Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Bees!

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why bees are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. (Alex’s old podcast hosting service required a minimum of 5 characters per episode title, and he's keeping that going for fun. So that’s why this episode’s title has an exclamation point) Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Bees. Known for being insects. Famous for being buzzing, honey, fluffy pollen, insects. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why bees are secretly incredibly fascinating. Folks, hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt.

I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of bees? I love bees. I can't hide my love for bees. Nice.

If a bee came into my life and I would leave Brett for a bee after only getting to know the bee for a few days. Just got out of head fast. Whoa, okay. Having it tell me some sort of some like outdated kind of, you know, 90s stand-up jokes. I'm referencing B-movie, of course. Oh, so I haven't seen B-movie. I've seen an edit online where they speed it up every time someone says B, and it's only like five minutes.

Well, then you've seen it. Okay. Your flicker fusion rate is just not up to par for the, the super high speed B movie, but you know who can watch it? Bees. No, bees are great. They are, I'm really interested in all sorts of species of bees. I have only been stung by a bee once, and I felt really bad about it because I didn't

want the bee to waste her stinger on me. I meant her no harm. Oh, yeah, felt bad. Didn't really, it didn't hurt that bad. But also I knew sort of the trick of, if you're stung by a bee, you don't want to like pull at the stinger. Like the best way to do it is kind of use your thumbnail or something to kind of like flick it off, like kind of scrape it off from the side. Otherwise, if you kind of like directly pull at it, you're like activating the barbs and it. Right.

Kind of gets you a little worse. You also don't want to like agitate the little tiny venom sack at the end there. Because that that'll also make it hurt a little more. It won't, you know, unless you have an allergy, it won't seriously harm you. But anyways, I like to think I'm a friend of bees. Good. Yeah, we'll get way into bee stings in this. And I was so excited that listeners suggested the topic of honey and picked it.

And also I know a few people. think a while back suggested bees, and I said, I don't think we can do it because there was another podcast by 99% invisible that was too big in my mind at the time. Now I've kind of forgotten it and can make my own episode. And also, the big thing when people said, let's do bees, I said, there's more than 20,000 bee species on Earth, it turns out, free stand up front. So we'll talk about kind of our favorite bee stories. And now there is a discord for the show. please share your further bee stories if we don't talk about it. Yeah.

But like to do honey, we need to talk about bees and they each deserve their own episode. We'll do honey next week. It's going to be great. We'll talk about honey bees, but not like all that much about honey this episode. How do you feel about bees, Alex? I like them a lot. And I don't know if I've told my main bee sting story because yours reminded me. It's that a bee stung me on the inside of the mouth when I was in college, which was terrifying.

I mean, were you like kissing the bee? What was going? Like, I know college is a time of experimentation, but. Yeah, we were tabling for our improv group. That's where you put a big table on the quad and try to get people to join the improv group. And we had a bunch of little, those little like dumb, dumb brand of suckers, like the very small lollipops. And basically, I was enjoying one, didn't see a bee landed on it and put the whole thing back in my mouth. So the bee was correct to sting me.

Like, I deserved that. Ah, yes. It's the classic bee on your lollipop routine. I remember that from whose line is it anyway. Yeah, and also, right when it happened, someone walked up who was from my exact town in Illinois. So I, like, really wanted to talk to them. And apparently my face was, like, visibly getting bigger from the bee sting. Were you?

I see. So you actually had a reaction to it? Yeah, I'm not allergic, but I'm sure it was a full-on venom and everything. Let's talk about how that works. Because it's inside my mouth, you know, they're freaking out. Yeah, it was sort of like in the mucus membrane. That seems rough. This is, again, some points in favor of you being a human golden retriever.

Because have you ever seen those pictures of the golden retrievers who like accidentally lap up a bee? It sings them on the inside of their mouth. And then they just have a big, like, they look like dust. from up because their muzzle gets all swollen? Bark, bark, bark. I mean, yes, yes, I have seen that. I have seen that picture.

This is my theory. My theory of Alex. Everything can be explained. I'm sorry both that you went through that and the bee went through that. It doesn't sound like a great time for either of you. Yeah, and I really rattled that person because they were like, you need to go to the health Center and I was like, I can't believe you're from Clown Allen, Illinois. And then we just went back and forth that way. Do you know about yes-ending? Right. If you tell me to go to the

health center, that's not yes-and. You're supposed to yes-and, what I'm saying. Yeah. And bees are great for the whole earth all the time. So that's very good. You know, and then I've been stuck in a wacky way. That's basically how I feel about them. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, we have so many bee stories to just touch on these more than 20,000 species. On every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called, Everybody's Statsin at me. I can't hear numbers they're saying,

Only the echoes of statistics. Beautiful. Thank you. And we have a new name for this segment every week. please make them a silly and making bad as possible. Submit yours through Discord or to sitpot at gmail.com. And thank you to Brian over email. Thank you, Brian.

The first number this week is 120 million years ago. So a while ago, 120 million years ago. That's a new estimate of when bees first evolved. Oh. Bee evolution, let's say. Bevolution. There's a study from 2023. It's a joint team from Washington State University and from

the University of South Paulo. They published in current biology. They compared the genes of more than 200 modern bee species with almost 200 different prehistoric bee fossils. And they picked a date that's older than we thought previously. They think 120 million years ago, one group of parasitic wasps started evolving into what are now bees. Oh, cool. Yeah. I'm familiar with parasitic wasps. a bunch of parasitic wasp species still alive today. Some are very tiny and cute and some are mind controlling and kind of terrifying but also very cool. Yeah. And I could always kind of need a dope parasite stuff. I do not think a lot about parasitic wasps, but... That's your mistake. That's how I became a golden retriever controlled by a wasp. That's it.

