SciShow Tangents - SciShow Tangents Classics - Bees

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

The Tangents crew needed to get out and enjoy some summer sun, so this week we're reposting our classic Bees episode! Tune in next week for a new episode!Do you ever just wonder, “are the bees doing okay?” They’re so important to our food industry and native ecosystems, and every couple of years it seems like something horribly bad is happening to them. So this week, we’re taking a look at the fascinating lives and deaths of bees! Can they recognize human faces or understand the concept of zero? Why are blister beetles mimicking sexy bee pheromones? And what do nightclubs and honeybee hives have in common? Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out SciShowTangnets.org![Poem]https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120316-hot-bee-balls-hornets-insects-brains-animals-science/http://jeb.biologists.org/content/jexbio/206/2/353.full.pdf[Truth or Fail]Handedness in beesBees understanding zeroBees recognize faces[Fact Off]Blister beetles: Drunk bees:[Ask the Science Couch]CCD: https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/colony-collapse-disorderGlyphosate:http://jeb.biologists.org/content/218/17/2799https://www.glyphosate.eu/glyphosate-mechanism-actionhttps://www.pnas.org/content/115/41/10305Native bees:https://www.wired.com/2015/04/youre-worrying-wrong-bees/http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Xerces_policy_statement_HB_Final.pdfhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5722319/[Butt One More Thing]Isopentyl acetate:https://www.extension.entm.purdue.edu/beehive/pdf/Breed_et_al.pdfhttps://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/isoamyl_acetate#section=Top 

Hello! As you may have noticed, this episode of SciShow Tangents is a rerun. Science podcasting is hard work, so we're going to take a week off. We're going to recharge our brains. We're going to work on our science poem rhyme schemes. We'll be back stronger than ever next week. But we wanted to reshare this episode because we really liked it a lot. It's also relevant right now because it features a lovely poem by Sari about giant Asian hornets, which are the murder hornets that you've been hearing about

and the little bees that cook them to death. We'll be back next week with a new episode. Until then, enjoy this classic from the SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week joining me as always are Stefan Chin. Hello. How you doing? Okay, I'm doing good.

What's your tagline, Stefan? Winner, winner, chicken dinner. We've also got Sam Schultz here joining us. Hello. How are you doing? Good. Very tired from work brain. What's your tagline today? It was going to be my brain, but I already said brain. So now my ears are ringing. That's my thing. Sari Riley is here too. Yep. Science communicator and writer. How are you doing, Sari?

I'm okay. Also tired. Sari, what's your tagline? My dinosaur son. Oh. Take care of him. I'm Hank Green. How have I been doing?

Fine. I just had a really big sandwich. So we'll see how that goes. Smells great in here. And my tagline, I guess, is the bank is open. So here's the situation. Every week on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to amaze one up and delight each other with science facts.

And we're playing for glory and also for Hank bucks. They don't do anything useful except more glory. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but we will probably go on tangents because that's the name of the podcast. So if the rest of the team deems the tangent unworthy, we'll force you to give up one of your Hank bucks. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with a

traditional science poem from Sari Reilly. Is it about dinosaurs or babies? It's not. It's about my favorite insect behavior of all time. Honeybees seem sweet as they buzz and forage and in the cold dark of winter, with their honey storage, they cluster together and hug in the night to stay warm and toasty and not die from frostbite. But let me turn your attention to the honeybees in Japan, who fight giant monsters.

Well, hornets that can kill 40 a minute and are too tough for stings. But just wait, these bees have a trick up their wings. They swarm their foe and vibrate so fast you can hardly tell it's the bees being harassed like an oven they roast it at 47 degrees

while they themselves are completely at ease so these bee balls are ballin' they've got hornets trapped thanks nature and please more weird ways to adapt

oh my god I mean the whole podcast should just be that that was a hell of a poem That was a hell of a poem. That was a hell of a poem. Two Hank bucks. I agree. I think that was...

I got goosebumps. It had a lot of rhymes in it. Yeah, good weird ones. Thanks. So bees kill hornets by cooking them. Yeah, Japanese honeybees. They form a bee ball with all their friends around a giant hornet and then just vibrate. They just burn their ATP and it creates heat.

