No Such Thing As A Fish - 268: No Such Thing As Welsh Guinness

Episode Date: May 10, 2019

Live from Dublin, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss miniature miniature trains, bees in mourning, and unholy transplants.

I Know such thing as a fish a weekly podcast coming to you live this time from here with Anna Chazinski Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go okay that's it that's all about facts okay it is time for fact number one and that is Chazinski okay thanks very much pipe down okay my fact this week is that if you are flying from England to Dublin the air traffic control waypoint that you pass that tells you you're going the right way is called Guinness so these these things very cool I didn't really know

about these but air traffic control waypoints are basically like landmarks in the sky because when you're flying a plane it's not like going for a walk where I guess you can say like go past the third tree and then turn left at the style there's just nothing there and so they have these things on aeronautical maps which are five letter codes basically and they have to be codes that anyone who speaks any language can pronounce they're mostly nonsense but they are created by the local air traffic workers the local air traffic providers and so sometimes they have a little joke and so the one on the way to Dublin is G-I-N-I-S which is not how you spell it but and there's over there's a big database of them there's over 37,000 of them and there's a lot of serious normal ones but

there are as you say plenty of very jokey ones so in Portsmouth New Hampshire in America when you're heading in there they have a sort of Warner Brothers tribute to the cartoon so your wayfinding points are going to be called I taught and then and you can fill the rest what yeah I taught and then I tore and then what did you talk is it a putty tat and then lastly I did but they're all really badly spelled presumably so tat must be with three T's on the end of something it's got two T's a and then two T's you're saying these are meant to be pronounceable I would look at them be like where are we yeah they are very good yeah you're from South London aren't you Dan mm-hmm and I looked at the one that was closest to where you live and

it's D-O-R-K-I dorky and sometimes they have local tributes to people who just live nearby so near St. Louis there's Annie and then Lennox and then in Boston there's Nimoy because Leonard Nimoy was born there and it's a really nice one where in California there's a place near where Charles Schultz the cartoonist was from and that's Snoopy with a you sometimes they changed them though so in 2010 when the apprentice was massive in America you had Donald Trump and you're fired you're kidding yeah no you're fad you're fad you're fad it's a less menacing when you say it like that isn't it it's how it's spelled u-f-i-r-d you're fad you fad but they also had Ivanka as well and it got to the point where people started pilots were complaining going I don't want to fly

you know past Ivanka and so they actually changed it they removed it so it no longer exists those waypoints yeah well you applaud but now there are a hundred pilots lost they do like a bit of wordplay pilots so if you are a helicopter pilot before you set off you need to check your shits and tits the tits for instance is your checklist for your navigation radio which is twist identity test and select and that's how they teach you how to fly a helicopter because my wife's a pilot so she did that and every time you get on an aeroplane before it sets off they always do their bumfish which is brakes undercarriage fuel or flaps instruments switches and harnesses and they know it as bumfishing really wow there's that that's very cool yeah see they've got a sense of humor

these guys you don't want them too funny though I I did find out a guy who we think is the man behind the airline pilot voice huh well good evening ladies and gentlemen we're just experiencing little turbulence as we head over the North Atlantic but don't worry that's not the same voice it's not pre-recorded it's not pre-recorded I'm saying there's a kind of way that pilots speak oh which is you don't get um well we've got some turbulence we're gonna be thrown about five minutes but surely they're just being calm or you're saying that they're all being calm but I've read a theory which is that they're all being calm because of Chuck Yeager who I think we might have

mentioned before so he was a he was a fighter pilot and then a test pilot and then he broke the sound barrier he had a very calm and gravelly voice and everyone thought oh wow Chuck Yeager is so cool and in control and so people started imitating him and so there's a theory that pilot voices are now like that partly because of him obviously it just makes sense also to sound calm and authoritative yeah I was looking into air traffic control generally and um the guys who do it at Heathrow particularly the ones who are in the tower they do 90 minute dedicated towering they sort of stare at the screen and they they make sure all the planes come in and then in their break after 90 minutes there's a special room that they go to where they're told

not to read emails they're told not to do anything where they're where their eyes are staring at anything because of the intensity of it so there's just movies and books for them to read it's like a recreation room for them to go into they have their break and then they come back for the intensity of flight yeah you know you can eavesdrop on them now if you want really you can eavesdrop on any air traffic control you like there is an app I think it's called live ATC and you can basically get that and tap into the conversations that air traffic control are having and it's if your plane isn't taking off yet or it's delayed or you know it's not landing yet and you can find out what on earth is going on and I think I don't know if it's technically legal um in some some countries

