to
reach a sweeter flower is worth traveling the extra distance
from the hive. They also must find water, dodge predators,
and navigate the shifting compass of sun and sky. Social

(11:39):
bees communicate that information to their sisters. Solitary bees fare
at the additional burden of foraging, nest building, and tending
their young all alone. There are an awful lot of
fairly nifty tricks that animals use to survive that are
not the results of individual intelligence. Chika says, such as
building hexagonal honey homes, or, in the case of a

(12:01):
human toddler, learning to walk. But intelligence in the broadest
sense has to come about by individual learning that goes
beyond genetic programming. No human being innately knows how to
ride a bicycle, he adds, that's something you have to learn,
so too must be learned to find and remember a
patch of flowers. One of the most radical leaps forward

(12:26):
in understanding the intelligence arose from another experiment that Chica
created half in jest. At a department meeting a decade ago,
one of his colleagues lamented that the parrots in his
lap had failed a string pulling test, a classic experiment
used to evaluate cognitive prowess in primates, dogs, and various

(12:46):
bird species, in which an animal learns to pull a
string to retrieve an otherwise inaccessible reward. I sort of
flippantly commented, I bet our bumble bees could do that.
Everyone laughed and said, oh, Lars has gone completely crazy.
But Chiku thought about it some more and brought the
idea off with his students. I said, why don't we

(13:09):
just try. After tinkering with a range of designs, his
team placed an artificial flower a blue dot filled with
a sucrose solution under a low transparent plastic barrier, so
the bees could see but not reach the reward. Instead,
they were shown step by step how to pull the
flower closer using the attached string. Shortly after the experiment's

(13:31):
design was finalized, one of Chika's students called him into
the lab. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, he remembered.
The bumble bees had quickly figured out how to pull
it to them. Then, Chickgun his team decided to expand
the classic framework by bringing untrained bees to watch demonstrator
bees pull the string. The observers learned the task as well,

(13:54):
and soon those bees were showing other foragers in the
colony how to do it too. The fact that a
completeatly non natural behavior spread rapidly through an entire population
was pre spectacular, he said. The experiment suggested that bees
can recognize cause and effect, how pulling a string can
produce a reward and engage in social learning. Bees surprising

(14:17):
cognitive abilities also made Chica begin to consider another radical idea.
If they're that clever, maybe they can also feel things
and are sentient like humans and other animals possessing the
capacity to experience positive and negativetive emotions. In order to
test for this sort of consciousness, Chika and his team

(14:38):
designed a set of robotic crab spiders simulating dreaded predators
to briefly capture test bees as if in an unsuccessful attack. Afterwards,
the bees whole demeanor changed. He said, they'd inspect every
flower carefully before landing and reject safe ones for fear
of another spider. That did look a bit like a

(15:01):
post traumatic stress disorder where you're conjuring up threats from
the past, he explained. In a different experiment, when bees
encountered unexpected rewards, they engaged in more optimistic behaviors, like
approaching unfamiliar flowers more quickly. This doesn't mean, as Chitka
wrote in his twenty twenty two book The Mind of

(15:23):
a Bee, that the insects ponder the arc of their
life from youth to death, but he believes it may
show that they feel pain, fear, joy, and perhaps even hope.
In addition to the well justified motivation to conserve bees
because their useful animals, Chitka says, I think the insight
that they are intelligent and quite possibly sentient beings, lends

(15:45):
additional motivation to do something to look after them around
the globe. A growing cadre of bee researchers is now
trying to measure and understand how thees change their behaviors
to soul to solve and survive new challenges, and that
means dreaming up ever more outlandish obstacle courses. Inside a
small laboratory at the University of Oulu in Finland last October,

(16:10):
behavioral ecologist Ali Bukola and doctoral researcher Akshai bam Booree
watched as a large buff tailed bumble bee try to
negotiate a rectangular testing arena. Bam Boree had placed a
fake flower a blue Dopa bee had been taught to
associate with a sugary reward on the ceiling, hidden from

(16:32):
the bee's view as it entered the mazelike area from
its hive. He then put a foam ball about the
size of a shooter marble in the testing ground without
any prior training. The bee had to roll the ball
to the dot, then clamber onto it like a step stool.
Bumble Bees typically scramble into flowers rather than hovering around them.

