The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Knives for Hands, Gay Bombs, Bee-on-Bee Crime

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story.

Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Chelsea B. Coombs.

I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. Chelsea, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here. Listeners, Chelsea is the engagement editor at Popsie and a real audio pro, a voiceover star. You've probably heard her on. Well, I'm impressed by your voiceover work. Thank you. Some of our listeners may recognize you, of course, from Ask Us Anything, our sister podcast.

Folks, if you have not listened to our latest season of Ask Us Anything, it's excellent, and you will hear appearances from all of your favorite weirdos. So definitely go add that to your feed wherever you get podcasts. But today, we are not here to answer you everything. We are here to talk about weird things. And on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first.

Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah Kylie, what's your tease? So I'm here today to talk about the legend of the knife-armed man. It's scary. spooky stuff. Not to be confused with poop knives. No, different, different knife.

Thank goodness. Wow. Hmm. Okay. Fascinating. I really, look, I have to be honest, most of the time when somebody says their tease for weirdest thing, I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm vaguely familiar with that at least because I know a lot of weird things.

I got to say, I have no idea where you're going with this one. I'm excited. I'm excited. I'm almost scared. It's actually kind of like a nice story. It's like kind of sweet. So it might be a little misleading, but there are knives involved. Okay.

Oh, okay. Well, that makes it great. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, can't wait. Looking forward to that. My tease is that I am finally going to talk about the gay bomb.

Oh. The bomb that is gay. Wow. So the bomb itself is gay or? We'll get into it. We'll get into it. Cool. I mean, what isn't gay, you know?

Tell you what's your tease. So my fact is that when there is a shortage of nectar to be foraged, honeybees actually become robbers. Ooh. All right. Well, I have written about bee crime, but it's been crime on bees and bee owners, not Be theft. No, this is B on B crime. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. That's what I was about to be like. It's a real problem. Wow. Okay. A lot of intriguing stuff today. I would like to start with knife arm.

All right. I got to know. Yeah. So Sarah Kylie, take it away. Okay. Well, I am excited to tell you all about a knife armed man. Back in ancient times, you know, losing an armor leg was kind of pretty common, you know, not uncommon, you know, everyone was doing violent stuff just like they do today and pretty much

all throughout history. But surviving afterwards before people knew about germs and bacteria and all that jazz was a different story. So a lot of people did not survive their amputations and whatnot. But so another part of, you know, not having a limb is prosthetic limbs. And so they weren't really functional in the way we think about them today until about the mid-20th century when we got myoelectric prosthesis. And literally, I think it was like the 1870s when we even got a prosthetic leg that bent like a knee. So prosthetics are kind of like an interesting historical thing. And the first ever prosthetic limb was found in Egypt and it was dated back to around 950 BC. Oh, wow. Awesome. Yeah. So according to the Atlantic, the prosthesis was made largely of wood, molded, and

stained as components were bound together with leather thread and it was made to replace a tiny toe on an ancient noblewoman. And it was meant to look lifelike. And so Megan Garber wrote in this article, the prosthesis is as much as it possibly could be humanoid, maximally lifelike and maximally toe-like. The Cairo toe, as it's been dubbed, is prosthetic and cosmetic all at once. Evidence not just of ancient manufacturing, stepping in where biology is limited, manufacturing, engaging in an ancient form of biomimicry. So that's the very beginning of prosthetics. And, you know, going into Middle Ages Renaissance,

that's when artificial iron limbs came into vogue, you know, our Jamie Lanster-style metal hands that looked kind of like a statue that people just plopped on there. And they were human-inspired. Like, a lot of them had nails and what have you, but they definitely weren't fooling anyone there made of iron. And nowadays, it's still kind of in vogue for prosthetics to not look exactly human.