Yeah. That's how they get you. Bark, bark, bus, buzz, buzz, I guess is what I would be saying. But the other number here is more than 6,000 new insect species per year. The Smithsonian says scientists describe an average of more than 6,000 new insect species every year. And apparently a lot of those are parasitic wasps specifically. Like we are constantly learning about new parasitic wasps all over the world. In fact, a lot of those are probably parasitic wasps. of other parasitic wasps.

It is a wacky kind of situation where you'll have like a wasp that say is a parasite on oak tree and then creates like an oak gall. They're called gall wasp. So it like creates this sort of a orb on the, on the oak tree in the little wasp lays an egg in there.

And so it's a parasite of the tree. And there's like a wasp that, is a parasite of the gall wasps. So then you have like a parasite of the parasite. And then you even have some parasites that could parasitize the parasite. So it's like a chain of parasites. It's, they're ridiculous.

Yeah, are there so many parasites in the world that we're weird for not being parasites? You know what I mean? Like, is it the weirder move to just like do whatever we're doing? Kind of Yeah Cool Yeah And it turns out

That if this theory is true Bees exist Because one branch Of the constant proliferation Of parasitic wasp evolution Like one branch of that Just got really really weird That's pretty much why bees exist

If this theory is true Yeah and it's I mean There are of course Different species of bees as Alex explained, but the most odd thing about a lot of bees is the colony structure of bees and the way in which that they evolved to become use social is just really mind-blowing and has inspired a lot of really vicious fights in evolutionary biology.

Yeah, it turns out, which is like so fun to be. And then the thing we're surest of is that bees are so closely related to wasps and also to ants. They're all in an order called hymenoptera in taxonomy. And if the 120 million years ago date is true, that helps explain why bees are all over the world. Because that long ago, most of the land that the simple version is basically all the land in what's now the southern hemisphere, South America and Africa and more, most of that was one landmass we'd call Gondw. And so bees branched off when that was all one piece of land. And then from there, they could spread across the rest of the inhabited continents of the earth, not Antarctica so much. Yeah.

Yeah. Ants, wasps and bees are kind of ubiquitous. Yeah. And then with bees specifically, it seems like they also helped spread some early species of flowering plants, especially stuff related to roses. Like the two of them spread each other from gondwana across the world. And 120 million years ago is the early Cretaceous period, like when some of the most famous and fun dinosaurs started existing. So did bees and a lot of flowers. It is really interesting because, I mean, there's a bunch of pollinating insects and mammals.

But with bees, they're just so specialized to be pollinators. They have like literal little baskets on their legs to collect pollen. And it's really cute. So there's a lot of co-evolution between bees and plants. It's so cool and so different from parasitic wasp life. Parasitic wasps are either preying on plants or just living in a way where they don't care about the pollination much at all. Yeah. And that ancient origin from parasitic wasps, it helps explain bee stingers in a few different ways.

because honeybees have a relatively specific stinger, and it's the one most of us have experienced if we have. But according to Oklahoma State University, almost all wasps and bees either don't have a stinger or they have such a small stinger. It cannot cause noticeable pain to a human. Right. And with honeybees, the number there is two rows of lancets

because a honeybee stinger specifically has two lancet rows, two serrated rows of blades. And apiculturist Eric Muson of the University of California at Davis says that those blades are barbed outward like a harpoon. Because the goal probably not consciously is that the honeybee should sacrifice its life to harm you as much as possible and protect their community as much as possible. And also tag the danger because there's a big release of these sort of danger pheromones upon the attack and the release of the stinger.

And by embedding itself, it's like basically put a, for a larger thread, it's put like a tagger on you. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, like, that's why. So if you do get stung by a bee, if you try to grab the stinger and pull it out, you actually kind of like squeeze the venom into you more because there's usually still a little piece of the bee stuck to the end of the stinger. You might even like, if you're not allergic and you have time to examine things, there's like,

you'll even like kind of see it on there and it's kind of interesting. So that's why you kind of want to like scrape it off, gently kind of like nudge it or scrape it off. You don't want to like pull at it because then you inadvertently just kind of like shoot yourself up more with bee venom. Yes. I had gone through life not knowing any of why specifically a bee sting makes us allergic or feel that way that the stinger has a venom sack if it's a honey bee. And like you said, that releases pheromones to warn everyone. And if you're allergic, it's to the venom sack. Like the basic puncture blade doesn't make you allergic or anything. Yeah, you have a histamine response. Like everyone does. But for people who are allergic to it, it's just a, it's just. it goes way extra than what it normally would. Yeah. And then honeybees are so you social and communal. The one sacrifices its life to sting you.

If you've heard that a bee dies when it stings you, that's true of honeybees. Most other stinging wasps or bees don't have a stinger that anchors this way and can just sting you and live. But the honey bee, when it stings you, if it tries to then leave, it's basically amputating a huge part of its body and will not survive because it leaves the stinger. There's so much to talk about in terms of that use social structure and how it's very strange. It's a strange thing because like obviously in evolution, like the basic core tenet of it is you pass on your genes and if that happens, hooray, you did it.

That's it, right? It's this idea that like you propagate your genes and then that creates the next generation. because you propagated your genes. So then it like amplifies those, those genes, but then honeybees specifically, like, because there are tons of species of bees.

Like the use social structure for bees is not the norm. Like the norm is, uh, independent, uh, out there, uh, getting their bag of pollen.