Yep. And it creates a lot of heat. And honeybees die at like 47.8 degrees and hornets die at like 47.2 degrees. So they get into a very narrow threshold of hot enough to kill a hornet, but not enough hot enough to kill the bee. It's like a fever. Yeah. Except multi-organism so the topic this week is bees and there's so many interesting things about bees i i already knew a number of good bee facts and then as soon as it was like oh it's a tangents

topic i read a bunch of stuff and what bees are Sari, what's a bee? They're a flying insect. They're in the order Hymenoptera. So that's with your wasps, your ants, sawflies. I don't know what those are, but that was in the list too. Somebody out there is excited about the sawfly I mentioned. Yeah. There's some entomologists out there like, yes.

And all the sawflies listening too. So they're best known for their role in pollination. We think of honeybees And all the soft lies listening, too. So they're known, best known for their role in, like, pollination. We think of honeybees as, like, the iconic bee species, the ones that make honey and build hives and are social and have a whole social order. But there are a bunch of different types of bees. There are stingless bees. There are solitary bees. So bees that don't have hives. Bees that don't have hives or just, like, dig holes in the ground or do other things.

But, like, they don't have't have like friends in their holes. Yeah. The lonely bee. They have babies in their holes though. Sometimes they put their babies in there. Yeah. Are most bees lone bees or are most bees hives? I think most species of bees are lone bees. Okay.

Bumblebee a hive bee or bumblebee a lone bee? Seems like it'd be hard to squeeze a lot of them into a hive, but all I know about bees is from Winnie the Pooh. Bumblebees are also social. I just looked it up on the internet. There are lots of bees that don't fit my traditional idea of what a bee is because they don't make beeswax and they don't make honey and they don't live in hives, but they are still bees. They still do pollination.

They're still awesome. And I still want to give them high fives. Also, most of those bees, because they don't have the hive to protect, don't sting very much. And some of them don't sting at all. It also makes sense because bees evolved from wasps, which I didn't know before today. But they evolved from a family of wasps and wasps are predatory hunters. So they go out and attack other things, would drag prey back to their holes in the ground nests.

And then they started dragging back pollen at some point because that's also a really good source of protein. And then eventually adaptations happened and they evolved into an organism that could survive off of just pollen instead of protein from other organisms and they got cuter too yeah well they got fluffier and less terrible and then they started making like good good juice for us to eat just put in a straw a big one like a boba tea straw what i take away from this is that i have previously believed probably incorrectly that wasps don't need to exist and we should just get rid of them because boo but we needed them for bees to happen but now that have happened, we can get rid of them, right? My guess is no.

I did no wasp breeding for this podcast. But they have to pollinate. If stingless bees and stuff, then they also do work and keep pests down. Like they eat something. And I'm sure that those things... Like my hamburger sometimes. Some of those things probably also eat us or spread disease. Sure.

So if the wasps are eating them, that's a good thing. Was it mosquitoes? We can get rid of all mosquitoes? I mean, I think so. Okay. Do frogs think so? Probably not. Probably the frogs would suffer a bit.

That was my first SciShow video that I ever wrote. Really? It was the mosquitoes. Where'd they come down on mosquitoes? Can we kill all the mosquitoes? No, probably not. We can kill the disease-causing ones. Yeah, it turns out there's lots of mosquitoes that don't cause malaria.

And those ones, they still might suck your blood, but they're not going to kill you. And they're also in different regions of the world, too. So there's big swarms of mosquitoes around the Arctic, and those are really helpful for pollination up there. And food and things like that. And so if we wipe out the malaria-causing ones, then there are still lots of mosquitoes in the world, but they just won't bother us as much, maybe. So now I believe I'm ready to go on to

where one of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of them is true. The rest of us have to decide which one we think is the real fact. And if we get it wrong, Stefan will get the hank buck. If we get it right, we will. This week, Stefan has got those facts for us. So this is a truth or fail about ways that bees are like humans. Okay. Fact number one, most bees are right-handed. Fact number two, bees can do simple addition. Fact number three, bees can differentiate between human faces.