so you might want to read your constitution first but um yeah it sounds really cool and you can understand all of it because I didn't know that air traffic control is all done in one language the language of English except for one country which I don't know people can guess what that is North Korea no fine with English and North Korea is France yeah I was reading that one of the problems that air traffic control people have is that obviously they're monitoring planes that are going by but other things register on the screen and I was reading a report that in Ireland they often have to report UFOs because they're appearing quite a lot these unexplained so they don't necessarily think that they are alien spacecraft um the problem is is that at night

sometimes the instruments are so sensitive to picking up lights and so on that they think what they often mistaken as a possible UFO are a flock of birds uh clouds and then even possibly a large truck on the ground um we're gonna have to move on very shortly oh really about Guinness yeah oh yeah um so know your audience handy so Guinness uh was invented in Wales at what point exactly do you think you lost the Mandy well there's there's a pub uh in a place called bloody hell land plan fair feckon I think is what it's called it's near Bangor and they claim that Arthur

Guinness uh took the recipe from there on his way to Dublin in the 1750s and they say it should be called Guinness sometimes it's called that after about 10 30 11 p.m various other names but it obviously has a really huge worldwide spread Guinness which is you know people think it was a very Irish thing but it's three biggest markets well its biggest market is the UK isn't it and then its second biggest market is Nigeria which overtook Ireland about 10 years ago now I think very popular there and also they're drinking the strongest stuff in Nigeria so that's the fact it was more than 10 years ago but they're drinking the more original Guinness so it was originally the Welsh stuff yeah the Welsh stuff

after you won them back when did you think you lost them again so when it first came about in the very start of the 19th century wasn't it Arthur Guinness then it was stronger so it's 70 it was it's not 17 percent it's 7.5 percent in Nigeria and that's because it has to be much hoppier to be able to be exported abroad and more alcohol to preserve it more and so that's what they're drinking and apparently there was someone who worked in the Guinness factory one of the Guinness factories in Nigeria who was saying you tell Nigerians that they drink Guinness in Ireland and they're like why do they drink Guinness there it's our drink you guys can have some beef for the few countries after this

in 1991 you know the little widget inside a Guinness can which helps it to fizz up in 1991 that was voted by Britons as the best invention of the previous 40 years very good that was in second place the internet okay it is time for fact number two and that is James okay my fact this week is that the first ever bone transplant used a dog's bone to repair a man's head the patient was immediately ex-communicated by the church for no longer being fully human that is incredible so it was in 1668 and the surgeon was called Yob Van Meereken and the patient was a Russian nobleman called Butterline and is that funny Butterline Butterline had been hit in the head with a sword and he put some dog bone in there

and then he survived but he was immediately ex-communicated and then Butterline demanded that the surgeon took the dog bone back out but by then his own bone had regrown around it so he couldn't get it out so he was stuck and he's yeah yeah he's still there in purgatory somewhere but that's a thing that happens doesn't it we are I believe when we're born we have over or around 300 bones but then as we grow up it slowly shrinks down to about 206 and that's because there's a lot in the head which fuses over so if you're gonna put a bone in that you want to take back out don't go for the skull it's just it's it's all about the fusion up there yeah I'm not sure that's except I mean that's with babies isn't it with cartilage turning into bone yeah oh but old

Butterline's head fused well they do well because bones regenerate very very well so if you've ever broken a bone which very most people have I broke a bone last year and they just say keep it still for a month and it's fine and that's why things like this can work and it's why in the 18th and 19th centuries in fact so from when Cook got to Tahiti he met Tahiti Islanders and he realized that they fixed skull fractures with coconut so if you had a skull fracture they'd cut out the damaged bit of your skull and they just slot a bit of coconut shell in there and then your new bone grew around that yeah it's really just the right shape yeah that's so good at doing it if you were running could you do that Monty Python thing of yes so just another kind of transplant you can have I we've mentioned

this before a big thing is fecal transplants where your stomach bacteria don't work and you have someone else's feces implanted into you so we've mentioned that before on the podcast you know it's a big thing these days but I've read this I did not know this okay a few people have had it great good on you a few a big problem these days is people doing DIY fecal transplants based on youtube tutorials and I looked them up and now my youtube is just going to be recommending these things to me for weeks and it's true and because the problem is you can you know the microbiome all the bacteria in your intestines are very very powerful so transferring cells can have an unintended consequence so normally you're screened for any autoimmune diseases things like