Uh, but, but also, I mean, they can be, they can, uh, sometimes form like,

communities, but they're not, it's different from being U-S-social because U-S social is specifically a hierarchical structure in which there are certain roles for the bees, and there is a reproductive female, and the rest do not reproduce. They're inhibited from reproducing. So it's just a very strange structure, and so it creates the most incredible and weird behaviors because it is not a normal social structure for insects or for pretty much most life is not like this except for bees, ants, and actually in terms of mammals

there's naked mole rats and I think one other species of mole rat and termites as well I believe. Right. It's some of the most amazing insects on earth. And then also for some stories of ones not doing that in an amazing way. This all gets us into takeaway number one. Almost all bee species are solitary, antisocial, and uninterested in pollination. Yeah. They get most of their reputation from honeybees specifically, but there are more than 20,000 species of bees,

and most of them do something else. Yeah. And I mean, some of the bees, like the other bees, are, I think, kind of cuter than honeybees. But, yeah, we love honeybees because, they make us a sweet treat. And that's, I think. I mean, it's also honeybee's social structure is truly, truly fascinating. But yeah, I mean, like some of these other bees are really pretty like there's,

are you going to talk about carpenter bees? No. Do you want to? Yeah, they're, it's, you know, they create a little cubicle, usually in wood or something for their offspring. and they're not really social. Like they might share sort of an area with other carpenter bees where they're digging their little holes into the wood. But they aren't, they're usually not like working together as a society in any way.

But they're, but yeah, they just like they're called carpenter bees because they, you know, drill into wood and create little single, just for one. offspring that they each have. And I think some of them are like, they can be kind of pretty like a, like sort of a purply blue. So they're really, they're really beautiful. They're not aggressive because they aren't really, you know, again, they're not these like sort of colony bees that are trying to defend their colony. They're just chilling out, making their own little, they make like bee bread, like they make this little, a nutritious blob for their offspring. And yeah, they're very cool, and they kind of look like a normal bee except like psychedelic colors. But yeah, they're just, it is really just completely different single lady apartment living lifestyle.

And that fits how most bees live, it turns out. Like there can be such gigantic populations of bees living in the same place and not caring about each other. in a way I had no idea because I've just been told about honeybees my whole life. And honeybees, I mean, care is a human vibe to it. But like honeybees are working together. And these other bees just form huge populations of independent bees. That it fits the wasp evolution. Like I think of wasps doing that too.

I highly encourage, you know, look up carpenter bees because they're just very fluffy and cute. Ooh. Yeah. And we have a few sources here about other species to digital resources. is from Arizona State University and from Caltech, also writing for Knowable Magazine, for NPR, and for BBC Discover Wildlife, to name a few. Oh, I'm getting a fluffy, fluffy blue bee. It's blue.

Yes. Yeah. Carpenter bees are blue? Some of them are. There's a bunch of different species. Some kind of are yellow and black, like your typical bee. Some of them are blue and fluffy. Some of them are sort of a iridescent.

and green. There's just a bunch of different species that are known as carpenter bees based on their behavior. Yay. Yeah. Another one sort of like that digging into the ground is called the mining bee. And my favorite weird example of that is that a lab tech at Cornell accidentally found about 5.5 million mining bees in one cemetery. Like, just by mistake, because Cornell is in Ithaca, New York. It's in upstate New York. And apparently this was discovered because Cornell's campus does not have enough parking. So according to the BBC, a lab tech named Rachel Fordyce started parking off campus and then

cutting through a cemetery to get to her office. And when she was walking, she said, hey, there's an unusual amount of bees here did a survey of small mesh tents after taking some samples of what species it is. And their survey suggests 5.5 million mining bees live in that one and a half acre cemetery. Mining bees, Adrina Regularis, the males just live brief lives to mate. The females dig underground tunnels for laying eggs. They just like being underground. That's why it's called a mining bee. And so this Ithaca cemetery is riddled with 5.5 million bees who are also not working together.

They're all separately trying to thrive and pass on their genetics. Right. And they're usually not antagonistic towards each other, but they aren't. They're not, it's not like a social structure like a honeybee colony. They're all just kind of, they might be competing somewhat with each other, but often they're just sort of all drilling their little holes. making new bees. Yeah, it is very interesting. Yeah, and also apparently we think this might be one of the biggest mining bee populations in the world

because the cemetery is across a road from Cornell Orchards, which is where Cornell University grows experimental fruit trees and tries to make the most delicious and perfect fruits in the world. So we think that plus a cemetery of dry, drained land, which is what mining bees wants is like a uniquely perfect mining bee habitat. But they found because Cornell University does not give the staff enough parking spaces. I feel like these trees and these fruit trees are now being pollinated by haunted bees. Right. Cemetery haunted bees that are under the ground.

They also think it's not harming like the remains. I mean, they're already dead. What harm would it be? But well, but they're not they're not like what's it called when you mess with the dead body. I forgot. Desecration. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, because they would have to go six feet under. It doesn't sound like they go that deep. Exactly. Yeah, they just go pretty shallow. And so, yeah, they're just haunted bees hanging out. Yeah. They're cute, by the way. Look at pictures of mining bees.

They're fluffy and I want to pet them. So many bees are so cute. And I did want to cover an extreme not cute example. Who? The nickname is vulture bees. I'll be the judge of that. I find everything cute. Yeah, vulture bees, it's the nickname for three different species of South American bees.

And it's a great example of honey bees not being the dominant type. Vulture bees don't have stingers, don't care about honey, and they depend on dead animals for food. They're what's called obligate necrophages. They have to eat dead flesh. Aw. I mean, you know, I think that's, I think that's sweet, right? Because they're like, they're not hurting anyone. They're just cleaning up the mortal remains of creatures.

