Short Wave - Why are bees special? We get inside a hive to find out

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

In a new National Geographic docuseries, viewers get a look inside a bee hive. The series is called Secrets of the Bees — and since there’s nobody we know who loves bees more than entomologist Sammy Ramsey, we brought him on the show to share some of these secrets. We cover how bees play together (yes, play!), their ability to fend off predators four-times their size and a mite wreaking havoc on honeybees everywhere. If you liked this episode check out past episodes on liquid gold (a.k.a honey), and honeybees. Email us your questions about insects, critters – or anything else to do with science at [e-mail]. We may turn it into an episode in the future!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Nobody I know loves bees or sings cover songs about them, quite like Sammy Ramsey. I've got so much honey, the bees envy me. I got a sweetest song than the birds in the trees. Sammy is an entomologist and a producer on the new National Geographic docuseries, secrets of the bees. Everyone, I have never been so taken with bee footage in my life. I'm talking up-close video of bees living and working together and fending off predators like

Vespamandirinia or the northern giant hornet. Those things are absolute tanks. They are units. To be able to have mouths that can chew through wood, stingers that are a quarter of an inch long, and the capacity to squirt venom out of their stinger while they're flying into your eyes is just why. And I asked Sammy to watch one key scene of the docu-series where a murder hornet scopes out a hive filled with Asian honeybees. The hornet hovers menacingly, golden wings of blur. And she is aware that there is a huge volume of protein available in this colony.

And this murder hornet is a scout. She rubs her abdomen on the hive to mark it with a chemical scent. She's basically dropping a pin, like on Google Maps, so that she can see where it is, but also, that all of her sisters can get back there and rip that colony apart. But to convince her squadron to come and attack this hive, she first wants to grab a bee to bring back to her murder hornet family. They'll grab a bee, chop it up into what we call in a very loving way, a bee meatball. They'll take this bee meatball back to their colony,

and baby, they are handing out Costco-free samples. So your only way to save the lives of yourself, your sisters, and your mom, is to kill that scout. She cannot leave. The bees wait patiently as the scout starts to break into the hive like an evil Kool-Aid man. And then something amazing happens. Just as soon as the Hornet tries to grab a bee, the rest of the colony swarms.

I mean, it's like a sea of bees that all congregate on the body of the Hornet. They decouple their wing muscles from their wings, and they vibrate their wing muscles. so that they generate a huge amount of heat. That heat creates a convection of an effect where they literally cook the Hornet, like they bake it like a cookie. It's wild out here in these streets. They're like, have you ever tried Costco Hornet cookie

because that's our specialty in this hive? This is the free sample today, y'all. So today on the show, the Secrets of the Bees, how bees have evolved to work together, play, and the parasite that is threatening hives worldwide. I'm Emily Kwong, you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast

from NPR. Okay, Dr. Sammy, we're talking about secrets of the bees. Let's talk about bee brains. You say that bees have brains the size of a pinhead, but neurons

specifically structured for learning. What kinds of learning are bees doing? with their brains. I got you. So bees have these brains that are so effectively structured for learning. So when they fly around and they smell different food sources, sometimes they will consume something that's not great for them.

But other times, they'll consume something that is an incredibly useful food source for the colony. And I think about it the same way that I think about people. Early on in our history as human beings, somebody has licked every possible thing that can be licked, and they have found out what is food and what is not food through trial and error, and we've lost some people as a result of it. They were our scout bees. Yes, yes.

There are people who are our scout bees. And in this, the bees have done the same thing. And they figured out incredible foods. Some of them have required them to do a lot of problem solving, a lot of puzzle manipulation to get inside of some of these flowers that intentionally only want to let specific creatures inside to ensure. sure that they're pollinated properly. And the bees figure this out, but then they also teach each other. And this was one of my favorite aspects of the entire documentary and the way that your eyebrow just raised up. That's what I'm talking about. Y'all, listeners, you might not be able to hear that. But Emily Kwong's eyebrow is like all the way up. It's true. Not to spoil it

for you too much, but listeners, we go and see bees in a lab at Queen Mary University of London. Yes. What did you see in that lab? that shocked you? So teaching my own class on insect biology to my students, I had made sure to have an entire module where we talk about bee intelligence, where we showed that bees are capable of second order thinking, so not just the first order where you're like, if I do this, this will happen. But the second order of I have to do this in order to be able to do the next step in order

to get to this next thing. That is a level of thinking that requires not just understanding of cause and effect, but the capacity to think about a future state and understand After I do this, I will be in a different state to then do this and then that. And we tend to think elephants and porpoises and dogs can do this kind of thing, but not an insect, right? But then there was... Wrong. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. But the moment that I did not expect was when the bees that had learned how to solve this puzzle immediately taught another bee how to solve that same puzzle. And the intelligence of that is absolutely staggering. because these bees have a lifespan that is just on order of little over a month. And so she's able to pass it down through generations of the colony. And what is amazing there is that that is officially what culture is. When we pass down these things that we've learned, these things that we've discovered, these things that we enjoy and are our preferences,