Ah, shoot. I don't know anything about any of these. My theory with the bee left-handedness is like a Zoolander situation where they can't turn one direction, you know? Zoolander only turns one direction. He can't turn left. Okay. In his car or just like walking around? When he does the runway walk. Oh.

And then at the end of the movie, he has to turn left. And he does. Oh, huge spoiler! It's his big growth moment. Hank, have you ever watched Zoolander? Yeah. I don't know. So the handedness, does that go for all hands on one side? So you got three legs

and at the end of each leg is, let's just call it a hand. I don't know. What are they using their hands for? Do they manipulate anything? Or does it move their babies? Do they play baseball? Do they make little like balls for their babies and things like that? Like they bomb it.

They bomb out their food and then shape it. And maybe they like shape it more with their. Sure, that sounds like it might happen with their front hands. Seems like a double-handed situation to me. But then they're like, whoo. Then they push it at their baby with one of the hands like it might happen with their front hand. Seems like a double-handed situation to me. But then they're like, poof! Then they push it at their baby with one of the hands. Okay, well, the math one. How about that?

I read something about how... And I only read the headline in my research that bees can understand the concept of zero. Yes, I read that also. No, I don't know what it means. Because I don't... Like, now that we've said it out loud, I'm not sure I do.

And I don't know if it has any impact on addition. Right. But I feel like if you understand the concept of a complicated number like zero, then probably you understand the concept of, like, one thing and another one thing being two things. I can't even imagine, like, what circumstance bees would need to do that because they can, like, I also can't understand the circumstance in which bees would need to know what a they can like i also can't understand the circumstance in which bees would need to know what a zero is but apparently scientists at least in the headline form have figured that out yeah should have read that article probably what was the last one we can differentiate between human faces oh because that sounds like it's super useful for a bee

because that sounds like it's super useful for a bee. Well, if you have like... Is that Karen? Yeah. Is that Karen, my friend, who's going to, like, I don't know, do something nice to my hive? The bee in the bee movie can. Yes, he loves that woman. Differentiate between different faces

because he does fall in love with a woman. Yeah, and he knows what her mean boyfriend looks like. Does he get it in? I think he does. Do they have a child? I don't think they have a child, but I do believe they get married at the end, possibly. In the end, at least we all know that Donkey fucked the dragon.

I mean, that's a definite. There is evidence of that happening. Well, I'm going to go with the math one. Math. Yeah. Okay. Sam's going math. I'm going to go handedness because I don't understand what that means.

And so I'm going to go handedness because I don't understand what that means. And so I'm going to go. Now that everybody's votes are set, I'm going to go with facial recognition because it's the true fact. And I know that one. Oh, sneaker. Sorry. You are correct. Ah, garbage. You distracted us with bee booby trivia.

Yeah. So we couldn't even talk about it. But I was just thinking about bees having sex with humans and then garbage. Okay, so with the handedness, I think the headline is misleading. They basically had bees fly down a long tunnel. And in the middle, there was an obstacle that had two holes in it, one on the left, one on the right. And the bee had to choose which way to go.

And if one of the holes was bigger, it chose that way usually. But if they were the same size, a quarter of the bees had a very strong preference to go left, a quarter of the bees had a very strong preference to go right, and half of the bees had no preference. So they call that handedness,

but it's just sort of, they prefer going in one direction over the other. So for the addition one, that one I just made up. Okay. For the concept of zero thing, they trained bees to choose between two images that had different amounts of an object. And they were training them to choose the picture that had less of the object. And then they kept reducing the number until they were comparing a picture of the object to a picture of no object. And the bees chose no object

as a less thing. I see that there's something less than one. Yes. And that apparently demonstrates a stage three understanding of the concept of zero, which means that you understand

that zero can have a numeric value and belongs at the low end of the positive number line. How many stages to understanding zero? They don't have that last one. No, but I presumably do. Probably. I don't know your education level. This is the first time that that high of a level of number processing has been seen in insects,

but there was no mention of like addition, subtraction, those kinds of things. And then for the real one, differentiating between faces, they paired bowls of water with various images. Some were faces and some weren't. And the face bowls had sugary water. So training them to like go after those. And after several hours, they were choosing correctly 75% of the time.