And they're not stinging nobody. They're not hurting nobody. You know, that's cool. I would say that's that makes them cute. In my mind. It really is something that, for example, vultures do. And bee evolution is so branched and varied that apparently these species of bees, there's a study in 2021 of their gut biomes, the microbiome in their bodies. And they have similar microbes to vultures and hyenas and other non-insect scavengers.

Wow. Like their bodies are designed to do this. It's not something you're settling for. And that's because Carian, I would assume, like, you're at a higher risk of contracting some kind of disease. You know, when something dies, its immune system no longer is fighting off various microbes and things. And so you've got a lot of bacteria that grows. So a carnivore that eats fresh meat is going to encounter a lot less bacteria and microbes than something that is scavenging, rotting flesh. something that's been left to, you know,

marinate a little while in its own juices. And so you have that like a specialized digestive system to be able to deal with, you know, like gross rotting meat essentially. That's right. Yeah. And they're so committed to this kind of eating that apparently adults will partially digest some flesh and then bring it back to their young and regurgitate it for them. Aw, sweet.

Yeah. And Katie mentioned most bees have some kind of bag or pouch-like structures on their legs, which most bees use to carry pollen. Vulture bees have smaller leg baskets and will put bits of meat in them. Meat baskets. Meat basket. It's not the bee you're imagining. People say I'm weird for putting a pejudo in my socks, but, you know, this is basically, you know, I'm just being a vulture bee. It's the European version of putting bologna in your shoes to feel funny, like the joke. Right. Yeah. Alex, I'm going to be real with you. I don't, I've never heard a joke of someone putting bologna in their shoes.

I want to say my dad or his dad told it to me. What's the joke? It's basically why did I put bologna in my shoes? Because I wanted to feel funny. Yeah, I know. It's that good. Oh. Anyway, in Europe they use prosciutto.

Prasuto. But, yeah, like, bees can eat so many different things, even though they are correctly famous for eating honey or eating pollen. It's really just honey bees eating honey because they're the ones who make it. And we'll talk more about that in the honey episode, but the short version is that a honey bee slurps up plant nectar. and then that combines with enzymes in their body and mouth and also passes between mouths until it processes into honey.

It's really weird. Yeah. And then pollen is a more common bee food. They'll just get that directly from plants. They might put it in their leg pouches. They might store it in the individual hive that the non-social bee has built just for their own children. There are species of bees who like just kind of create. It's not really something that humans can harvest, but they will create sort of a processed

pollen product for their individual offspring. But honeybees are the ones creating like basically a factory of honey that is used. They will eat it themselves. A lot of it's used to feed the next generation of bees. It's kind of interesting because when you think about it, it is a method of digesting. in metabolizing food, not by using like a fancy ruminant stomach system like a cow has, but just by using a bunch of individuals all contributing to the processing of food. Yes.

Honeybees are just such a specific sub, sub, sub, sub, sub branch of all the evolution of this. And apparently also that means they're kind of a strange choice as a pollinator too. because if you're a human who wants all of the plants to pollinate each other, according to NPR, there's a long history of farmers in Europe and in colonized North America, setting up hives of honeybees almost like livestock and like moving those from place to place to support crop production. But honeybees are so busy building up that weird hive. They don't actually spread so much pollen from plant to plant. They mostly just bring it straight back to the hive.

And recently some researchers are trying to promote different bee varieties just for better pollination. NPR says the mason bee is one popular pick. It's called the mason bee because it's antisocial weird way of building its own hive is sort of a tube with walls that like, you know, it may be a human mason would build. But unlike the honeybees grabbing the pollen and bringing it back in an orderly way, Mason bees do kind of a belly flop move onto a flower. And just like blasts pollen everywhere because they're not being that particular about feeding a whole society. That is so cute. I'm looking at one of these and its tummy is just covered in pollen.

That is really cute. Yeah. And it's like, because the way that pollination happens is, you know, you go to some kind of flower and then you get covered in pollen and then you go to another. flower. And then like the most efficient way to like get pollination to happen is not just something that spends a lot of time in flowers, but also like we'll go to different species of flowers and eat a lot of different pollen and spread around. So having different species of bees is really important. You can't like just rely on honeybees. Totally. And yet it seems like a lot of Farmers especially have just not learned so much about bees and they have a routine to receive a hive at the proper growing time.

And I'll link to the 99% invisible I mentioned because that episode's mainly about honeybee hives being rotated around by farmers. But if you are like thinking outside the box and not thinking of only the bees that make honey, there's tons of other great bees to pollinate stuff, especially because mason bees are native to North America and honey bees are imported from Europe and elsewhere originally. Yeah, and there is, I mean, there is a danger of sort of subsidizing honeybees in a way because then you are potentially out-competing native species of bees with honeybees who it's not that, you know, there's anything necessarily inherently wrong with the honeybees, but they may not be as specialized to, like, say you replace a native species with honeybees, well, the honeybee might not be as, specifically adept at the new environment. And then if like there's some kind of shock or maybe the honeybee doesn't pollinate a specific flower because it's not appealing to it. So like you can't necessarily just replace all of the different bees with honeybees.

It wouldn't work well. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And the last thing about honeybees being so specialized and so basically weird is that they're so evolved to do this specific. hive colony use social structures they do, that they're almost too big and there was briefly a physics mystery of how they're able to fly. I know that one because of the beginning of B-movie. I am starting to think I really should have watched B-movie in a real way. I only saw the joke at it.