when we pass that down to the next generation, when we pass that down laterally to other individuals, that is indeed. culture and that means that insects, y'all, these insects out here are cultureistas. Yes. One of my favorite parts of the documentary, which also happened in the lab, is when you see the bees in this arena, I think they call it, it's like a clear plastic box and one chamber has a food reward and the other has no food reward, just a bunch of wooden balls, like tiny

little balls. And you think like food, food, food all day, but actually what, and you're, you're, you're in the documentary watching this happen, quite a few of the bees they went to go play with the balls. Yes. Oh my God. That was one of the most beautiful and also whimsical moments of the entire documentary. These bees had the opportunity to pursue the clearest and most important reward that they will ever have. It is sugar. They love carbohydrates. They love a source of sugar water because they need it to keep the colony alive. And instead of going for it, they hung out in this. room in between where they could just grab these purple or yellow painted wooden balls and just

roll them around. Some bees will roll them from one bee to the next. Others will grab onto the ball and just roll around on top of it for a while. And it's play. And play is one of those things that helps develop the systems of learning that insects like wolfpups and dogs and cats and everything will use in the future to develop systems to learn more effectively, to practice skills like hunting and so on. And it's a great system, but it's one that we have always thought as specific to the vertebrates.

And yet, play has emerged in them in similar ways that it is emerged in us. And that's something that I hope reminds people that we are not that different from these insects. This study, it was the first time insects were, insects were documented engaging in a play behavior. What does that suggest to you about, like, insect intelligence? It suggests to us that insect intelligence is a lot more broad spectrum than we originally thought. Insect intelligence isn't just so directed where everything is about the next aspect of natural selection. The next, if I don't do this, I will die. I must have some sugar water.

I have to focus on just the goals that are going to keep me from dying. And what we find is that there is a much more broad system of intelligence that allows them to refine skills that are important for learning, that are important for the development of the colony in the long term, rather than just these short term, if I don't do this, I will die kind of behaviors. Yeah. Of course, I want to make sure we leave time to talk about the work that you are very well known for in the entomology field, which is to address a scourge to honeybees everywhere, the varroa mite.

These mites, they're so nasty. They can decimate a whole colony of honeybees. They stick to the honeybee and mess up all kinds of systems within the bee. Can you talk about the status of varroa mites now in the world since you began this work? And what could be done to stop them from harming bee colonies worldwide? They are present now on every continent where bees are kept, including Australia, which is new as of the last few years. They've just arrived in Australia and have just wrought havoc. And their ability to really take over is absolutely off the wall.

And now we know that nearly 100% of colonies in the U.S. have varroa mites or will have them within a year's time. They attach themselves to bees. They liquefy the bees' liver. And they suck that out of the bee's body, which is really awful for the colony because they need bees that are capable of dealing with viruses and bacteria. And because the liver actually produces the proteins that form their immune system, those bees, when they are dying, get very, sick and then can spread those viruses and bacteria to the rest of the colony. They're also much more vulnerable to pesticides, which is one of the reasons why there has been this constant call for us to reduce our reliance on a lot of these pesticides. What was a sublethal amount of these pesticides

is no longer sublethal to them because without their liver to protect them from these toxins, they can die from sublethal exposure to these pesticides, which is really quite awful. Wow. Yeah, exactly. So if you could snap your fingers to address the varroa mite problem and how it's herming bees, what do you wish would happen? Actually, it's a twofold answer. Yeah. I need people to truly understand how bad these creatures are for their colonies.

There are beekeepers who will see these mites. They'll see the size of them. And they'll just kind of get the impression they're probably not that big a deal, right? And I want us to think about the welfare of our bees, the way that we think about the welfare of other organisms. They're considered by the USDA as livestock, and they are the third most valuable livestock in the world, just after chickens and pigs. And so groups like the Bee Research Laboratory at the United States Department of Agriculture, the lab that is consistently relied upon to find out what's going on with the bees, the ones who are constantly telling us, oh, we figured out this breakthrough and this breakthrough. That lab is being dismantled. And in addition to that, we are already in a context where we need more bee research and we are getting less of it. And so the wrong time to pull

away all of that funding and support is right now when we are so close to figuring out how to protect our bees consistently. Thank you for this beautiful piece of work, Dr. Sammy Ramsey. It was incredible to talk to you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. And I'm so glad to get to be on Shortwave again. If you liked this episode, share it with your favorite worker bee. We'd love to meet a new friend. And follow us if you're not already, so we can grow closer with you, too. We'll also link to a previous episode we've done on Honeybees and another one on honey

in our show notes. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Quasi Lee was the audio engineer. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.