But then additionally, there's a couple of tests that they can use to show how humans process faces, basically by taking parts of faces and coagulating it in our minds to be a recognizable person. And so using similar tests with the bees, they found that the bees could distinguish between different people's faces. They don't think they could recognize the same person if they like got a haircut and grew a beard and put on sunglasses. It's just like that specific photograph of that person. How well can corvids recognize people? Like how does this be facial recognition compared to crows? I don't know. I think the crows can recognize people really efficiently, like in the

same person over and over again. I don't know if that's like face. It could be a combination of stuff. That's true. As different animals definitely like look to different body properties and proportions to do identification. We are very face specific. I feel really skeptical about both of those things because I feel like bees probably are really good at recognizing patterns or something like that. Sure. So they're just like that is a flower, but it's my face. Right. It doesn't even know

that it's a face. Right. So there's some level. Like a crow knows that's a person. I hate that person. B would be like, that face flower tastes good. Yeah, that's an interesting new design that flowers have chosen. Yeah.

Alright, so I guess that means that I got a Hank Buck and Stefan got two Hank Bucks. Oh, yeah. They feel great. They feel good. They feel great. Got one in each hand. Shaking them up. Yeah, that's better than the numerical understanding of zero that Sam has.

Let's move on to our hats, though. I don't even get it. Alright, we're back. Here are our Hank Buck totals. Sari has two. I have one. Hank Buck totals. Sari has two. I have one. Sam has a zero. And Stefan has two. It's time for the Fact Talk.

Two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. The people receiving the presentations each have a Hank Buck to award to the fact that they like the most. But if they don't like either of the facts, they can just throw them into the dinosaur poop pit. But if they don't like either of the facts, they can just throw them into the dinosaur poop pit. So to determine who goes first, let's say the person who has the best bee sting story. I have a good boring one. Okay. I was sitting in class and I was like, oh, my head's itchy. And I scratched my head and a bee stung my head.

That's good. That's it. That's good. I don't know that I, now that I've said it, I don't feel like I don't have any good bee sting stories. Have you ever been stung by head. That's good. That's it. That's good. I don't know that I, now that I've said it, I don't feel like I don't have any good bee stings. Have you ever been stung by a bee?

Yeah. Okay. I've been spot like walking around in clover. I one time stepped on a yellow jacket nest and it went really badly for me.

How many did you get stung by? Uh, like three. Okay. But it's, they hurt, man.

And then you're having a panic at the summer camp. Yellow jacket story not admissible. Yeah, hurt, man. And then you're having a panic at the summer camp. Yellow jacket story not admissible. Yeah, no, I agree. That's not a real bee story. I win? I guess the game wins.

Does that mean I get to go first? Yeah, if that's what you want. I don't, but I will do it anyway. Digger bees are a variety of ground-dwelling solitary bees. Solitary bees don't live by the same rules as hive-based bees. They live in holes. And leading up to mating season, the females fill these holes with food

that then they will eventually lay their eggs in to feed their babies. So they put the food in the holes, and then they go off and emit pheromones to find a mate. But there is a species of blister beetle that has figured out a way to hack this whole system. So clusters of larvae will hatch from eggs and then like hang out together and emit chemicals that smell

or that mimic the pheromones of female digger bees. Then the male bees will come and they'll be like, hey, sexy lady bee. But then they'll be like, oh no, just a bunch of weird babies. And then the larva will crawl all over the bee and then they'll be like oh no just a bunch of weird babies and then the larva will crawl all over the bee and then the bee flies away and if it mates then the larva will crawl onto the lady bee while they're mating then the lady bee flies back to the nest and lays the eggs

but the larva crawl off of her and sneak into her nest while she's laying her eggs then they eat all the food and all the babies during the winter and then in the spring they emerge as beetles oh man it's like rude but bees it is very rude and they found out that in different parts of the country these larvae smell different depending on the kind of bees that there are in the place where they live. I think that evolutionary biology is wonderful and amazing. Scary. Jerks. Yeah, jerks. It's weird to have value judgments on these things

because, of course, they don't know that they're being jerks. They don't have values. That's pretty low. But, like, oh, man, you're just taking advantage of this poor mom. How do the larvae hang on? Yeah, there's really good pictures of it. I don't know how they hang. I think that they've got little claws.

