Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Wonderful World of Bees

Starting point is 00:00:00 There are millions of different insect species on planet Earth. All of them fill some niche in the ecosystem in which they live. However, some species are more important than others. In particular, insect species that are members of the family apity, or what you probably know as bees. Bees are some of the most important pollinators in the world, and they're responsible for a large amount of plant reproduction worldwide. Learn more about bees, what they are and their importance,

Starting point is 00:00:28 on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I'm sure all of us would recognize a B if we saw one,

Starting point is 00:01:14 but what exactly is a bee? Bees are insects from the family apity. Apity is the basis of many of the words surrounding bees and beekeeping. Apiculture is the word for beekeeping and an apiculturalist is a beekeeper, and an appiary is a collection of bee hives. There are about 20,000 different species of bees in the world. Wherever you can find pollinating flowers, you will find bees. Bees can be found on every continent except Antarctica,

Starting point is 00:01:44 and in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Not all bees have stingers, and not all bees live in colonies such as hives. A bee is not the same thing as a wasp. Both insects are in the order hymenoptera, but there are significant differences between them. Bees tend to be fuzzy-looking, and wasps are smooth. Bees feed on pollen and nectar, whereas wasps tend to feed on other insects. Bees tend to be less aggressive and can only sting something once before dying. Wops, on the other hand, are much more aggressive and can sting multiple times.

Starting point is 00:02:18 A hornet is just a type of wasp. What makes bees so interesting and so important is the outsized role that they play in plant pollination. About 75% of all flowering plants in the world, and 35% of global food crops rely on some sort of animal for pollination. Of the animals and insects that pollinate plants, bees are by far the world's best pollinators. Bees have evolved to effectively carry pollen. They have hair-like fibers on their bodies where pollen can attach and be carried to another plant. They also have pollen baskets known as corbicula on their hind legs.

Starting point is 00:02:56 Bees are so important as pollinators that some species of plant have evolved to only be pollinated by certain species of bees. As there are 20,000 species of bees with a wide variety of behaviors, most of the rest of this episode is going to focus on the various types. of honeybees. Honeybees are of special importance because they're the bees that are most commonly used in the production of honey and have been the most widely domesticated. The human relationship with bees dates back well before recorded history. Early humans discovered honey and beehives and found that it tasted pretty good. Honey was probably the most pure and concentrated form of sugar that early humans would have had access to. These early humans engaged in what is known as honey hunting.

Starting point is 00:03:43 Honey hunting is the gathering of honey from wild bee hives. Honey hunting still takes place today by Aboriginal people in Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. The most famous of the modern honey hunters is probably the Hadesa people in Tanzania. Their modern hunter-gatherers, for whom honey is still a staple of their diet. Here I should briefly explain exactly what honey is and how it's produced. Honey bees are a variant of berries. bees that live in colonies. Each colony consists of three types of bees with a clear division of labor between them. Queens, worker bees, and drones. Queens are females with active reproductive

Starting point is 00:04:22 organs. There is only one queen in a hive whose primary role is to lay eggs. The queen produces pheromones that regulates the high's behavior and maintain social harmony. These pheromones help control the activities of worker bees and suppress the development of new queens. Worker bees, are female bees with underdeveloped reproductive organs. They perform all of the non-reproductive tasks in a hive. Drones are male bees whose main function is to mate with a virgin queen from another hive. They do not perform any other function in the hive and are just fed by worker bees. Honey is a sweet substance produced by honeybees from the nectar of flowers. Worker bees, called foragers, visit flowers to collect nectar. They use their long, tube-like tongues called

Starting point is 00:05:09 probiscuses to extract the nectar and store it in their honey stomachs, a special part of their digestive system. While in the honey stomach, enzymes in the bees' saliva begin breaking down the complex sugars in the nectar and do simple sugars, such as glucose and fructose. Upon returning to the hive, the foraging bees regurgitate the nectar and pass it to house bees through a process called trophylaxis. This mouth-to-mouth transfer allows further enzymatic activity. The house bees then deposit the nectar into hexagonal wax cells in the honeycomb. They fan the nectar with their wings to evaporate excess water, reducing the moisture content from around 70 to 80 percent to about 18 percent. The evaporation process, combined with the

Starting point is 00:05:55 enzymatic breakdown of sugars, transforms the watery nectar into a thick, concentrated honey. Honey is deposited into a substance known as beeswax, which is also produced by worker bees. bees. Bees wax is also highly valued for use in candles along with honey. The earliest evidence of humans interacting with bees dates back to around 10,000 years ago. Cave paintings in the Cuevas de la Rania in Spain depict people gathering honey from wild bee colonies. It's believed that humans used clay pots or hollow logs to house bees and make hives, which made it easy for them to collect honey. The first culture that we have evidence of that practiced an organized form of bee

Starting point is 00:06:37 was ancient Egypt. There is written evidence that beekeeping was practiced in ancient Egypt around 4,500 years ago. Hieroglyphics and tomb paintings show beekeepers using cylindrical hives made of clay or woven materials. Honey was highly valued in ancient Egypt. It was used as a sweetener, medicine, and in religious rituals. It was also offered to the gods and used in embalming practices. There are depictions dating back 4,200 years ago of beekeepers in Egypt blowing smoke into beehives to get access to honeycombs. There's also evidence of beekeeping in ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, and China. In the Old Testament, a land of milk and honey was a metaphor for a bountiful land.