Just take running blades. There's the Boston arm from the 60s that kind of looks like a hook. Someone even created their own prosthetic leg out of Legos like 10 years ago, I think. But yeah, so that's making prosthetics more than just an imitation has been a part of history for quite some time. And so enter the Longabar Necropolis. So in northern Italy, there's a necropolis, which means city of the dead, but it's just a really old big cemetery. It's dated back as far as the 6th to 8th century AD, but was founded shortly after. the Longobard invasion of Italy in 568 AD.

So the Longobards, which are also known as longbeards or longbards, you've probably heard of them. There are a Germanic group of folks from Austria and Hungary that ruled over a decent chunk of Italy from 568 AD to 774. This necropolis is about 15 kilometers southwest of Verona. You know, we love some William Shakespeare. So it's in the locality of Madonna de Louvaseca on the fringe of Via Postumia, one of the main ancient Roman roads of northern Italy. So big necropolis, you're definitely going to find some weird stuff.

So what we have in here are 164 tombs containing 222 individuals. So some of the buried folks had tombmates, not roommates, but tombmates. And then in a large pit at the bottom of the necropolis, there were two buried greyhound dogs and a headless horse. So weird stuff already beginning. And so using jewelry, they found on a female burial in the site. The researchers were able to age the necropolis to after the Longabards came along, and they determined that this spot was used for burying people for around a century and a half. So quite a long time of dropping people in here.

But the headless horse isn't the weirdest thing that was founded there. Researchers who excavated the site in the 1980s and 90s also found something really, really weird. A man who had his right forearm amputated, healed, and then replaced with a knife. So I'm not a walking dead person, but when I was Googling, knife arm man, Merle Dixon's knife hand came up. So if you want to just picture like a 500 AD version of that, I'm pretty sure that's what we're working with.

Of course, like I'm like looking at him. Like, I don't know who this is. But anyway. So sometimes form has to follow function. And the function you want is knife hands. Knife hand. I understand completely now. Oh, yeah.

So we've got knife hand man. And so a couple of years ago in 2018, more researchers were like, okay, let's take a look at this formless Italian. And he was removed from the site in 1996. So they were like, okay, let's see what's going on here. Let's figure out what's going on with the knife man. So what this new research found, and there's a bunch of things. So to begin with, it was that the bit above his right hand was chopped clean off by a single blow.

Oh, God. So, yeah. So we're talking about some seriously intense combat, maybe a medical intervention because of some seriously intense combat. The Lombards were pretty warrior-like. I mean, they took over Italy for 200 years, so I guess that's a test. I mean, I got to say a single clean blow is preferable to many alternatives. Yeah, I think with medical intervention, that sounds kind of nice. Like, it's like just chop it off if there's a problem. But who knows? And it could have even been a form of punishment, which was pretty common around this time for these people, which, you know,

is pretty scary. That would be the least fun. I don't know. Maybe intense combat would be the least fun. Either way. Depends on what this guy was into. You know, we'll never know. We'll never know.

But the stump that was left healed really, really well. So basically, the man who was dubbed T-U-S-380. So if I say 380, I'm talking about Knife Man. So he not only survived for a while after this. but he made it to around his 40s or 50s, which is middle age at the time. And that's a long time to be alive after going through an amputation before we knew about bacteria. Right. Considering that the age at death on average of noble adults in England and Wales was 48 for those born 800 to 1400, he did pretty well.

So he's, you know, living about as long as a fancy person in England 300 years later. But the skeleton of the man was not the only thing that was found in the tomb. With the skeleton was a knife and a D-shaped buckle with decomposed organic material around it, which was likely leather. So the archaeologist guessed that he probably made like a little cap for his stub, which attached to the knife and then there was a strap also for loosening and tightening. So it pretty much does look like this Merle guys. from my, you know, quick Google is the estimation. But yeah, and so in a lot of these graves, there was actually knives or weapons that were left kind of beside the bodies of, you know, the dead people.

But for him, it was left like across his midsection attached right at his elbow, or not elbow, I guess, whatever his stump was at the end. He got kind of a bonus elbow. But wherever his arm had been chopped off, they put his knife. So it was clearly a little bit different than just, you. you know, a knife that he had around. And then there was also bony healing on the edge of the stump, which was called call, or which is called callous.