So the pictures basically look like the bee has a shirt on made of larvae. Oh man, that's why it can't be so fuzzy. And they look really sad that they have babies all over them. I guess if you had larvae on you as a bee, you couldn't really do anything about it. They can probably feel them just like you could feel the bee on your head, maybe? Yeah, they're like, oh, my head itches.

It's like, oh, I'm covered in blister beetle larvae. I guess I will just sacrifice this crop of children to them. Can a bee look at their own body? Probably not, right? I don't think so. I don't think they have. They probably have really good peripheral vision, I would guess. They look like they got a big round thing, but still, that's the back of their body. They think they're all hiding. They're like, don't let them

see! I mean, I guess you're right. All they can do is be like, oh, well. I guess I'll go about my business. Well, that's like value judgments, too. I think a lady bee would look at this and be like, what the fuck is going on with you? You've got a bad shirt on. Please stay away from my

yeah body and my babies but yeah bees don't have that sort of adaptation they don't they can't look at the internet and see oh there's some kind of weird bug that crawls on me if i do this thing it's a it's a that is a very strange sexually transmitted disease yeah i guess you could call it that really a disease sexually transmitted larva well it's definitely a disease. I guess you could call it that. It's not really a disease. Sexually transmitted larva. Well, it's definitely a disease because it interferes with your normal biological processes of reproduction. What's a disease, Sari? I mean, like, is lice a disease? I feel like for me, disease is more microscopic, like disease interferes with your cellular processes in some level. But you can have like an infestation of lice. You can be infected with a tapeworm.

But then if it causes a disease, then that disease is something like, it's a separate step of the process. It's going to be so easy to Google disease and prove you wrong. Disease, a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant. You're right.

Heck yes. Yeah. These lice are just like Craigslist murderers. They are. They're like, did you want a lady bee? I'm over here. And they're like, I got catfished. I got catfished by a blister beetle

and now I'm covered in their babies. Can I go with my fact now? Yeah. No one's stopping you but yourself. Here's my fact. Nectar is just water with sugar and some other stuff in it. That is also what everything we turn into alcoholic beverages is. So yes, nectar can ferment and become alcoholic and honeybees don't mind drinking it. In fact, they like it. And once they begin lapping mind drinking it. In fact, they like it. And once they begin lapping up fermented nectar, they get a taste for it. And yes, they get drunk.

And sometimes they get so drunk that they are incapacitated and can't make it back to the nest. They fall off of flowers. They run into trees. They just get lost. But if they manage to get back to the hive, the guard bees can tell that they've gotten drunk and they will fight them and shove them and generally prevent them from coming into the hive until they get sober.

Also, bees will drink 100% ethanol. They found it last. And they don't die? Yeah, no, they're like, cool, they get drunk. They're party machines. They're party machines. They're party machines. And they got bouncers at the hive to prevent them from coming home drunk. Can they breathalyze the bees?

Or do they know how drunk they get? They don't know how drunk they get. I don't know that they've done any blood alcohol tests on the bees. Bees don't have blood the same way we do. Did I miss how they know if the bees are drunk, the bouncers? They just know. How the bouncers know they're drunk, I don't have blood the same way we do. Did I miss how they know if the bees are drunk? The bouncers? They just know. How the bouncers know they're drunk, I don't know. Okay.

It might be pheromone, like smell. You smell drunk. So I don't know if it's smell or if they can just tell by the flapping. The sloppy behavior. But apparently if they come in and they deliver enough alcoholic nectar, it can be a problem for the whole hive. Those were both great facts. I'm going to go ahead and say. Bees got a problem for the whole hive. Those were both great facts. I'm going to go ahead and say. Bees got a tough life, kind of.

They have friends who beat them up and little bugs that will crawl on them. We're killing all of them, maybe. No, just the honeybees. Oh, well, the important ones. It's pretty unclear. It's hard to do a good bee census. Yeah, because they're small. They're really hard to track down.

