No Such Thing As A Fish - 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.

This thing is a fish, a weekly podcast coming to you live this time here with Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunton 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 Chisinski. How were they tonight? Bit cold, actually. Okay, thanks very much.

Pipe down. Okay, my fact this week is that if you were flying from England to Dublin, the air traffic control waypoint that you pass that tells you're going the right way is called Guinness. Yeah. So these things are 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 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 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 cartoons. So your wayfinding points are going to be called,

I taught, and then. And you can fill the rest in for that. No, what? Yeah, I taught, and then, I tore, and then, what did you talk? Is it a... A putty. Tatt.

And then lastly, I did. But they're all really badly spelled, presumably. So tat must be with three T's on the end or 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 that and be like, where are we? Yeah, they are very good. Yeah, you're from South London, aren't you, Dan?

And I looked at the one that was closest to where you live, and it's D-O-R-K-I-Dorky. No. Oh, my. Your honour. I'm getting heckled in the sky. And sometimes they have local tributes to people who just live nearby. So near St. Louis, there's Annie and then Lennox.

Oh, cool. And then in Boston there's Nimoy, because Leonard Nimoy was born there. Nice. 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. That's sweet. With a U. With a U.

Instead of the double O. Yeah, nice. Sometimes they changed them though. So in 2010, when the apprentice was massive in America, you had Donald Trump and you fad. You're kidding. Yeah, no, you fad.

You fad. It's a less menacing when you say it like that, isn't it? It's how it's spelled UF-I-R-D, you 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 past a vunker. And so they actually changed it. They removed it, so it no longer exists those waypoints. Yeah. That's cool. Wow. Well, you applaud, but now there are 100 pilots lost somewhere over America. 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. Ah. The tits, for instance, is your checklist for your navigation radio, which is Twist, Identity, Tech. and select. And that's how they teach you how to fly a helicopter. Really?

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 under carriage, fuel, or flaps, instruments, switches, and harnesses. And they know it as bumfishing. Really? Wow.

That's good, isn't it? That's very cool. Yeah, see, they've got a sense of humor these guys. You don't want them too funny, though. I found out a guy who we think is the man behind the airline pilot voice. What? Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We're just experiencing a little turbulence as we head over the North Atlantic,

but don't worry, that's going to be passing away. It's not the same voice each time. Well, that's not pre-recorded. It's not pre-recorded. I'm not saying it's pre-recorded. I'm saying there's a kind of way that pilots speak. Oh. Which is, you know, get, well, we've got some turbulence.

We're going to be through it in about five minutes. But surely they're just being calm. They are being calm, but I've read a theory, which is that they're all being calm because of Chuck Yeager, I think we might have mentioned before. So 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's 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. I was looking into aerotraffic. generally and 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 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 an earth is going on. And I think, I don't know if it's technically legal in some some countries, so you might want to read your constitution first. But, 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 if 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. The problem 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 clouds and then even possibly a large truck on the ground we're going to have to move on very shortly I've got to talk to about Guinness yeah oh yeah

know your audience handy so Guinness was invented in Wales at what point exactly do you think you lost them Andy well there's a in a place called Bloody hell

Flanféchen, I think is what it's called, it's near Bangor, and they claim that Arthur Guinness took the recipe from there on his way to Dublin in the 1750s, and they say it should be called Guinwis. It sometimes is 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 of it as 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 stronger 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... Oh, the Welsh stuff, yeah. The Welsh stuff. After you won them back. When did you think he lost them again? So when it first came about in the very start of the 19th century, wasn't it, Afghanistan,

then it was stronger, so it's 70, it's not 17%, it's 7.5% in Nigeria, and that's because it has to be much hopier 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?

So I'll drink. You guys have some beef with a 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.

In second place, the internet. No. 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 excommunicated by the church

for no longer being fully human. That is incredible. Someone shouted out damn right. When was this? It was in 1668, and the surgeon was called Job van Meerkhan. And the patient was a Russian nobleman called Butterline. Is that funny?

Buttervine. 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 excommunicated 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 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 going to put a bone in that you want to take back out,

don't go for the skull. It's all about the fusion up there. Yeah, I'm not sure that's... I mean, that's with babies, isn't it, with cartilage turning into bone. Oh, but old Butterland's head fused. Well, because bones regenerate very, very well. So if you've ever broken a bone,

which 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 uh 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 they're 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. 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 implants it into you. So we've mentioned that before on the podcast.

You know, it's a big thing these days. But I read this. I did not know this. Okay, a few people have had it. Great. Good on you. A big problem these days is people doing DIY fecal transplants based on you,

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 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 obesity. What? What? You can Because your microbiome will change.

How much of it are you eating? No, you're not... Oh, God. Okay. Is that how you... By eating it? No. No, it's not by eating.

You both need to go and watch these tutorials. They'll tell you. Except, no, don't. But you can even hand over, like, poor sleep. But how do you get it in? Does it... 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 to do this. You should probably just, no, I'm going to put it. If you go to bumfishing.com, you will find... You know, cats can repair their own bones. Okay. And you know how they do it?