You really should have watched B-movie. The B-movie did lie a bit because it claimed that physics says that there's no way a bee should be able to fly. Physics doesn't say that. It's just kind of like it, like they are large and not super aerodynamic seeming. So that's why they had to look into it. And they have like, as I think I know what you're about to say, because I thought they had already discovered the little sort of aerodynamics of their wing flaps. Yes. Yeah, it was mysterious from the 1930s when some French entomologists pointed it out that, hey, how do these things even fly? And then it took until around 2005 to figure out how. But we always just saw them flying and thought we'd figure it out. It's not like a mystery of the universe or something.

B-movie came out in 2007. So that's even more egregious. Right. This was huge news. Yeah. I'll link about it in 2005. It was teams at Caltech and at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. They published a study where they had used high-speed digital photography to figure out how the wing movements are able to lift this huge body. It's partly that the wings are not rigid, it turns out. So they can beat 230 times per second and also make very flexible sweeping motions, partly with the thorax. The point is we figured it out.

But the reason it was surprising is that honeybees have so overrex. evolved to carry basically freight, like cargo, that they got away from maybe some earlier wasps where it's obvious how and why they can fly. But they never lost the ability to fly, and it was never an actual mystery. We just couldn't specifically explain it blow by blow. Yeah, they create these little like vortices, a little wind vortexes that creates this negative pressure. It's really cool from a small-scale physics perspective. It's so hard to see what's going on in, like, if you're just watching a bee, it just looks like a blur, but in slow motion. It's very cool watching the, it's very graceful looking.

Turns out it's really neat. So, yeah, it's something that it's cool we have figured out. And Jerry Seinfeld lied about it, but it's fine. And either way, the honeybee has dominated our perception of bees in a way that kind of of erases the 20,000 other amazing bee species in the world that are so different. It's not surprising another jerk move from Jerry Seinfeld. Yeah. And then into some further numbers, there's a few stories here that I call honeybee nightmares.

Oh. Fun. Aw. Because now that we've explored some other bee species, we can get into honeybees being scary for humans in a way that I find fun. Oh. The next number is six months in county jail. That was the sentence for a Massachusetts beekeeper who weaponized thousands of bees to attack law enforcement officers.

So they're like, killdozer, but with bees? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, they were sentenced April 2026. So this is new news. But it seems like it took a while on the legal end because four years earlier, this beekeeper Rebecca Woods of Long Meadow, Massachusetts. She drove her bees over to the home of her friends. And her friend was a cancer patient, nearly 80 years of age, who was being evicted by sheriff's deputies.

And here's the guardian's description of what happened next. Woods, who put on her beekeeper's suit during the incidents, had driven up to the property with the hives stacked on a trailer pulled by her blue SUV and proceeded to lift the lids on a number of them. During an ensuing tussle, she was thrown to the ground by two deputies and arrested as a large swarm of bees flew around the property's front yard. The court heard that Woods was told during the encounter that some deputies were allergic to bees and that she replied, oh, you're allergic? Good. Several officers were stung. One was hospitalized. She just like sent thousands of her bees at them to stop the eviction. I'm maybe not some big city bee lawyer, but technically it sounds like the bees did this of

their own volition. Yeah. You can't, you cannot train bees to attack someone as far as I know. That's like almost what her lawyers said. But it seems like she tried to lie and then that kind of helped the judge say, okay, you're going to jail. Because when the legal process started, apparently Woods claimed she only released the bees so they could forage on the lovely flowering landscape at the house.

Yeah. But like, no, she timed it to attack the sheriff's deputies as they brought her friend out of his house. Yeah. I mean, this is a complicated story. It is. Yeah. I don't necessarily agree with the weaponization of bees. I also don't agree with evicting a cancer patient.

Right. It's complicated. Right. It is complicated. I think what would have been more fair would be for the bees to represent them, legally speaking, because it doesn't sound like her lawyer did a good job. I think the bees might have. If you watch, because when you watch the B movie,

sure. The Jerry Seinfeld B has a B lawyer. And a turn B? An intern B. Yeah. So anyways, it works out good. They win the court case in the B movies. So I think if you had Beds as the lawyers.

So maybe don't like sick your Bs. on people, but, you know, also don't evict people who have cancer who are friends to all the bees. Yeah, I guess the bees didn't attack the guy being evicted, because how would they know what to do? They must be friends. Right, exactly. And the story also says that thousands of the bees died, not just because they were stinging, but because, like, at least one of the hives she opened and the chaos kind of fell. They were all in the trailer pulled by her truck and like one hive fell on another hive and crushed it, you know.

So a lot of bees died too in the process. It's a mess. Yeah, you shouldn't weaponize bees. There's a ton. Did you know there's like a ton of traffic accidents all the time that involve trucks carrying bees? So many bees. Yeah. Like if you look up a, you know, like truck crashes on freeway, you know, millions of bees.

released. It happens with some regularity where a truck will fall over or crash and then like thousands or hundreds of thousands of bees will be released. And the reporting is always like, you know, local beekeeper agencies did their best to save as many bees as possible. Oh, yeah. They don't do well with these crashes, yeah. Or like, law enforcement was forced to put down a bunch of bees. And it's like, are they shooting at the bees? what do you mean? But yeah, I just, this was like, I saw a news story about bees being released in a truck crash and I wondered how often this happens.

And the answer is almost every year, fairly regularly. A truck carrying a lot of bees gets into an accident and then releases those bees. That's extraordinary. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. The next nightmare here might be one people have heard about, speaking of like, bee accidents.