I kind of felt a survey. Yeah. Oh, you were joking. No, I was serious. Oh, okay. It became a joke. But yeah, it's hard to keep track of how many bees there are. Sometimes you look at me for so long that I don't know if I'm supposed to know what you're talking about or not.

Large numbers of things are hard to estimate in the animal kingdom. Large numbers of insects, even small fish, because the most you can do is like collect the sample in an area in a time and then multiply that to try and estimate the entire population.

The densities vary wildly and change a lot from year to year. Natural variance is totally a thing that happens. And so, yeah, it's just hard. Okay. I'm going to give it to drunk bees.

I'm sorry, Sam. I just like the question. I'm'm gonna give it to drunk bees i'm sorry sam i just like you know i'm gonna give it to sam yay i have one point we're all tied except you yeah cool and now it's time for ask the science couch where we have listener questions uh get answered by our couch of finally honed scientific minds sam Sam, do you have a question for us? Yes. Allison Bowers asks, how are bees doing? Is glyphosate a problem or not? What is glyphosate?

It is an herbicide and it is glyphosate, I think is the thing. It's Roundup. And then like we use a lot of Roundup in America because we have genetically engineered a lot of plants to be resistant to it. So our crop plants are resistant to it. So you don't have to selectively spray it. You can just go vroom over the whole thing. And the plant that has the resistance in it will not get killed. And all the other plants that you don't want will.

What I found is that glyphosate interferes with honeybee digestion, we think. So the way that glyphosate works, it interferes with a particular enzyme in plants and some microorganisms that's in their metabolic pathway. So the way it kills plants is it like breaks the metabolism pathway so they can't synthesize the compounds that they need and then the plants essentially starve. And so if it ends up in bee stomachs,

then that happens to the gut microbes that are digesting things in there. And so then the gut microbes die and then the bees get sick. Can that happen to us? I actually didn't look into this too much, but I think there's some toxicity that can happen if humans eat it, maybe because of a similar reason, because we have a bunch of different bacteria. But we don't use this metabolic pathway to synthesize compounds. And so just getting in contact with glyphosate won't affect how our cells metabolize things. How are the bees, Sari? They're doing all right. They're not great. It's unclear.

It's unclear. I had this question like a couple months ago. It's just like, how are the bees doing? Because you heard a lot about the bees and then all of a sudden they were out of the news. Just in your free time you had this question? Yeah, I was thinking. We did a SciShow on it. Yeah, and that's why, because I had the question. Most SciShows are just Sari wondering things. So around 2006, 2007, that's when the big colony collapse disorder scare happened, where beekeepers began to report high losses of like between 30 to 90 percent of their honeybee hives.

And it was a very specific kind of loss, too, where the queen and the brood, so like the larva, remained. They had food and all of the worker bees pretty much were gone. So like they disappeared. They weren't dead outside the hive, which would have indicated some sort of like poison or immediate disease. They just had disappeared. And we had no idea why. And we still don't really have a good idea why.

We think it might be some combination of nutrition, pesticide exposure, and maybe some sort of virus or parasite that infects the bees because when bees are sick, they generally fly away from their hive. So it's not to infect the rest of their social colony. And so colony collapse disorder has gone down. It only accounts for about 20% of the hives lost in the first quarter of 2018. So that's really good compared to like 90% of mysterious disappearances. But also we don't know why it's better now either probably. Yes. And so we don't, we're not prepared if it happens again.