Sorry, what do you mean? So not naturally, like, if you break it, it's... Well, yeah, basically. So if cat breaks its bone, the way it repairs it is just it purrs. And that's what cat purring is, they think, now. What? No. They're healing their fractures.

So, well, they purr at 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 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, Anna. That's what they're doing. They're very clever. So there was another dog human transplant. This was in 1891.

It was a doctor called Phelps. 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 it. 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? Because you'd be so bonded by then, I think. Well, they've said that they both recovered after a brief convalescence. So they both got better. They did love experimenting on dogs with surgery. Because another kind of 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 he 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 communication. Okay, so there's a big long list online

of things you can get as communicated for. Posing as a nun stealing from a Christian who's been shipwrecked. Oh no. Oh no. Taking place in any jousting tournament between 1245 and 1248.

Oh no! I did one this afternoon at 1247. Well, the good news is that there is an ecclesiastical law which is canon 1324 which makes a number of exceptions for excommunicable offences and if you're under 16 you can't be excommunicated and also if you lack the use of reason because of drunkenness ah the old loophole if you're pissed you can do what the fuck you want that's why island has remained such a religious country when the rest of us have drifted so there are there are some offenses where

Oh, you might be excommunicated. And there are some which bring immediate automatic excommunication. So grassing people up after confession, just automatic. Desecrating Holy Communion, fair enough, the Eucharist. This is all over the internet. Physically attacking the Pope, which I would have thought, I think fair play, actually. That's probably excommunicable.

But there is always a way, there's a way back. Because I thought it was that if you were excommunicated, you were out and that's it. 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. It's the naughty step, basically. It's the naughty step.

But there is, I like the Eucharist one where 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, at 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 work really, really hard to engineer crumb-free Eucharist bread, because if you drop a crumb, then that's it, you're out. You're 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 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'm not as neck in another bottle of wine. It's really hard, though, to get excommunicated these days, as you were saying. There was a site that was online called count me out.i. And it was a website that was providing information to how you can be excommunicated if you wanted to go out. So it sort of gave you the form that you could send in. And 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 the way to get excommunicated, which they couldn't get past. They couldn't get their head round 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, wind 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 mention Jesus is false. I've done it again.

You've done it again. Yeah. If you mention Jesus is false and 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 it. It was very rarely, and the last one was the start of last year,

and it was someone who spilled secrets from the confessional. Yeah, that was the first for about two or three years, I think. Yeah, in 2014, the mafia in Italy got excommunicated. And high time, I think, 2014. But the really cool thing was in the 15th century, used to be able to excommunicate all kinds of stuff. So in the 1480s, the bishop of Othartin 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 because it made it easier to destroy them. What? What? As in you felt less guilty about it. You felt as guilty.

Like the people who were looking after gardens didn't want to destroy God's creatures but if they'd been excommunicated. 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. And he was excommunicated by a guy called Blessed Urban the Fifth.

And yeah, so he was excommunicated for cruelty. So I don't know which came first. The name was like a chicken egg thing with that one. Speaking of Urban Popes, I don't know if this is true, but it's certainly stated online that it's true. And that is that Pope Urban the 8th ordered that anyone that found guilty of taking snuff in church should be as communicated.

And that's because it led to sneezing, which he thought too closely resembled sexual ecstasy. Ah. I get that. I understand that. Guys, we're going to have to move on a second, and we're going to have to move on without ever finding out why James has been talking about Jesus' foreskin. Can I just give you one fact about Catholic confessions? Yeah.

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? It was just opposite Phoenix Park. It was obviously a publicity start, 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. drive-thru. Are you joking? You drive-through, you do, it was outside a park? Wait, hang on, if it was a drive-thru, 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. That's not how drive-thrues work. If you go to McDonald's, you've not got Ronald McDonald's 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, Ireland 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, 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, says Paddy Power Sin bin. In a church. Do they offer odds on the things

that are going to be confessed inside? We've got adultery at 8 to 1 today. If you fancy our 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. Is it cool? It's cool. We're going to get a real insight into Andy's childhood in the next time. You better believe it. So this was, I saw this guy called Tim Dunn, 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 the video is online. It's incredible. So they get 198 mini trains. And they've all got little engines in them. And they attach them to one single rope, which is attached to the front of a massive not a massive train, not a train.

It just looks massive because of the little ones next to it. Yeah, it does, yeah. And so, and it works, and they manage 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.

Can they get on the rail gauge? Can they fit on the rail? It was done under controlled circumstances, somewhere that was not a normal railway, yeah. Got it. them a little platform. Oh, did they? Okay. It's not a platform.

Oh dear, here we go. But they're not saying it's a viable way for trains to get about in future or anything. 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 model railway in the world, is it, or something?

Yeah. 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. It has, because it's Germany, it has mini-natureists and people doing things in bushes.

Oh, wow. Yeah. It's 1,100 square metres and they started by building Germany as a replica of Germany and they've moved on to other countries like Venice and they... Count of countries like Venice, really.