(16:53):
If the bee could roll the ball under the flower,
climb up, and probe the dot for nectar using its
pop probos within a prescribed time limit, it passed the test.
The experiment is an extension of work that Lukolo and
Chica pioneered when Lukola was a postdoctoral research researcher in

(17:14):
Chika's London lab. Building on Chika's string pulling experiments, Loukula
had taught bees to play soccer, training them to roll
a small yellow ball to a floral goal to reach
a nectar reward. Another remarkable demonstration of bee's ability to learn.
But this new trial is even more challenging. It could

(17:36):
demonstrate that they can, without previous experience, establish an objective
the sugary reward, remember it when it's out of sight,
and then use the ball as a tool to reach
their objective. If the trial is successful, and will prove
that bees are capable of something similar to insight learning,
solving problems through sudden aha moments rather than trial and air.

(18:00):
This is true intelligence or a complex cognition, says Lukola.
The animal needs to really understand what they're doing. The
bee they were observing did seem to understand the task
at hand, though she was clumsy. After exploring the arena
for a while, she nudged the ball, then crawled up
on to it and flipped it over on herself. Many

(18:22):
bees rolled the ball backward this way, moving their bodies
in the direction they want to go. She somersaulted awkwardly,
tumbled with the ball, and abandoned it a few times,
then finally rolled herself and the ball to the reward's location,
climbed up on the ball, and plunged her proboscis into
the dot. She had passed the test with time to spare.

(18:44):
Lukola and his team encountered some healthy scientific trial and
error of their own as they designed the experiment, reworking
the testing arena a number of times. Though their work
is ongoing, the results look promising so far, and if
they prove it, it will be, Lucola says, the first
evidence in any insects where we show that they can

(19:05):
solve problems spontaneously. While the highly controlled environment in the
lab has allowed Lucola and Chica to investigate the outer
bounds of bees cognitive abilities, other colleagues have found eyes
have found ways to witness and corroborate bee intelligence in
nature in California you see Davis biologist and National Geographic

(19:29):
Explorer Felicity Mood have demonstrated that lone mumble bee queens
are even faster and better learners than the foraging worker
bees used to Chika and Lucula, perhaps because these queens
have to forage, build, and provision their nests all alone
in the first weeks of their lives. In one experiment,

(19:50):
Mouth placed strips of colored paper dipped in sugar water
or plain water in a meadow. The queens learned to
visit the colors that contained sugar water more quickly than
the world did. In France, University of Toulouse behavioral a
collagists Mathieu hrou has glued tiny magnetic transponders onto the
backs of bubble bees to track how bees constantly alter

(20:13):
their roots as plants, flowers, and weather patterns change, with
an aim of developing a predictive model for how these
visit flowers. Understanding the way bees think and adjust could
not only help farmers plan agricultural pollination to increase crop yield.
It could also be used in conservation efforts, such as
aiding in pollination of endangered plant populations like the bees

(20:38):
they study Likro muth, Lucula, and Chica have had their
share of revelations as they've come to understand how bees
negotiate a radically shifting landscape with agility and vigor, and
just how vastly we've underestimate the underestimated the capabilities of
their tiny brains. Perhaps be advocates suggests we are also

(21:02):
misjudged the intelligent the intelligence of the insect's ability to
adapt to the raft of new challenges like the parasitic
Varroa mites that continue to devastate the beekeeping industry. Kirby,
for one, has come to believe this is the case,
at least where honeybees are concerned. Beekeepers have for too

(21:24):
long been stuck on a treadmill of chemical treatments to
fend off the mights, but eventually those treatments stop working
and we see huge die ops like the one last year.
Working with a group of like minded beekeepers, researches, and scientists,
Kirby founded the Adaptive Bee Breeders Alliance, a national network
that promotes beekeeping practices that align with the insects instincts

(21:48):
and intelligence, encouraging the breeding of bees that have been
shown to be resilient in their climate and environments. More
beekeepers are beginning to embrace the notion that the best
and strongest bee are the ones that survive on their own.
Zea Queen Bees, the company Kirby owns with Z Spitzegg,

(22:08):
sell as many as three hundred queens each week during
spring and summer to beekeepers across the country and bigger
more commercial operations are also beginning to come around to
this point of view. Don't tell the bees how to
do the job, says beekeeper and breeder Randy Oliver, who
keeps fifteen hundred colonies around sixty million bees in California.