And then there was a bone spur on the ulna bone, which points in the direction that the stump was frequently subjected to biomechanical force. So the stump is putting in work. Yeah, that, that knife hand saw some action is what we're hearing. It was not just resting. There was some action going on within the stump. It wasn't just an aesthetic knife hand. Oh, yeah.

He just didn't learn his lesson. He got his arm chopped off and he was like, I'm going back for more. He'll be back in. And so like the next strange bit is that not only are the arm bones and the knife placement, like, you know, pointing to the fact that the knife was probably his prosthetic arm. But his teeth and shoulders were really messed up because he was constantly tightening it. So his teeth had a huge loss of enamel from just biting, gripping and pulling the piece of, leather that, you know, held it in place. On the right side of his mouth, actually, he wore his teeth down so far. He opened the pulp cavity and got a bacterial infection. So, oh, my gosh, that could

have been might killed him because that's what came to mind for me too. And so when he also, his shoulders, he had like a sea-shaped ridge of bone from holding the shoulder in this like unnaturally extended position to tighten the arm, the knife arm in his mouth. So, I mean, and that could have only really happened if he was doing his tightening trick pretty often. So, you know, he was practicing that quite a bit. I mean, and he survived for a while after, you know, his bone healed. So I'm guessing if he had the knife arm for a while, you know, there's a lot going on. I'm picturing, like, to imagine why he's not using the other hand to help tightening it,

but, like, doing it with, like, his teeth a limbo. I'm imagining somebody, like, riding a horse into battle and being like, ah, got to tighten my knife hand and then, like, fwah. And, like, honestly, it's pretty attractive. So I don't know. I think what I'm saying is probably knife guy could pull. Just throwing that out there. I mean.

Rest in peace. Rest in peace. Knife man. Yeah, I mean, like, imagine like you're holding like a shield of some sort. You can't tighten your knife arm and hold something else. So there's a lot going on. He's a man on the go. But so there is like we don't really know what he was using the knife arm for.

Obviously your imagination can go kind of wild. What if he was just like a chef? What if he was like Salt Bay of his time? Like, and we're here imagining him like stabby-stabbing people. He actually lost it in a primitive meat grinder accident and was the most famous purveyor of Hote Cazine in his age. Knife Man was definitely the precursor to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Oh, gosh.

I'm not sure I want to eat anything made by the Knife Man. I don't know where that knife has been. But yeah, there is a heartwarming twist. So the authors write about basically how this is like a really wonderful story of how this man was supported by his community, given really great intense medical care and space to heal in order to survive for as long as he did. Not to mention the fact that he didn't die from just blood loss is a pretty huge testament to the doctors that were running around cutting off people's limbs at the time. And so they write,

this fact strongly supports the idea that the limb loss was due to combat or surgical intention. It seems less likely that a criminal would have been given such successful medical treatment. So that's their little hypothesis on why the arm might be missing. But yeah, and this is not the only example of community care of disabled folks in ancient times. It's been documented throughout history in multiple situations. The authors noted findings about the care of a child from 300,000 years ago that there were archaeological finds about in Sima de losos in Spain. Basically, this child had craniosinosis and possible cognitive disabilities, but because of the community taking care of this child and putting in the work that it actually lived to be five years old.