And there are still other problems like pesticides are still there. Viruses still exist. Have we reduced our use of pesticides significantly? Not in the U.S. really. Okay. Yeah. And there's a problem because this is all honeybee focused, too. This is, which is an important type of bee. It helps pollinate a lot of our commercial crops and we know how to work with them. And a lot of beekeepers keep honeybees. And that makes it easier to study because then, like, you know how

many hives there are. You, are. The beekeepers get upset and scared when they're having colony collapses. Whereas wild bees... Yeah, and that's the problem is there are some researchers now in the last couple of years looking into the interactions between honeybees and wild bees. And we think that honeybee populations are impacting wild bees. Like a lot of wild bee species are going extinct

or dying out. And we don't know exactly why, whether it's habitat destruction or competition from honeybees that are foraging for pollen. As there's this decline in non-honeybee bee species like wild bees, the rise in honeybee population isn't enough to counteract it. And so we're losing a bunch of natural pollinators and we're not studying it enough because we're so worried about honeybees. And so there's a bunch of bee people being like, hey, hey, those guys over there, the ground bees,

the ones in the holes, pay attention to them. Don't forget about the hole bees. It's so strange to me to think that like all those bees just got a hole somewhere because it's one thing when you're like, there's a lot of bees around, but they all go back

to the same house where they all live together. Yeah. And there's a bunch of wild bees. It's like they each have their own hole somewhere. Like I just feel like poke the ground

anywhere in the world and be like, there's a bee. There might be a bee in there. Hey, where the heck do all the squirrels live? It seems like there's so many squirrels and then in the winter do all the squirrels live? It seems like there's so many

squirrels. They live in the trees! And then in the winter when all the leaves fall off, you don't see lots of squirrel houses everywhere. Not enough to account for all the squirrels. Can we duck, Sam, a hank fuck? Where are all the squirrels? Super power I want. X-ray vision. Just so

I can see where all the animals are hiding. In all the holes. In all the trees. In all the ground. It's not X-ray vision. Just so I can see where all the animals are hiding. Action. In all the holes. In all the trees. In all the ground. It's not X-ray vision. It just highlights every living thing. But then you look at me and you're like. Yeah, every single human.

Gross. I could see tapeworms in people too, though. Now you see the things inside the people. That would be super useful. That would be such a curse to be able to see where every spider, every cockroach, every fly. What if I,

I mean, now I want the ability to see cancer in people. Everyone has cancer a little bit, probably. But I'd know how much. That's a specificity of the power.

You just said, I want to see cancer in people. It wouldn't have to be a specificity in the power. You would just see the cancer and then at a certain point you'd learn how much is too much. You'd go to medical be a specificity in the power. You would just see the cancer and then at a certain point you'd learn how much is too much.

You'd go to medical school if that was your magic power. Yeah. Saving people's lives. Just like, just like go to towns, have people line up, walk down the line of people

and be like, you need to go see the doctor. And then Sarah would be like, you have so many spiders inside of you. This isn't helpful or anything, but whoa. And underneath your feet, three bees. Well, I think we all lose this episode.

Yeah, everyone was at two. Now we're all at zero. If you want to ask the science couch and be responsible for nonsense like this, you can tweet us your question using the hashtag AskSciShow. Thank you to ThatDannySaid and Marie Hitchler and everybody else

who sent us your questions. So I guess what we've ended up with roughly is a three-way tie between Sari, Stefan, and I. Sam down one, possibly down at zero because of your weird squirrel tangent.

But we all like ultimately I derailed everything. I'm sorry. Maybe the three of us should have to pay a Hank buck and then we just end tied

in one happy bee family. We're all going to sacrifice our Hank buck and not take yours away. Oh. So then we're all at one. We're like a little hive, like you said.

I see now. We're social bees. We're social bees. Podcast socialism. I love it. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that.

First, you can leave us a review wherever you listen, like Rachel Metallo and Caitlin Zwar did. It's very helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show. Second,

tweet us your favorite moment from this episode. Does it have something to do with Sari seeing spiders inside of you? Maybe. And finally, if you want to show your love for Tangents, you can just tell people about us. Thank you so much for joining us. I have been Hank Green.

I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stefan Shin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC Studios. It's produced by all of us and Caitlin Hoffmeister. Our art is by Hiroko Matsushima. And our sound design is by Joseph Tuna Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno.

And we couldn't make any of this stuff without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. European honey bee stings contain a mix of pheromones that cause alarm and aggression, specifically a chemical called isopentyl acetate, which smells like artificial banana or pear. So they'll sting you.

It'll smell a little bit like banana. And then a bunch of other bees will be like, time to sting you. Then they all come and get you. Yeah. Oh, no.