Starting point is 00:07:22 Beekeeping appears to have risen independently around the world. The Maya in Central America domesticated a type of stingless bee. The Romans appeared to have practiced migratory beekeeping, moving hides to follow flowering plants. During the Middle Ages, beekeeping was often practiced in monasteries. Monks used beeswax for candles and honey for medicinal purposes. The Islamic world also made significant advances in beekeeping. The 10th century Persian scholar Al Masudi wrote about the importance of bees in their role in agriculture. What all ancient beekeeping practices had in common is that collecting honey and beeswax

Starting point is 00:08:01 usually resulted in the destruction of the hive. Whether it was a woven basket, a ceramic pot, or a hollow log, these artificial hive locations were only designed to be used once. These are known as Skep hives. Considering the thousands of years that humans kept bees, it took a surprisingly long time to truly understand how honeybees worked and lived. It wasn't until the 17th century that beekeepers such as Charles Butler of England and biologists like Jan Swammerdam of the Netherlands

Starting point is 00:08:33 began to understand the social order of hives and the importance of queens. In the 18th century, English beekeeper Thomas Wildman developed multiple advances in beekeeping. He developed a multi-skept system where honey could be harvested from one hive, and bees could then move to another hive without killing them. The big innovation in honey production occurred in the 19th century. An American preacher named Lorenzo Lorraine Langstrith developed the Langstrith hive. The Langstrath hive has vertically hanging frames where bees can create beeswax combs and deposit their honey. The spacing between the frames is always between 6 and 9 centimeters, which is known as the bee space.

Starting point is 00:09:17 If the frames were any closer together, the bees could connect them with beeswax. By keeping the frames just far enough apart, the bees have room to move between them without connecting them together. The Langstrath hive is the basic design. of commercial beehives that are still used today. The 20th century saw a dramatic rise in beekeeping around the world. Increased beekeeping was necessary, not just to meet the demand for increased honey, but also the need for pollination services as agriculture expanded. The number of active beehives in the world has expanded steadily throughout the 20th and 21st

Starting point is 00:09:53 centuries. As of 2021, there are estimated to be 101.6 million active bee hives in the world. world. The largest honey-producing countries in the world are China, Turkey, Argentina, and the United States. While there have been some innovations in beekeeping, by and large, it's still the same process that has been practiced for thousands of years. Bees have to pollinate flowering plants, and then they have to make the honey. Today, many beekeeping operations have mobile hives. They will transport hives from place to place to provide pollination services at different times of the year, before moving on to a new farm field to provide pollination services for yet a different

Starting point is 00:10:35 crop. Urban beekeeping has also grown in popularity as the need for bees as pollinators has been recognized even in cities. However, all is not well in the world of beekeeping and honey production. There are two major problems that are currently affecting the industry worldwide. The first is colony collapse disorder, or CCD. CCD is a phenomenon. that affects honeybee colonies characterized by the sudden and unexplained disappearance of the majority of worker bees in a hive, leaving behind the queen, immature bees, and ample food stores. CCD was identified in 2007 when a large number of honeybee hives suddenly collapsed. Subsequent research has found that similar episodes of colony collapse have occurred in

Starting point is 00:11:22 the past, in particular in 2018 and 2019, and there were also recorded cases occurring as far back as the mid-19th century. Despite the problem being well-documented, there's no known cause for CCD, nor are we even sure that there is a single cause. Proposed causes include pesticides, mites, viruses, nutrition, habitat loss, and stress from transportation. Bee populations have bounced back from the problems of 2007, but a cause for CCD has been elusive. The other major problem facing the beekeeping and honey industry is better understood, but is probably more economically damaging. Fraud. The truth is that honey is one of the most faked food products in the world, perhaps only behind olive oil. There is a good chance that the cheap honey at your local supermarket

Starting point is 00:12:15 is not in fact honey at all. Much of the commercial honey available in stores today is either a small amount of honey cut with cheap sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup or not honey at all. If you purchase honey, you have to make sure to check the label and research where the honey was produced. Real honey from an actual honeybee hive might cost a bit more than the cheap stuff you can find on your shelf at your nearest grocery store. Bees have an incredibly important role in both the earth's ecosystem and in the world of modern agriculture. Despite all of the advances in farming and food production, there is still a large part of our agricultural system that is dependent on the humble bee.

Starting point is 00:13:03 The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Ben Long and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review comes from listener Valarge Saraptor over on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, the one I've been looking for. I just discovered this and I love it. It's everything I want in a podcast in that it informs so well and does so on such an extensive breadth of topics in a matter that is light and entertaining. The episodes are short but so full of events.

Starting point is 00:13:30 information that they don't feel it. It is like you distilled other podcasts down, so all you're left with are the pure, interesting tidbits and factoids, the actual what and how. That is what this is, which is all I'm really looking for anyways. Sweet, concentrated, juicy factoids about the stuff. Thank you, Valard Seraptor. Many other dealers, I mean podcasters, will dilute their product and fill it with meaningless banter between the hosts. Here, I guarantee that you will always get the pure unadulterated good stuff. Remember that if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show. I suggest you leave immediately.

Starting point is 00:14:09 Or what? You'll release the dogs or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouth? And when they bark, they shoot bees at you? Well, go ahead. Do your worst.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Wonderful World of Bees

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