(22:30):
Just promote the ones that do. A bee's job, we've
come to understand is to learn its world, to navigate
and remember its ever changing surroundings, to support its colony,
and perhaps our job as humans is to support bees
in their process of learning and adaptation, being mindful of
the habitat they need in the poisons and stresses they don't.

(22:52):
Humans need to learn to listen to the bees around them,
says Kirby. I always feel like the bees still have
so much more to teach us. The ingenuity of wild bees.
Scientists are currently studying only a few kinds of bees,
but there are more than twenty thousand species found across
all continents except Antarctica. Their incredible diversity appears in a

(23:13):
range of physical and behavioral adaptations, providing clues about their intelligence. Here.
How different bees, some of which have yet to earn
common names, have evolved to overcome the unique challenges within
their habitats. Underground vulture bee in lieu of pollen and nectar,
these bees gather dead flesh as food for their offspring.

(23:37):
Wallas as giant bee, the largest bee, nests in termite
colonies in trees to help ward off attacks. Broad cheeked
nocturnal sweat bee. Large light sensitive eyes allow these bees
to forage at night. Striped curly banded bee to access pollen.

(23:57):
Females vibrate flowers to extract grains yellow pollen. Baal bee
to survive desert life. This bee can pause larval development
for years. Emerald comb bearer bee in arid habitats, this
burrowing bee tunnels nearly six feet deep in sand. Long

(24:20):
nosed sand lobber bee. A long head and tongue allow
them to reach nectar deep in desert flowers. Nature's engineers.
Bees are ingenious builders, capable of crafting shelters that take
advantage of the resources around them. While some have the
help of their colonies, others are on their own. Individual females,
known as solitary bees, may live only several weeks, but

(24:44):
are especially adept at designing many kinds of nests in
arid environments. Here's how these domiciles compare with a hive
built by social bees, which live longer and commonly reside
underground architects. A single bee can build and above round
nests by making hundreds of trips together plant materials and pebbles,

(25:04):
binding them together with resin or a mix of saliva
and mud. The water repellant resin used in these nests
also protects against fungi, bacteria, and parasites diggers. The majority
of bees excavate soil to nest. A typical nest is
a vertible vertical burrow with tunnels leading to areas waterproofed

(25:26):
with glandular secretions, floral oils, or plant materials. Nests are
normally four to six inches deep, but some exceed three feet.
Larvae develop in areas stocked with food called brooded cells. Intruders,
These parasitic bee or its larvae exploit the nests of others.

(25:50):
Some kill the hosts offspring with their sharp mandibles and
lay their eggs in the areas already stocked with food.
Carpenters are relatively small percentage of solitary bees. Boor into
wood stems or animal dung to nest. With strong jaws,
they chew tunnels and create chambers with sawdust partitions. Renters

(26:13):
Commandeering in existing space or objects such as a crack
in a wall and an abandoned insect nest or a shell,
is a common nesting strategy. Communal diggers. Some solitary bees
are known to create a communal nest for protection, where
they share an entrance, but each maintains its own brood cells.

(26:33):
Hive builders a typical colony of social bees includes workers
and a queen. Together. They live in hives that are
usually in underground burrows, tree hollows, or rock crevices. Next,
wildlife leopard seals can open their jaws to remarkable angles,
a frightening prospect for prey like penguins, and perhaps for photographers.

(26:56):
They have a reputation for being ferocious and the little terrifying,
says National Geographic explorer Kidi Yun, who met this nine
foot long adult off the top of the Antarctic peninsula.
Sensing the seal was more playful than aggressive, Yuan hung
off the side of his inflatable boat, snapping picks as
his playmate opened wide. National Geographic explorers Lujan Augusti during

(27:23):
three weeks at sea as part of the National Geographic
and Rolex Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions. Augusti photographed the Antarctic
field work of fellow explorers like Christian Lager, the marine
biologists profiled in this issue. Augusti is co creator of
Agua Negra, a film about the world's threatened peat lands

(27:43):
and the humans who rely on them. Hanna Nordhaus Nordhouse
traveled to Finland, United Kingdom, and the American Southwest to
report on the expanding frontiers of the intelligence. An explorer
since twenty nineteen and author of The bee Keeper's Lament,
she's covered threats facing the buzzy pollinators for publications such

(28:04):
as Wired and Scientific American. This concludes readings from National
Geographic Magazine. For Today. Your reader has been Marcia thank
you for listening, keep on listening, and have a great day.