this and if you have any you can't be a poo donor but if you just do a DIY one at home you can transfer over you can transfer obesity but just what you control because the because your microbiome will change how much of it are you eating no you're not oh god okay is that how you transfer it by you to get no no it's not by no you go and watch these tutorials they'll tell you except no don't and but you can you can even hand over um like poor sleep but how do you get it in does it which how do you insert it I think it goes up not down I think it's a pill if you do it properly it's a pill I don't know what youtube tells you youtube probably just no if you go to bumfishing.com you will find yeah you know cats can repair their own bones okay and do you know how they do it

sorry what do you mean so not naturally like if you break it uh well that yeah basically so if cat breaks its bone uh the way it repairs it is just it purrs and that's what cat purring is they think now is they're healing their fractures so well they pour a frequency which is between 25 and 150 hertz and sound if you fire a certain sound frequency at damaged bones or damaged muscles then it repairs them and it's exactly the right sound frequency and it's all the reason they're just sitting there purring contentedly it's just they're just healing and developing their bones and muscles I think you've got my notes that's what they're doing they're very clever um so there was another dog uh human transplant this was in 1891 it was a doctor called Phelps um there was a

young boy who had injured his leg and a bit of his bone had come off and they'd had to remove in so they had to put a dog bone in there but the way that they did it in those days is both the donor and the host were attached to each other for two weeks so that the blood circulation could carry on going round so this young boy had he was playing like a wait a minute one two three four a five-legged race with a dog because he had to have one of his legs attached to the dog's leg that's cool isn't it did he get to keep the dog afterwards um because you'd be so bonded by then I think um well they've said that they both recovered after a group a brief convalescence so they both got better yeah they did a lot of experimenting on dogs with surgery because another

kind of uh surgery that has a similar mechanism is skin grafting really so if you put a skin graft on then it can cause new skin to regenerate and the first person to experiment with skin grafts properly was a guy called Walter Charlton who did it actually with Robert Hook who we talked about a few weeks ago this was in 1663 and he basically did it by he got a dog and he sliced the skin off one side of the dog and then plugged it onto the other side to see if it would be able to like still stay alive there and grow but the dog understandably just chewed the whole thing off quite quickly so they got it back in the lab and they tried to do it again and the dog escaped and was never seen again wow so that's why they put doors on hospitals now

are we ready to go on to x communication sure okay so um there's a big long list online of things you can get us communicated for uh posing as a nun stealing from a christian who's been shipwrecked oh no oh no um taking place in any jousting tournament between 1245 and 1248 oh no i did one this afternoon at 1247 uh well the good news is that there is an ecclesiastical law which is canon 1324 which makes a number of exceptions for excommunicable offenses and if you're under 16 you can't be excommunicated and also if you lack the use of reason because of drunkenness that's why ireland has remained such a religious country when the rest of us have drifted and there are some offenses where oh you might be excommunicated and there are some which bring

immediate automatic excommunication so grasping people up after confession just automatic um desecrating holy communion fair enough for you christ um this is all over the internet physically attacking the pope which i would have thought yeah i think fair play actually that's probably yeah excommunicable but there is always a way but there's a way back i because i thought it was that you were if you were excommunicated you were out and that's it you're not you're not even a catholic anymore yeah and it's not the case no you stay catholic and actually they do if you go i mean you probably know this a lot of you but if you go to catholic resources online they say the whole point of excommunication is to try and encourage you to repent and come back to the church

and so you can be unexcommunicated yeah it's the naughty step basically it's the naughty step yeah but there is i like the Eucharist one where the you're not allowed to throw away the Eucharist because what that basically means is that if you're a priest and you're going giving the Eucharist you will be excommunicated if there's wine left to the end and you toss it away which is why at the end you have to drink all of the wine leftover as the priest and eat all of the bread and that's why the bread they they work really really hard to engineer crumb free Eucharist bread because if you drop a crumb then that's it you're out you've automatically gone i love that bread so much do you yeah i'm annoyed you can't get in shops i would totally when are you when are you eating

this stuff at church oh every sunday where the fuck are you guys wow you are definitely excommunicated you just keep going up in a different mustache meanwhile i was there necking into the bottle of wine it's really hard though to get uh excommunicated these days as you were saying it's um there was a site that was online called count me out dot ie and yeah and it was a website that was providing information to how you can be excommunicated if you wanted to go out so it was sort of gave you the form that you could send in and um you would so because the idea is that you need it on your baptism certificate to say that you're officially excommunicated but then this was launched in