Stan's still living in the 14th century, aren't you? You meant city-states. Didn't you? They are moving on to other countries though, right? They've got a whole spread of countries. Yeah, like Sydney and so... 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. 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 going to do. And so England's getting on there. England and Scotland are getting on there by 2021. Ireland and Wales have to wait until 2025, I'm afraid. Oh. Yeah. One thing it does have is it has a mini replica model of the miniature Wunderland

with tiny miniature trains going around. Yeah. 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. So the guy who came up with the idea was called Frederick Brown.

And in 2000, he'd been running a nightclub for eight years, and he decided, 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 3,000 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. The model railway thing, model trains.

Someone who loves model trains is Rod Stewart. Oh, yes. So he has one. He has a model thing. 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 featured on a model railroad magazine a bunch of times. He's been a cover star of model railroad. 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 NME. He's not the only rock star. Neil Young as well, massively into model railways, and he actually has bought into a big brand called Lionel 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 Coil, and Clyde Coil is his alter ego.

who runs coil picks, which is a short film set inside his model railway system. Totally into it. Oh, it's so exciting. I don't know if that's the best way to recruit new users. And that is a problem for

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 for instance, there was an interview with a guy called Ron May who lives in Phoenix. And he said that he's been

into railway since the 50s, and he's like really obsessive about it. And they interviewed his son, who was 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 seams from the 1950s, right down to what pigeons

would have been at what train station, at what time. And no way. What pigeons? He's done the research. He's a keen reader of what pigeon magazine. And the rust streaks on the box cars. And so he was I really respect my dad for this, so the journalist said,

and are you the younger Mr. May tempted to take up the hobby? And he said, to be honest, not really. No. Yeah, and 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... There was a great story in the newspaper in February. This is the headline. Oxygenarian sat on burglar who tried to steal his model railway collection. This is true. He's a guy called John Hedington. He was in his mid-80s.

He used to work on the railways. And 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 two 80-year-old people sat on me

I would still be able to get up. Yeah. Well, you weren't this burglar, Mr. Barnes, who... Yeah. It was actually just a five-year-old child who'd been invited around to play, picked up one of the trains, sat on him.

We're going to have to move on very shortly. Just a model of him. 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 giggled in Birmingham means a different thing today. But 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 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 was 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. Should we move on to our final facts? We can do, yeah.

I have another world record about trains. Okay, quickly. Just in 2012. a Romanian wedding salon got the world's longest train of a wedding dress. Okay? It was 1.85 miles long

and it's stretched across the entire city centre of Bucharest 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 a 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, don't they? Yeah. This was the thing that did often happen. It was called telling the bees.

And this was not just for... And how did it get that name? 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 beekeeper would go to the hive and be like, guess what?

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 the purpose of them. And 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, you're right, it wasn't just death. It was because they get offended if they're not kept up to speed, it 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. 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. Very disruptive.

You don't want to be sat next to one of them in a wedding. I had 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 upset. People did mad stuff before tele, 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 B-side. 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 round the beehives that belong to the dead person out of respect, and then sometimes people didn't know how to do that. So this was 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 7th century Brehan laws. And we have a group of 7th century Irish lawyers in tonight, I believe. They were written by a Welshman called... No.

So they have some B laws in these laws. 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, nectar, then he had to give the bees to the neighbour's 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 meal of honey? Oh, great. Delicious. Like a bowl of honey?

Yeah. Some food, some honey. Yeah. 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 around about there. And 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 people realized that it was a chemical reaction and the bees actually added some stuff to it. 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 gather them up in their mouths and took them back to a hive. That's how bees come about. There's the other belief about how you got bees which was called Bugonia, I think. And that was spontaneous generation

from dead animals. So we may have mentioned that in the past. It was that 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 different things came out of different animals so drones came from horses hornets came from mules

and wasps came out of asses which does sound uncomfortable 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 of mouth

and beat it to death and then it's not one of Virgil's best lines and then you have to shut it up in a room with some herbs and then after nine days the bees will appear. Wow. From the body. Yeah, because they, in Egypt in about 250 BC, they thought the same thing and when a cow died or an 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. Worse than treading on Lego. Do you know that there's Undertaker bees? So roughly, daily, about 15 bees will die in the area of the hive. And 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 known as the Undertaker bee.

They're bringing that. 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. They could 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, don't her by the roadside, 150 feet away. I think the Undertaker bees also grab the deceased in their jaws and drag them that way. There's a belief that'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 2,000 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 would go out and bash metal onto a saucepan to try and get the bees to settle. And if you go on to beekeeper forums, they still say, do you do tanging? Do you guys do tanging? Do you guys do tanging? 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. Clever. Yeah, maybe it works. We're going to 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 Seeley and Kirk Vischer, 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 beehives

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 coloured dot on a bee. And that marks it as a bee that's been into this hive. And then the bee is going to be go back to, let's call it, base, 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 learned 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 where the 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 basically concuss a bee to the extent it says, fine, or move to your place. It was fine. That's crazy. That's it. Just on colour with the hives,

I was reading a thing. It just reminded me that 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 it was just doing it for ages, and they had to investigate it going, have they evolved in some way? What's going on?

What's producing this? And they think they've worked out the answer, and that is 2.5 miles away as an M&M factory. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. With any of us about the things we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter.

accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Shazinski. You can email podcast at qI.com. 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 job and we'll see you again.