And then more recent but still pretty ancient history, there was a man with, temporal mandibular joint ankylosis, which basically meant that he couldn't really open his mouth. And in a similar kind of method, his community took care of him, had his teeth removed so that he could eat. His remains were found in a necropolis in the site Castel Malnome near modern-day Rome, which is dated back between the first and second century AD. So, yeah, and so the researchers have this really lovely quote, which I'd just love to leave with you guys. But the survival of this Longabard male testifies to community. care, family compassion, and a high value given to human life. A variety of interpretations and

implications from skeletal evidence of injuries such as this can inform us of the motivations of others as they care for disabled individuals. So that's the sweet twist is that, you know, the Longabards really took care of this guy, even if it was in a knife-arm-y kind of way, but, you know, to each their own. But yeah, that's the knife-arm guy. Yeah, I love to. I love that because there is, I think, um, this like very pervasive and an insidious beliefs that like it's a really new concept, um,

for communities and cultures to, um, provide people with the, the help they need to thrive. And like, first of all, it's really interesting where we draw the line of like, what counts and what doesn't. Nobody is like,

before glasses existed, all you people would be dead. We accept that glasses are like, wow, it's so great that we have these now. And obviously, like, people have had vision problems for all of time. And people must have worked around it. But isn't it great that we now have this awesome accessible assistive technology that has become ubiquitous. And like so, like, I feel like I say this, like every other episode on weirdest thing.

but so many of our beliefs about what is normal are really from 19th and 20th century, sort of like white European and American norms. And the American eugenics movement did a lot to make people just accept that it was like a new modern, dangerous idea for people with various physiological differences or disabilities or impairments. that it was like a really new, dangerous idea to care for them as humans and give them what they need to succeed. And it's not at all. So I love Knife Handman. He probably was pretty stappy. I don't think we would have like hung out. But I respect him. Yeah, much respect for Knife Arm Man.

Like that is, I don't know if I could like exist with a knife. I would nick myself everywhere. I can't even, I can't even like shave my legs without like cutting my, my body open. So like if I had a knife attached to me, I would just, that would be how I die. Yeah. Like five minutes later. So, yeah, amazing. Awesome. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to share my fact, which is about the very serious and also not so serious at times, history of gay bombs. So in 2007, the Ig Nobel Awards, which are, for listeners who don't know, a satirical take

on the Nobel Prize, and it highlights research that, quote, makes you laugh, then makes you think. So they're often very silly, but also sometimes there's stuff that's like actually very important just sounds kind of goofy. So in 2007, it honored a few real heavy hitters. So just to give you some context, I'm going to name a few of those. So the prize for medicine went to research that we actually talked about on a previous episode of Weirdest Thing, where scientists use sword swallowing to better understand

gastrointestinal stuff. The Physics Award honored several studies on how sheets become wrinkled, which is very relevant to my life. A Japanese chemist actually won for her work on extracting vanilla flavoring from cow dung, which isn't too gross if you remember from a previous weirdest thing episode that the best natural source of vanilla flavor is beaver anal glands. So I don't know what it is about vanilla and butts, but there you go. And Glenda Brown from Australia received recognition for her deep linguistic

investigation of the word the, and specifically the problem it poses in alphabetization, because no one can agree what to do with the the. So today, we're not talking about any of those things. We're talking about the 2007 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, which went to the Air Force Right laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. According to reports of the award ceremony, no scientists actually showed up to claim this prize, which was probably because they had worked to develop a chemical weapon capable of making enemy soldiers turn gay for one another. So that's a little cookie, a little problematic, I would say, on several levels. and perhaps not something they were so proud of.

But they did win the award. So it took a little bit of effort to dig up details on this because obviously, as you may expect, a lot of the reporting out there is just people being like, this just won an award at the Ig Nobel Awards and like, what the heck? And also, because the group responsible for uncovering these so-called gay bomb is unfortunately now defunct. It was an NGO called the Sunshine Project. It was based in the U.S. and Germany. And they formed sometime around early 2000 to expose research on and try to

reduce the implementation of biological and chemical warfare. According to their website, which you can still access with the Wayback Machine, thanks Wayback Machine. The group suspended its operations in February 2008 due to a lack of funding. But up until then, you know, for almost a decade, they worked to dig up secret government projects primarily using documents requested using the Freedom of Information Act. So they basically would just like trawl for documents and emails and memos that showed what governments were up to, specifically mostly the U.S. government, because we do a lot of researching terrible things. Now, you may wonder why the Sunshine Project existed. Well, that's because