2009 this website and in that same year the pope set up new canon laws about what is uh the way to get uh excommunicated which they couldn't get passed they couldn't get their head around it so the site had to close because they were like we've got no idea how to get excommunicated anymore it's too complicated so it's not difficult i don't think to get automatically excommunicated like you said there's two types there's the automatic super easy flush communion wine down the toilet you're out i mean i've said before on the podcast that i have been excommunicated because i'm a catholic and i mentioned jesus is false i've done it again you've done it again yeah jesus if you mention jesus is foskin you get automatically excommunicated

you do but to get specifically excommunicated is quite special and to get excommunicated by the pope is very exciting so he does this very rarely and the last one was the start of last year and it was someone who spilled secrets from the confessional oh yeah that was the first for about two or three years i think yeah in 2014 uh the mafia in italy got excommunicated and high time i think 2014 um so in the but the really cool thing was in the 15th century used to be able to excommunicate all kinds of stuff so um in the 1480s the bishop of orta orta in france he ruled against some slugs which were in his garden and he ordered them to leave or be cursed and basically slugs were quite frequently excommunicated in the 15th century

oh really because it made it easier to uh destroy them so what what as a new felt less guilty about it he felt less guilty like the people who were looking after gardens didn't want to destroy god's creatures but if they'd be an excommunicated yeah that must have been a hassle for the pope though just every slug he needing to approve the excommunication i think he could send an envoy i found a guy who was excommunicated called pedro the cruel um and he was excommunicated by a guy called blessed urban the fifth and yeah so he was uh excommunicated uh for cruelty um so i don't know which came first the name but it's like a chicken egg thing with that one speaking of urban popes um i don't know if this is true but it's certainly stated online that it's true

and and that is that pope urban the eighth um ordered that anyone that found guilty of taking snuff in church should be excommunicated and that's because it led to sneezing which he thought too closely resembled sexual ecstasy ah i get that i understand that um guys we're gonna have to move on a second and we're gonna have to move on without ever finding out why james has been talking about jesus's foreskin but um can i just give you one fact about catholic confessions yeah um so this is the news that paddy power is getting really wrapped up with the catholic church and it's a good thing so first of all in fact last year the pope came here and apparently paddy power erected a massive confessional did any of you guys see it though it was just opposite phoenix park it

was obviously a publicity stop but they said they'd put these adverts out saying we invite everyone to come and have their sins absolved sorry do you mean a single enormous booth yes yes a drive-through are you joking you drive through you you do is outside a park right hang on if it was a drive-through is is the priest in another car next to you they didn't i don't know they didn't seem to advertise the presence of a priest it's not how drive-throughs work if you go to mcdonald's you've not got ronald mcdonald in a Mazda going past you throwing burgers at you but no this isn't the first time they've bonded so in 2010 there's a church in suffolk right in a new market which was trying to raise 65 000 pounds for refurbishment they phoned lots of places

they phoned up paddy power one source said because they thought island is a catholic place it's a catholic looking name why don't we just phone them up and see if they want to donate and paddy power said yeah we'd love to donate to your new confessional and so they did they put 10 000 pounds i believe towards a new confession box and it's got their own little logo their little paddy power marker it says it's got a plaque on it that says paddy power sin bin in a church like do they offer odds on the things that are going to be confessed inside we've got adultery at eight to one today if you fancy a flutter amazing we need to move on to our next fact okay it is time for fact number three and that is andy my fact is there is a world record for pulling a train with model trains

this is so cool uh is it cool it's cool we're going to get a real insight into andy's childhood in the next five minutes you better believe it um so this was uh i saw this guy called tim dunne who tweets a lot about trains he is really cool he put this up recently and this record was broken a few years ago in germany at a place called miniatur wunderland and it's and the video is online it's incredible so it's they they get 198 mini trains and they've got they've all got little engines in them and they attach them to one single row which is attached to the front of a massive well not a massive train not a train um and the really it just looks massive because of the little ones next to it