The number is 1957. 1957 is when experimental bees escaped a laboratory in Brazil. And the upshot is the creation of what became nicknamed killer bees. Killer bees. Which I think like the more technical term is Africanized honeybees. correct? Exactly, yeah. And because this involves really four different continents. Modern North America, all our honeybees are imported from Europe a few centuries ago. Like there are other pollinating bees that are native to the continent. But we've imported and bred European

honeybees to be more and more effective at making honey or spreading pollen. But then in 1957, a lab in Brazil was breeding honey bees from Africa to try to be effective in the Amazon. And the goal was like, oh, these African honeybees are adapted to all kinds of powerful predators in Africa, army ants and honey badgers and ant eaters. So we need super tough honeybees from Africa for South America. But then in an accident in 1957, one assistant beekeeper made a mistake that released all of the queen bees. So a few dozen of them escaped and mated with European honeybees.

And then a hybrid of European and African honeybees gradually spreads across both the Americas. Apparently they've killed more than a thousand people all time. So that's like a lot, but not every day. And in 1993, they killed their first U.S. victim in Texas. And apparently as the climate heats, killer bees might be able to spread more because it'll be warmer. main limit on them has been cold winters. Hmm. I see. Well, that's good. But they're just

living their lives. Like, they're just bees that were adapted to survive African predators. Right. And then made it with some European ones. Both of which are transplanted. Like, there's really humans' fault, if anybody. Yeah, when you say like a bee that can, like, face down a honey badger, you know that

someone is going to die. Yeah. And the reason they're so deadly is not Is it, because I kind of, I do not remember the details on this. It's not just that like their venom is more potent. It's that they're also a lot more aggressive and they will just keep, they're much more relentless and they consider a greater area to be part of their territory. Yeah, exactly right.

Yeah. They're just being the bees they are. It's not like they are vulture bees with a taste for flash or something. And even them are being who they are. All the bees are being who they are. Right. Yeah. No, it's, it's, they're just, yeah, they, they are just much more defensive,

uh, than, um, your typical honeybee. Yeah. And so it's like, um, one bee sting from them isn't really that dangerous. It's the, it's the quant, the volume of the bee stings that, uh, causes, because then you just get so much of the venom that is not, you know, inherently more dangerous than honey. bee venom, but it's just the number of stings that you get is a lot more. Totally. And then our last number, which is our last honeybee nightmare, the number is more than 100 pounds

of honeycomb, which is more than 45 kilograms of honeycomb. That was what was found in the walls of one house in North Carolina. That doesn't sound like a nightmare. That sounds delicious. Yeah. So this is a story that the Guardian covered. They talked to the family. In 2023, they moved to a new house in North Carolina.

And then a few months later, their daughter claimed there was a monster in her room that was specifically making a droning sound from the walls. And then later, the mother saw a lot of bees near the laundry vent in the attic. And when they called beekeepers to investigate, most of them couldn't find anything. And then one tried thermal imaging. Shout out to recent Night Vision Show. Hey. Thermal imaging revealed a gigantic hive of honeybees inside the wall.

It was more than six feet tall. And apparently the spookiest part is that its outline resembled a large man wearing a top hat. It's just a bad coincidence. Are we sure? Because we just talked about those mining bees going in graveyards. Yeah, it's very Candyman or something. I don't like it. But then they, apparently there was one gap in an attic window and something about the walls of this house.

It was a truly unique space that this community of honeybees wanted. After a series of interventions, they eventually removed more than 100 pounds of honeycomb and more than 70,000 honeybees. Wow. And the daughter was, I guess, vindicated because she said there was a buzzing, droning monster in her room. And it was true. Yeah. It's like, and the monster is thousands of bees. Yeah.

Don't worry. It's shaped kind of like Abraham Lincoln or something. That's fine. You know, that reminds me, like, there is an artist who actually will, he keeps honeybees. And then he helps them sort of seeds their hive formation with like a wire frame so that they create these like sculptures. Whoa. Let me look up his name. Some of them are shaped like people.

Cool. His name is Thomas Gabzdel Libertini. Yeah, he did like, he does busts of people. He's done like, I think he's, or he was at some point working on like a full bee, bee body, body of a person made by bees. Yeah, he just, he sets up the, the frame. for them to work from and then and then they they have at it. That's so cool.

And it's that's actually going to fit the honey episode too because we'll talk about honeycombs more. So that's awesome. That's great. You want to see a guy's torso made out a honeycomb? Who doesn't? Everyone does. It's pretty nuts. This rocks.

Yeah. Folks, we have so much more to say about bees. So we're going to take a quick break while we look at art. And then we'll be right back with a few other astounding ways bees act in the world. And we're back with just a couple more takeaways about bees and the many possible stories about them. The next one is takeaway number two. Honeybees communicate with everything from whoop noises to waggle dances to head butts. Aw.

Whoop, whoop. Slam right in the. right in the head. I think the whoop might be my favorite. But yeah, this is some of the many recent studies of how honeybees specifically communicate. We know that they are used social and work together, as Katie's described so well. And then the specific ways they tell each other things are so weird. It's far from just buzzing.

It's great. Yeah. No, I mean, there's obviously pheromones, which they, is sort of the chemo. they use their chemosensory organs to be able to detect these chemicals that the other ones lay down and that helps them communicate. But they've got just they've got other very specific methods of communication that are very cute. Yeah. And a bunch of sources here including JSTOR Daily and cabinet magazine, new scientist and the Smithsonian magazine. As Katie said, pheromones are huge. And I think we mentioned that

when they sting you, they are also releasing pheromones to tell the hive you are dangerous. Yes. The honeybees specifically. Honeybees also do waggle dances. And apparently people started to kind of observe this as early as the 1700s, you know, hopefully just with their eyes, basically. Then it took many more decades and a lot of vicious argument between scientists to decide what the waggle dances mean.