many so-called non-lethal weapons are absolutely horrifying. And their development was extremely concerning, especially because they were, as the name suggests, presented as like a more humane, civilized alternative to more old-school methods of warfare. But at some point, you start really splitting hairs about what is humane when you are doing war. So weapons that maim and disfigure people are often classified as non-lethal or less lethal. I mean, anyone who's paid attention to protests in the last few years know that even stuff regularly used by like U.S. police officers, like rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons, can be incredibly physically harmful and cause, you know, long-term impacts and disable people, not to mention psychologically traumatize them. So you can just imagine this sort of stuff the government might be willing to use on enemy

combatants or even on foreign civilians who aren't cooperating with military commands. But that does not mean that some of the military's ideas, especially the ones that never actually took off, can't inspire at least a little bit of a chuckle. And people definitely chuckled in 2005 when the Sunshine Project released a 1994 memo from the Air Force Right Laboratory called harassing, annoying, and bad guy identifying chemicals. What, bad guy? Yeah, like quote unquote bad guy. Like chemicals to identify the quote, bad guy, air quotes. So this paper, and I will link to it on popside.com slash weird.

God bless the Sunshine Project for making this PDF public because it's absolutely unhinged. It was basically just a list of spitball ideas, like an attempt to create these broad categories of chemical weapons that might be worth investigating further. So it wasn't like, oh, here's a list of things we've developed. Here's a list of compounds that might do X, Y, or Z. It was just like, what might we want them to do? So it was a real, a real brainstorm session, a real jam-borne situation. And they really ran the gamut from like very close to things that have actually been used or, you know, let's be real have probably actually been used to things

that like sound very silly at, at first listen. So for example, they talked about compounds designed to attract biting insects or rodents. And they were like, not only could these weaken enemy defenses, but they could also disrupt food crop production, which really gets into the whole issue of like acting as if so-called non-lethal weapons are good. Because a lot of this stuff is talking about like completely. disrupting a society.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But they also talked about like chemicals that could tag these so-called bad guys for later identification. So those are basically like the exploding ink packs on clothing tags at the mall, but like sneakier and more war crimey. So they really run the gamut from like truly compared to like just immediately killing someone. Like yes, this is, you know, this.

is a non-lethal, less harmful weapon to like, I think you're just removing yourself several degrees from the fact that you are doing really inhumane things. They also mentioned using chemicals to give the enemy really, really stinky breath as a way to like disrupt cohesion and morale. And that's an idea that went farther than you might think. I was going to have a whole aside here about stink bombs as a serious military industrial complex enterprise, but there's so much that I think I'm going to save that for another day. So if anybody listening really wants a stink bomb episode, like, please let me know.

And I will hurry that along for you. I will get it in the pipeline. But back to this paper, most insidiously, perhaps, and also most hilariously, they talked about chemicals that changed the behavior of their targets in a way that would cause confusion or damage morale. They said, for example, maybe you'll make your enemy super sensitive to sunlight. Then they also noted that a, quote, distasteful but completely non-lethal option would be to use, quote, strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.

Oh. That's a very 1994, 1995 attitude there. Absolutely. And so when the Sunshine Project dropped these papers in 2005, the U.S. military came out saying that none of the proposals contained in this document had ever been taken seriously, which was like definitely not true. Some of these are very close to things that we have heard about being used later. You know, we covered on Popside.com, there's like a pain ray that's like a focus.

You know, there's just like really horrible stuff. We know that this stuff gets worked on. So them just being like, no, absolutely. That document was a silly joke. Somebody. Wink. Yeah. So the Sunshine Project responded by producing evidence that the joint non-lethal

weapons directorate included it on a promotional CD-ROM about its work, which is just a great phrase, that got distributed to other U.S. military and government agencies in the year 2000. So six years after this supposedly never taken seriously memo got written, it was still getting passed along on a seedy rob. Somebody had to burn that. There was a conscious choice. That is too much. Children who are listening, you used to have to choose which files you put onto a physical object and then mail that object to someone to share them. And that's what they did. So when this story went mainstream in 2007, thanks to the Ig Nobel Awards, the Guardian reported that document showed that researchers had actually asked for $7.5 million to develop the gay bomb.