yeah it does yep um and so and it works and they they put they managed to pull whole thing along and the really cool thing is that the model trains are exactly the same as the same model of train as the train that they're pulling when did they do can they get on the rail gauge can they fit on the rail uh it was done under controlled circumstances some of it was not a normal railway yeah i think they built them a little platform oh did they okay so it's not a platform oh dear here we go yeah but they're not saying it's a viable way for trains to get about in future and no they're not no they were very clear on that this miniature vunderland is amazing isn't it i think it's the biggest uh model railway in the world is it or something yeah um it has an airport with planes

taking off and landing it has a football stadium where they have commentary of a famous football match that happened um it has it because it's germany it has many natureists and people doing things in bushes oh wow yeah it's a thousand one hundred square meters and they started by building germany as a replica of germany and they've moved on to other countries like venice and and they they got like countries like venice really dan is dan's still living in the 14th century aren't you dan you met city states didn't you yeah they are moving they they are moving on to other countries though right they've got a whole spread of countries yeah like sydney and so as i think you were trying to say they do have a bunch of

countries already there so they expanded into austria and america it's kind of it's a weird sort of territory war america is actually a continent not a country sorry you're absolutely right i meant the united states of america um at switzerland scandinavia which again not a country but they did love them all in together but they've planned up to 2028 what they're gonna do and so england's getting on there england and scotland are getting on there by 2021 island and wales have to wait till 2025 i'm afraid oh yeah um one thing it does have is it has a mini replica model of the miniature vunderland with tiny miniature trains going around wow really they also have because they got a Guinness world record they also have the adjudicator who came to give them the world

record they made a mini version of her to stand in front of their building nice yeah so the guy who came up with the idea was called frederick brown uh and in 2000 he'd been running a nightclub for eight years and he decided he didn't want to do it anymore he said this is not my life people are always getting drunk they hug you but they do not know you and so on so he realized he wanted to do something else and he didn't know what to do and he said at that time it was possible to send emails to thousands of aol users without it being spam around 3000 people answered my question for what kind of attraction they would like to see in hamburg for men a model railroad was number three for women it was the last out of a list of 40 but i'm a man so we went with the

model thing um the model railway thing model trains someone who loves model trains is rod stewart oh yes so he he has one he has a model railway the size of a tennis court in his home he has admitted as well that he likes model trains so much that when he goes on tour he books a second hotel room just for his model trains and they go on the road with him yeah he loves it he's he's featured on um model railroad magazine a bunch of times he's been a cover star yeah cover star and he wrote to them saying can i be included in your magazine they didn't write to him yeah and he's more proud of that than being on the front of rolling stone on enemy he's he's not the only rock star um neil young as well massively into model railways and he um actually has bought

into a big brand called lion all trains he did that in the 90s and he's worked on sound technology for them really yeah so for when they're moving this is how into it he is when he's playing with his model railways he uses a pseudonym created to be the model railway enthusiast he calls himself Clyde Coyle and Clyde Coyle is his alter ego who runs Coyle pics which is a short film set inside his model railway system oh god totally into it oh so exciting i don't know if that's the best way to recruit new users and that is a problem for railway model railway enthusiasts right so the average age of your model railway enthusiast is going up and up and they're worried that the younger generation is not as into it so there was for instance there was an interview with a guy

called Ron May who lives in phoenix and he said that he's been into railways since the 50s right and he's like really obsessive about it and they interviewed his son who's 26 years old a guy called tony who said i'm so impressed by my dad's level of detail the layout he recreates train scenes from the 1950s right down to what pigeons would have been at what train station at what time i had no way what pigeons he's done the research he's a keen reader of what pigeon magazine and and and the rust streaks on the box cars and so he was saying i really respect my dad for this so the journalist said and are you the younger mr may attempt to take up the hobby and he said to be honest not really no yeah in the um the national model railroad association has 19 000 members

and their average age is 64 and their average sex is male very cruel of you to associate them with average sex average sex a lot of them may be very fiery lovers look if you scale this up a hundred times bigger um there was a great story in the newspaper in february and this is the headline oxygenary and sat on burglar who tried to steal his model railway collect collection this is true he's a guy called john headington he was in his mid 80s he used to be work on the railways and um there was a man who broke into his home and was trying to steal his very valuable