But as far back as Aristotle, Aristotle in his book, The History of Animals, was saying that when bees return to their hive, they shake or dance in front of a group. And it turns out that dance is to indicate where there are sources of food and pollen. Yeah, and it's kind of like semaphore

where they have specific little movements that will tell you what it is and where to go, like what direction and how far it is. It's really impressive. It really is, yeah. And I'll also link to the past episode about caffeine. We talk about some plants providing caffeine to bees.

And then their waggle dance will vary depending on whether there's extra caffeine or not in a plant. And then also the dance can create sounds that are a small whoop noise, which I really just like imagining bees doing, going whoop, that's great. Go Kelly. Go Kelly. It's a birthday. Kelly is the queen, let's say. We love Kelly. Because, yeah, the whoop noise, a study at Nottingham Trent University in 2017 found that some bees will do it when they're startled.

And the whoop will almost be the opposite of a waggle dance. It'll almost say, let's stop. This is a forging location where there might be problems or a predator or not enough food anymore. And then the whoop is something they can produce with vibrations of their wing muscles. Most of the reason they buzz is just that they are moving their wings so fast, but also the wings can do buzzes and whoops and other noises to let each other know things. It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, there's other ways in which that they can use that amazing wing muscle vibration.

They can keep themselves warm with it. There are certain species of view social honeybees that will destroy intruders by dogpiling them and cooking them alive because they have such that they will vibrate. And normally that vibration creates a nice gentle heat that warms the colony in the winter. They can also use their wing beats to cool the colony if it gets too hot. But if, like, say there's a predatory wasps that gets in, they will surround the wasp and, you know, vigorously vibrate until the wasp gets so hot it dies, cooks it. It's so cool. Yeah. And I love that the hive is so much more than just where they're putting their pollen and honey and babies.

It's also a fortress that way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the whole time they're going, whoop, whoop. You're right. And I love that they say whoop to say not to go somewhere, like a negatory whoop, because at least humans in my U.S. culture, whoops are always for excitement.

But the whoop is like, stop, cut it out. No, this is bad. Yeah. This is a cautionary whoop. A cautionary whoop, yeah. And then kind of related to that headbutting is another thing they do. Apparently, this is a long time topic. for Thomas Seeley, who's a biologist and bee expert at Cornell, who especially studies the swarm

intelligence, we call it, of honeybees, like how they make group decisions. And apparently he's studied the headbutting for a long time because apparently they will headbutt each other while deciding on a new nest location. And they'll use a headbut to try to stop other bees from promoting other options. Like once the scouts have headbutted in. favor of their own nest location and there's a quorum of about 15 honeybees all dancing for the same location. Then they headbut the others to say no to that idea and promote their idea. So political headbutting, I guess. Yeah. You know, I do feel that this might uncomplicate some

things if we just, if politics was just slamming our heads into one another and whoever is just the more committed to doing headbutts, when's the argument? Already feels like headbutting. Let's just go all the way. Yeah. Yeah, great. Yeah, so they're communicating in so many different ways

with parts of their bodies and sounds and pheromones. And just the way honeybees talk to each other is so cool. And I especially find it cool in the context of 20,000 other kinds of bees not socializing at all. They're just having no interest in each other, really? That's pretty cool. Well, yeah, because, I mean, it is when you think about it. It's a very odd system because you have all of these bees, these like sister bees, not

reproducing and sacrificing themselves for the colony. And that's like not the typical way in which natural selection works. There has to be very specific conditions for that to arise. Yeah, totally. I think I skipped in the numbers. Apparently there's an average of about 60,000 infertile female bees who sting and do not reproduce. And then there's the one queen. Maybe they make more queens to make more hives. But it's, yeah, it's so different from other species. It's incredible. Yeah, they'll actually like feed the larval royal jelly in order to create new queens. It's like a special berry. nutritious honey. Yeah. These are extraordinary.

It's so cool. And then we have one last takeaway for the main show about an extraordinary thing humans would like to do. Takeaway number three. There's a longtime international dream of training honeybees to detect landmines. This is something that we think we can exploit the skills and abilities of honeybees to detect the TNT's. and landmines. And at least two different countries have tried to make this happen. Oh, interesting.

And the countries are Croatia and the United States. Okay. That's, you know, I wouldn't have guessed. I mean, the U.S. I might have guessed, but Croatia. Yeah. And Croatia, it's partly driven by sort of the unraveling of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and past wars and civil wars between, you know, ethnic groups and people. peoples in what was Yugoslavia.

It left behind landmines all over the place. Yeah. Key sources here for the U.S. are essentially press releases by Sandia National Laboratory in Montana. And then other sources are the BBC and the Smithsonian magazine. Back in 1999, Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Montana collaborated on an experiment with foraging bees and whether they could detect buried land. binds if we train them to do it. It's like one thing for them to technically be able to detect it, but how do you train them to want to seek out landmines?

Because that's not what they usually eat. Yeah. Apparently the key step of it is to take the foraging honeybees, give them a sugar water feeder that is doped with chemicals simulating the chemicals and explosives. So you are messing with their natural way of acting and giving them food that's separate from how they feed themselves. You're training them to see landmines as delicious. Exactly, yeah. And, you know, this is a global problem.

Apparently, as of 1999, the Red Cross estimated there were at least 80 million landmines deployed and active all over the world in at least 70 countries. and the thing that makes this work is that those landmines usually leak. They usually leak small amounts of the explosives into the nearby soil or water. So if you make chemicals that simulate the smell and other chemistry of the leaking explosive, feed it to foraging bees and tell them that, oh, you can get more, you know, soda, basically, from things that are explosive like that, then you can hopefully follow the bees to the landmines. that are under the ground. So the idea is that the bees will cluster around where a landmine is?