Oh my God. I wasn't able to find those exact documents. So it's possible that that was referring to like a bundle of the weapons in this weird spitball memo. That being said, in the defense world, 7.5 million is like basically. pocket change, so I really don't think it's implausible at all. And it's also worth noting that when asked about the so-called gay bomb in particular, the Pentagon responded with the following statement. The Department of Defense is committed to identifying, researching, and developing non-lethal

weapons that will support our men and women in uniform, which, yeah, totally sounds like something they would say if they could absolutely prove that they had not considered putting any money into this research. That is absolutely a statement that says we maybe thought about this. So important disclaimer here, there are no chemicals that can make you gay. Absolutely none. Being queer or straight is something that, you know, is still poorly understood like most of, you know, human brain stuff.

and as best we can tell is based on a huge variety of factors, environmental, cultural, genetic, personal preference. You know, it's a very complicated, beautiful cocktail of inputs that decide what your sexual output will be, as is the case with most human behavior. But beyond the fact that there are no chemicals that make gay, there's also no actual known Aphrodisiacs. So the fact that chemists were spitballed on this is just absolutely wild to me. So just to make it clear, like, how few meaning none, aphrodisiacs there are out there, Bremelanatide, which is sold as the so-called female Viagra branded as Vailisi, has like

pretty unimpressive efficacy rates, like quite bad. And it works by interacting with. with your brain chemistry in ways that scientists like don't actually know how to connect with the arousal that sometimes seems to result. So it's just, it's basically like an antidepressant, except instead of like maybe sometimes it helps your depression and we don't really know why. It's like maybe sometimes it kind of makes you slightly hornier and we don't know why, which is great. Great. I love that. There was a researcher who gave himself an eight hour erection once with this combat. but he also like vomited a lot. It's way easier to just make a boner by getting blood to flow into the penis, as I have

said on a previous episode of weirdest thing, than it is to actually make someone want to bone, let alone make someone want to like get freaky all of a sudden with someone that they normally wouldn't find attractive. Also in the middle of a war, I mean, you know, danger is exciting. so your results may vary, but I just feel like this is a very high bar for influencing people's sexuality. And the idea that they're going to like disrupt the function of a military by making them all so horny and gay for each other so immediately is just really shows how little science has chosen to understand human sexuality, queerness, really anything. just anything. I would also like to say, you know, sexuality is fluid.

It's a spectrum. And if there are certain circumstances or scenarios in which you find yourself, like feeling a strong attraction to someone who is like not in a category of people you would normally find attraction, like, don't freak out. Brains are funny and it's okay. Maybe it's a one-time thing. Maybe it'll become your forever thing. That's all totally fine.

but the point is there is nothing the government can put in the water to make you gay, which is a big concern people have had since the leak of the gay bomb proposal. It has prompted quite a few conspiracy theories, unsurprisingly, of people saying like, this is why America is so gay now. Like, actually the gay bomb didn't go away. They just decided to make us all gay. So my book, Been There Done That, Arousing History. of sex is about, among other things, how we have always been this gay. We haven't gotten any gayer.

But I just really want to, I understand, not trusting your government. I understand finding all this research very unsettling because it is. Very war-crimey, very bad. But if your next logical step is so I'm concerned that maybe I'm being dosed with a chemical that is making me gay, here's what I have to send you. The pharmaceutical industry would be making so much fucking bank on an aphrodisiac compound if it was actually discovered. Like, talk about who stands to gain. Somebody would have, trust me, the powers that be, if there was a conspiracy theory, it would be that they were selling us a new pill to make us horny. So that is my little side part. If this really worries you or you have like, you know, an uncle who listens to a lot of Joe Rogan

and he's really worried about the gay bomb, I would posit that you put forward this counter argument that the pharmaceutical industry is desperate to bottle horny vibes. And they have not succeeded so far. So for now, the gay bomb has been. become just kind of a little bit of an internet joke. It's also, I think, a great opportunity for people to, like, stop and think about the kinds of things that get classified as okay in the industry of warfare. Because we would not like there to be a gay bomb.