trains and he and his wife sat on the burglar together until the police arrived really is that sweet i reckon if wow 80 year old people sat on me i would still be able to get up yeah well you weren't the this burglar and mr barnes who yeah it was actually just a five-year-old child who's been invited around to play picked up one of the trains sat on him we're gonna have to move on very shortly but the model trains have been around for a while so the early 1800s really almost since trains but the first model trains were carpet the first were carpet railways and they were trains that you'd have in your house and they were invented in the 1840s and they were called the birmingham dribblers which having just kicked in birmingham means a different thing today

but they they were called that because they were basically a steam powered boiler so they'd have an alcohol fueled flame and then it was powering it was steam power so it had a big tray of water above it and then it would dribble because because it was made of tin so it had lots of gaps it just dribbled all over your carpet as you ran it but it was also a massive fire risk because there's an alcohol fueled flame on a very unstable wooden floor and all the floors were wooden in those days so it would frequently just bump into the furniture and fall over and set fire wow we've come a long way um should we move on to our final facts uh we can do yeah i have another world record about trains yeah okay quickly just um in 2012 uh romanian wedding salon got the world's longest

train of a wedding dress okay it was uh 1.85 miles long what and it's stretched across the entire city centre of bukarest and it was modelled by a lady called Ima Dumitrescu who went up in a hot air balloon while the train went down throughout the whole town and according to the telegraph this was mostly ignored by unimpressed bystanders okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact my fact this week is that in the 19th century if the owner of an estate died it was traditional for the estate's beekeeper to inform all of the bees of the death and then allow them to mourn by covering the hives in black veils but you wouldn't have to inform them one by one would you I think you only tell one of them

and he lets the others know yeah yeah this was this was the thing that did often happen it was um it was called telling the bees and this was not just for and how did it get that name um it's and it wasn't you weren't just telling them about death you were telling them everything if there was you know juicy gossip the bee the beekeeper would go to the hive and be like guess what guess who's guess who's dating who and by keeping them informed you pleased the bees because they wanted to feel part of the family and so that was that was the purpose of them and when when people died if they weren't told people would worry that they would get sick and die so that was a very important thing to do to make sure the bees knew otherwise and yeah it wasn't just death it was

they get offended if they're not kept up to speed was the idea wasn't it so if you had a new birth in the family or if you got married or anything like that then you had to inform them straight away if a couple got married and they went back to their parents house they had to introduce themselves formally to the bees uh because and sometimes actually if you had a wedding and you got married then you'd leave them a piece of wedding cake as well to make sure that they knew that they were welcome and they were invited to funerals as well I read they were invited to weddings too sometimes really yeah yeah you don't want to be sat next to one of them in a wedding the baby on my left and then the swarm of bees on my right sometimes they protected them when

the body was leaving the house as well they would turn the hive around so they wouldn't see and get people did mad stuff before telly didn't they that's really what we've learned you had to sing to them sometimes there were traditional bee songs along the same lines you know so bees bees awake your master is dead another you must take what a song I don't know it does sound like a bee side there was I was reading a story actually which one of our colleagues Matt posted a few years ago on our forums but it's related to the fact that every funeral another thing that you did out of respect was you turned around the beehives that belong to the dead person out of respect and then sometimes you all didn't know how to do that so this is in 1790 a report where

a servant didn't really know about the fact that you had to turn the beehives around when their owner died and so instead he lifted the beehives up which of course released them all and they intact the entire funeral procession the horses and their riders a general confusion took place attended with loss of hats wigs etc many stings and a corpse left unattended and so the oldest laws ever in Ireland are the seventh century Brehren laws and we have a we have a group of seventh century Irish lawyers in tonight I believe they were written by a Welshman called no so they have some bee laws in these laws and so if your bees were found to be collecting

nectar from flowers on the neighbour's land they could be accused of trespassing and to get around the laws the rule said you had three years of freedom with your bees so they were allowed to do what they wanted for three years but on the fourth year if they went to a neighbour's area and they ate his flowers next to her then he had to give the bees to the neighbour as payment yes so there was another one if a person was stung by a bee they were entitled to a meal of honey from the bee's owner a bowl of honey yeah some food some honey unless he or she had retaliated by killing the bee they used to think that honey was ready made though didn't they until in fact 1800

people like around around about then the prevailing belief was that honey just existed in the atmosphere and all the bees were doing was they were picking it up and putting it in their houses like stealing it and so it wasn't until then that they sort of people realised that it was a chemical reaction and the bees actually added some stuff to it and then so they just thought bees were collecting it from flowers and it was naturally produced and in fact people thought that bees were naturally produced as well so for a long time people like Aristotle and Virgil wrote that bees didn't give birth to their young they went to nearby flowers and they found baby bees in them what and they gathered them up in their mouths and took them back to a hive