Yes, yeah. And then the best news maybe is that the bees will not set off the landmine. They're far too light and small. Right. Unless you get like enough bees all piled on one landmine. Bees working together in the shape of a man. Right. The spooky Abraham Lincoln and the wall steps on the mine.

Yeah. And this also could save the lives of other animals because apparently other experimenters have tried to do this kind of training with rats, which usually goes okay. And then with dogs, which usually goes poorly. The dog gets blown up. It's too big. Yeah, that's not. Yeah. Very sad, you know.

Not ideal. Yeah. And so this U.S. work by government labs and the University of Montana, that's influenced other work in especially. the former Yugoslavia. And according to the BBC, there's been a few rounds of this. In 2013, especially, there was a Croatian experiment where they set up a bunch of different feeding points to prove that you could train bees to specifically seek out the scent of explosives, even more than the scent of their actual food.

And again, you're giving them a super sugary solution mixed with TNT. like just extremely appealing delicious almost dessert for bees laced with what's in TNT. Right. But it's not this does not make the bees explode when they drink it. Right. And then they're fine. Yeah, it's like a simulated version of what's in TNT. I see.

So it's not toxic to them. Yeah. And then the other difficult step is something we're finally starting to do with technology like machine learning and also mechanical drones, not bee drones. That's different. In 2021, a team from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. So it's nice that Croatians and Bosnians are working together because that is part of why there are some mines in the area from before. But that team came up with a way of using mechanical drones to monitor the bees and then also use machine learning to teach the drones what bees look like and how to spot bees, which are tiny, with their cameras. And so then the drone can follow the bees. Nobody gets blown up. And then there's recorded information for humans to go out later and safely remove the landmines. So it's not

going to be a situation where it's like you train the rat to follow the bee, train the dog to follow the rat. Also, earlier you mentioned it's a different kind of drone to be specific drones for bees are male bees. Yes. Yeah. And, and I read that apparently the male honeybees especially will die by ejaculating. Because sort of like a female stinger, they have to amputate a bunch of their body. And then that wound is not survivable. They're one and done. Yeah.

Yeah. I guess the Reddeter meme would be, doesn't matter, had sex. But yeah, you do die. You do die in the process of the male drone. Lower you up, hit the gym, reproduce once. Yeah, so this is amazing technology and a potential use of bees because we don't want to kill bees, but a colony of bees saving the lives of dogs and people long term and short term is great. So there's an exciting idea. Yeah, I'm okay with using some bees to save people.

That's okay. Totally into it. Yeah, amazing possible thing we could do. And again, honey bees are so social and specialized. that specialization is something we can exploit and find the minds. It's good stuff. Yeah. And, you know, maybe teach them how to boogie and wuggy as well.

Like they've already got the dancing instinct. Yeah, they can dance, they can whoop. They party. Right. Yeah. Party down with some bees. Just don't mix up the party bees with the mine sniffing bees. Oh yeah, that's a tough mix.

Tough combo. Yeah, yeah. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, almost all bee species are solitary, antisocial, and uninterested in pollination. In other words, honeybees are our dominant idea of bees and an extreme.

outlier out of the more than 20,000 species. Takeaway number two, honeybees communicate with everything from whoop noises to waggle dances to headbuts. Takeaway number three, there's a longtime international dream of training honeybees to detect landmines. And then so many stats and numbers this week about everything from the formation of the current continents of the earth to the enormous amount of parasitic wasps all over the world to to be nightmares of honeybees being used as offensive weapons and killer species and wall monsters and more.

Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is Carl Linnaeus messing up the scientific name of European honeybees in the process of fixing all other scientific names. Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of approaching 25 dozen other

secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation, and especially the way you wonderfully pick topics and make the whole show go. I'm so excited for next week's show about honey, which will have its own bonus show that is also enriched by this Bs show and its bonus show. So check all that out. You're going to love it. And thank you to everybody on our Discord. Like I said at the beginning of this B's show, if you have an amazing story about bees that we did not talk about, the thing to do is go share it on the Discord.

Get excited about it. Share what you love with other people. Additional fun things. Check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include an enormous amount of excellent scientific writing online from Smithsonian Magazine, Knowable Magazine, BBC Discover Wildlife Magazine, The Guardian, and that's just to name a few. Also, a lot of university resources went into this. in particular from Oklahoma State University, the University of California at Davis, Arizona State University, and Caltech. Further digital resources are from J-Store Daily, Cabinet Magazine, New Scientist magazine, and one extra special source to mention is 99% invisible.

I think it was years ago when some listeners suggested bees as a topic, and I had just heard an excellent episode they made with the funny title on Beeing. and it's actually very specific to just one element of bee stuff. It's about hives of honeybees being used sort of like livestock or crop support by farmers. Because I had just heard that, I didn't want to repeat it, so I held off on making a bee episode. But now it's more out of my head, and I'll link it for that one super specific bee story. And they make great work every week. Check out 99% invisible.

That page of links also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skateagok people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations and the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 16.

That is about the Great Gatsby, the novel specifically. One fun fact there, there's basically a real woman who's the basis. of Daisy Buchanan in the novel, essentially the female lead of the novel if you haven't read it. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's podcast Creature Feature about Animals, Science, and more. As you could hear, and as I say about any, siff about animals, that's the show to check out if you like this at all. That's just such an amazing podcast, has such a deep catalog. Please enjoy. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshavened by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun.

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