As much as I love gay things, I think we, perhaps we shan't yassify war. So that's my whole fact. Not Yossify war. Many, many governments have tried. During Pride Month, absolutely. But we say no. We say no to that. All right.

We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going

and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in the crowd. But too often, life gets busy.

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Start selling now. Deepop where Taste recognizes taste. Okay, we're back. And Chelsea, tell us about Beyond B crime. Yes, I know. It's a real serious problem. but it actually really is for beekeepers. You know, I'll get into it in a little bit, but it's a big problem.

So during early spring, before plants have actually begun blossoming, but, you know, it's getting a little bit warmer. You know, bees might start to get a little bit awake. As well as in the fall when plants are wilting away, some honeybee colonies will actually turn to robbing other, weaker colonies of their hard-earned honey stores and killing a bunch of them in the process. So I missed that and B movie. I did not get to see that. I know, I know. That was a B-love story, not a B-war story.

So, you know. They left that detail out. Honestly, it'd make a great movie. Someone should consider this. Jerry Seinfeld, are you listening? Comedians and cars getting coffee with bees and also stealing. I'd watch that. Yeah.

Who wouldn't? It's actually really funny because you can see the enemy bee robbers casing the joint. They fly side to side in what's called a casting pattern to survive. veil for the defensive bees known as guards, which are always hanging around at the main bee hive entrance. And they're also looking for back entrances or weak spots in the hive itself so they can sneak in and get the goods. Wow. I know, right? You know, those specialized guard bees, they basically hang out again at the hive entrance and they try to determine whether the returning bees are friends or foes often based upon their smell. You know, when you've got

a bee, you know, having a little fun in another hive, it might get a little bit of a different smell, you know, bee cheaters, you know, that's a thing. But, you know, obviously, if they're coming back to the hive with the goods, then, you know, you want to, you want to let them in. But it's a little bit more complicated than that. So those guard bees, they essentially use their antennas to kind of touch the returning bees. They also will bite them and even threaten to sting them by grabbing the bee with their legs or their mouth and making a sting motion with their abdomens kind of like, hey, bro, what's up? Like, I am here and I'm going to potentially sting you.

and sometimes they really do even sting. So they kill the potential intruder. It might not even be an intruder. And they also kill themselves. So if you watch videos, I know, it's so dramatic. If you watch them, it literally looks like they're wrestling. And it is fascinating. And, you know, those garbys, they have a big, they have a big job.

If they're getting robbed, you know, they got to go. They got to figure out how to, get those neighboring bees out of their freaking hive. Because otherwise, you know, all that tasty honey that they, you know, it takes a while to make the honey. You know, they have to go out foraging. You know, they have to cap it. They have to.

It's a whole process. So what's interesting is that after being robbed, you know, the victims are going to increase those defensive behaviors. So, you know, any sort of. hive mate coming in, they will actually, you know, they'll pick up those defensive behaviors, and they'll assign more worker bees to become guards because of that. But something that was interesting is we didn't really know what actually happened to the behaviors of the robbing colony after they'd come back from the robbing.

A study published in 2021 in Animal Behavior headed up by Claire Richoff, who is actually the postdoc I used to work with in my previous life as a honeybee researcher, which, yes, I have gotten stung hundreds of times because I also worked on honeybee aggression research. But that's what her group wanted to find out. So they actually found that after a robbing, the bully colony actually increases both their foraging and their defense behaviors. So, you know, hive guards, they're increasing their defensiveness, even against those nestmates coming back from foraging. But interestingly, their increased defensiveness isn't due to weird smells that the robbers are bringing back with them from the victim hives like it was previously thought. Their study actually looked at the brain expression, the brain gene expression patterns of those robbing bees coming back. and they found that they're just unusually aggressive bees.