and that's how bees come about well there's the other belief about how you got bees which was called bugonia I think and that's the it was spontaneous generation from dead animals so we may have mentioned that in the past it was the bees came out of the body of a dead ox if you had a dead ox you left it for a long time you would get bees and the different things came out of different animals so drones came from horses hornets came from mules and wasps came out of asses um which does sound uncomfortable and but and there were even like Virgil gave instructions on how to get bees so he said you have to take a bullock whose second year's horns are just curling over its brow stop up its nostrils and mouth and beat it to death and then it's not one of

Virgil's best lines uh and then you have to shut up in it shut it up in a room uh with some herbs and then after nine days uh the bees will appear wow from the body yeah because they in Egypt in about 250 BC they thought the same thing and when you when a cow died when ox died you buried it but it had its horns sticking up above the ground and they thought the body would basically turn into bees and then they'd come up through the horns so you must have just been walking through Egypt and you've got these horns poking up through the ground everywhere turning into bees that's very cool what's the treading on lego do you know that there is undertaker bees so roughly uh daily about 15 bees will die in the area of the hive and uh what happens then is they wait for a few days when

it loses moisture and some bees will go out and they'll pick up the bee and they'll drop them off about 150 meters away and it's it's known as the undertaker bee they're bringing them so it's the idea to get it away from the hive so that anything coming to eat it doesn't find the other living bees is that the idea 150 feet I should say meters is a pretty long journey yeah I don't think you still do that they're not as advanced as undertaker humans I think you'd be annoyed if you called an undertaker to take away your granny and they just picked her up dumped her by the roadside 150 feet away I think the undertaker bees also grab the deceased in their jaws and drag them that way so there's a belief there's really ancient about bees that is still practiced according to a lot

of beekeepers that I know and also on the internet so I don't know if there are any beekeepers here but they enter a thing called tanging so there's been this belief that it's been around for over 2000 years that they really bees really love the sound of metal clashing together with other metal and that is how you can calm them down so if they're freaking out and swarming you can settle them into your hive and so you know you've got pictures of women in the 16th century who had gotten bashed metal onto a saucepan to try and get the bees to settle and if you go onto beekeeper forums they still say do you do tanging do you guys do tanging so we know what they think the bees think um I think they think that it's like thunder and so when they hear thunder then they look for

shelter and so they'll immediately go back into the hive okay yeah maybe it works we're gonna have to wrap up in a second guys yeah do you know bees communicate by headbutting each other just like people of Dublin and it is to communicate with their rivals but I really like the way this was found out so one of the world's leading bee experts or two of them actually called Thomas Celian Kirk Visha and they were on an island off the coast of Canada I believe and basically what they do is one of them goes out and places lots of bee hives of different levels of goodness and then he waits outside though and then they release some bees and wait for them to find the hives and then Kirk sits outside one of the hives with paint on a brush and as soon as he

sees a bee go in he gets poised and when the bee emerges he flicks the paintbrush at them to put a little colored dot on a bee and that marks it as a bee that's been into this hive and then the bees go back to let's call it base uh where they started out and so the ones with a pink dot you know have been to one hive and then the ones with a yellow dot I think he puts on others have been to another hive and then we learn that because bees are always trying to advertise to each other where they should move what house they should move to next they love moving house and so they come back and they're always saying hey you should come and move to the house that I've just found for us so when the ones with a pink dot come back they want everyone to move to the

pink dot house whereas the ones with a yellow dot want them to move to the other house and they head butted out until they've decided and they just bash into each other until eventually they've been silent so you know you you basically can cuss a bee to the extent it says fine we'll move to your place it's fine that's crazy that's it just on um on color um with the hives um I was reading a thing it was just reminded me that um there was in north france somewhere there was a hive that was producing blue honey and then green honey and they had no idea what was going on and um it was just doing it for ages and they had to investigate it going have we have they evolved in some way what's going on why what what's producing this um and they think they've worked

out the answer and that is uh 2.5 miles away is an M&M factory um okay that is it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter account Simon at Shriverland Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at James Harkin and Shazinsky you can email podcast at qi.com yeah or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or no such thing as a fish.com thank you so much we'll see you again good night