So, you know, they, those bees, you know, they're not just like foragers, like the regular foragers. These are the guys who they've got the road rage, you know, they are, you know, beating holes in the walls of the hive. They're the knife hand guy of the bee world. Exactly. I love this, you know, this connection here. But the returning robbers, because they are more highly aggressive, they're the ones actually provoking aggression from the nestmate guards when they come back to their home hive. So this is not like, oh, yeah, you know, we come back and we celebrate the fruits of our labor. They come back and they're like, what's up?

You know, like they're trying to beat up their fellow nestmates. It's really, it's pretty messed up. And, you know, you might think, like, why would you do this? Like, why would you want to increase this defensiveness if so many bees die from it? Like, you know, why would this happen? That's, like, not really advantageous. But because the nectar conditions are so bad, which led the colony to start robbing in the first place, they're actually increasing their defensiveness in case a colony would then come to rob them.

So it's like these bee gang wars essentially going on. And, you know, there's some counterintuitive stuff there, but it's pretty fascinating. Another cool fun fact about another class of bees and their bee behavior is there are bee undertakers. So, you know, bees will die in the hive. Like, just normally. But, like, also especially, you know, during these kinds of, you know, robbing events, they're the ones that are literally bringing out the dead. I've, like, seen it.

It's really cool. They carry this dead bee in their, you know, little, little arm thing, legs. And then they bring it out to the outside of the door of the hive. And they just throw it away. It's fascinating And I love bees What? They throw them overboard They throw them overboard

I know, I know They're not helping out Like the knife hand arm guy They're just like well They could bring disease into the hive Gotta get them out Yeah I feel like you could really have a pile up Very quickly

Oh they do We had a lot of bees died During some of our aggression assays we did Like back in the day And yeah you could see them Just bringing out the dead So yeah Fun times in Bee World, got to love their society and how they, you know, they shift roles

based upon what they actually need at that moment. It's kind of cool, especially when you think about the fact that they're just insects. Yeah. They're so, I mean, like, I love that social insects like bees have like really complex, I don't know, sets of roles that you can just be like your destiny is. to be this really angry, live, fast, die young bee with nowhere to channel your aggression unless there's a bee war. I don't know.

Maybe there's a lesson to be learned there about society and feelings. I don't know. I don't know. But it does sound like bees commit fewer war crimes. So than humans. Yeah. Oh, by a lot. Yeah.

You know, they're not making gay bee bombs. But as far as we know I know that could be the next paper You never know I would respect it in a B All right What was the weirdest thing we learned this week A lot of a lot of heavy hitters

Yeah A lot of death Long showing Yeah a lot of death That's true A lot of war A lot of war Much more than is normal

For weirdest thing I could have coordinated us a little better. At the same time, not the darkest episode of Weirders thing we've ever had by a long shot. So I guess that says something about our content. Keep listening, though. How can we depress you this week? Yeah.

There was definitely a run where we felt like we were the most depressing thing I learned this week. And we, you know, we try to, chat, of course, correct. I think for me personally, it is the knife handman. I learned a lot. And Sarah Kylie, you really painted a picture. You told a story. I can see the knife hand man. So that's my vote.

There are pictures of him if you'd really like to see the knife hand man. Oh, I think I'm just going to imagine him as he is in my head. I think probably I I think probably it won't get better than that. I'm going to dream about him tonight. But like in a good way. It's going to be a good dream. My fan man was like less spooky than I expected.

I know. Yeah. It's like the most positive one. Yeah. Honestly, yes. So for that, for that shocking twist, Sarah Kylie, I think you were this week's winner. Agreed.

Well, thank you. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsai.threadlist.com.

The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering, by Just Bodie. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.