The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Greatest Con in Mushroom History, Secret Weapon: Normal Dogs, a Bee's Benis

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

Bee scientist Kit Prendergast joins the show to talk about... well... the birds and the bees. Plus, Rachel explains how portobello (portabella?) mushrooms are not exactly real. And Sara Kiley tells us how a spotted lanternfly's worst enemy could be a normal dog. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tweet at us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Click here to learn more about all of our stories! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to Jess' Twitch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to all of Jess' content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.jesscapricorn.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Jess Boddy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Popular Science: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/PopSci⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Theme music by Billy Cadden: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at https://MINTMOBILE.com/weirdest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's the real science behind all the popular UFO claims on television? What's the true history behind today's growing beliefs in Atlantis, the flat earth theory, and ancient aliens? And when you take away the media hype, what do scientists really say about COVID-19 and global warming? Since 2006, the Skeptoid podcast has been revealing the true science, true history, and true facts behind nearly a thousand of our most popular urban legends and mysteries. Each episode of Skeptoid looks at a famous story you know and reveals the part of it you haven't heard. Check out episodes covering mysteries such as popular ghost stories, famous UFO cases, alternative science claims, cryptids and urban legends, or conspiracy theories. Find out why the truth behind these popular legends is even more interesting.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for Skeptoid. That's S-K-E-P-T-O-I-D. Or visit Skeptoid.com for full transcripts of the entire catalog. Skeptoid, critical analysis of pop phenomena. At popular science, we report and write dozens of science and text 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 editor. of popular science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. And I'm Dr. Kit Prendergast. Kim, welcome to the show. Woo! Yay! So excited to be here all the way from Australia. So I don't know whether you've had any Aussies on before. I don't know that we have. It's, now that you're saying it, I think perhaps not. So welcome and congrats. It's very exciting. Would you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are? Sure.

So I am Dr. Kit Prendergast, also known as the Bee Baybet. And I'm a wild bee scientist from Australia. I study all things, bees and pollinators, a bid advocate for our native bees. I'm the vice chair of the IUCN Wild Bee Specialist Group, which is pretty cool. I have published over 80 articles on native bees. And in addition to my hardcore sciencing, I also do, yeah, a lot of psychom and performing. And I have a science circus comedy called The Birds and the Bees. Cute.

We love that. Thank you so much for joining us. This is going to be great. We love bees here. Yeah. Big Bee fan over here. Before we get into the show, there are a couple of sort of housekeeping notes I have that I remembered because you're from Australia and perhaps our first Australian guest, definitely our first tuning in from Australia. But so first of all, I have a correction and apology to make because recently a few episodes ago, I was talking about watching New Zealand crime procedurals.

And I lumped deadlock in with that, which is, of course, an Australian show. Oh, no. And I was deeply embarrassed when I was listening back. But then in my defense, I did realize that the reason I messed that up in my head is because the lead actress is, in fact, a Kiwi and someone I had just been watching on Taskmaster New Zealand. So, and also the concept of Tasmania has confused me before and will confuse. excuse me again it's not the first time shan't be the last but listeners have you heard that and you thought did she even watch deadlock yes i did and i'm so sorry if you're looking for another new zealand based crime procedural other than of course the delightfully schlucky brokenwood

mysteries that i i talked about wellington paranormal also excellent so that is that is my correction apology and recommendation also i i want to thank you listener Sarah. I was trying to, I believe your name is Sarah. Your handle on Instagram includes the phrase Bilbo Swaggons. And I love that so much. Okay. So Sarah reached out because in another episode, maybe the same episode, don't remember, different episode.

I talked about how I had this visceral memory of a worm charming scene in like a 90s sci-fi movie. and that was all I remembered about it. She spotted that it was from Godzilla, 1998 Godzilla. Oh, wow. That's a good detail. Yeah, yeah. It is like literally like a dude in the Chernobyl exclusion zone

just zaps the ground, some worms come up. That is literally like all you see of this guy in these worms, but it stuck in my mind and in hers as well. So thank you so much for solving. I listened to that episode and it just brought back memories of being in high school when I was in Queensland and it rains all the time in Queensland. And I just remember all the worms coming up and just like everywhere rolling around. That's like nightmare alert for me. Yeah, I'm really, I'm not.

I was one of those kids that would pick them up and put them back in the garden. Oh, that's sweet. Yeah. Yeah, I've never been bothered by worms. but I will say that I think you can reach a critical mass of them where I'm like, oh, that's none of my business. That's those wriggly guys. I'm leaving them on their own. Well, anyway, with that very important housekeeping out of the way, now that I have all that off of my chest, let's get into the show.

So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera. 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. Asteris, no, we don't. It's fine. Every time I think I don't need to add that caveat anymore, I have like a repeat guest who hasn't been on for a while,

who then at the end of the show was like, wait, we didn't pick the winner. Like, wait, did I win? Like, no, no, no, no, no. Sir Kylie, why don't you start? with your teas. Yay. Okay. Well, today I come with a tail of an invasive species

and they're very unassuming potential foil. Oh. Intrig. All right. Kit, what's your teeth? My tease is that bees have limited sex positions, but a whole variation of mating strategies. Rar!

Love it. I'm so excited. All right. My tease is that if you think you don't like mushrooms, you might just not like one particular species of mushroom because like 90% of the mushrooms we eat, at least in the U.S., and more than half of the mushrooms eaten in a lot of other countries in the world,

are the same guy, just hold them to the different names. And also, you may hear this and think, I already know this fact, but there is a detail here that even I, my college nerd Rachel Feltman, did not comprehend until starting to research this fact. And it might ruin my life. Oh, no.

Oh, I'm so excited. Okay. I'm going to get into that. I really, I was writing my notes on this. And I was like all over, I learned something about mushrooms all being the same that is like really, I don't know what to do with it. And we had just given our kid a bath. And apparently, like, my eye was a little irritated. And he thought I was, like, near tears.

So he really thought that I seriously was, like, on the brink because of this. Which is not the case. I'm fine. But I am shocked. Okay. So with all that buildup, this may, in fact, send me down a dark investigatory food journalism path to a perhaps unsolvable mystery. But we're going to start with the easy stuff. ripping off the big band-aid.

Portobello mushrooms are a conspiracy dreamed up by big mushroom. Yeah. Big shrimp. Yeah, big shroom. Most mushroom consumption, particularly in the U.S., like in the U.S., we're talking 90% of all mushrooms. There are countries where this is not the primary mushroom eating at all, but if we're talking sort of like broadly speaking, Western world, European culinary influence,

they are like the majority mushroom as, as I'm aware, is either this classic little white button mushroom or a big, bold portobello. But these are actually the exact same species, agiricus bisporus. And even if you've already been made aware of that, there's a lot of fun stuff and, in my opinion, maddening stuff about this history to unpack. So rewind all the way back, fungoculture, fungoculture, or the cultivation of mushrooms dates back to at least the like early CE years in China. Now, mushrooms are made of mycelium. It's very cool because mycelium is chytinus. Kiten is the same thing beetles are made of. If you are vaguely aware that mushrooms are weird, but, you know,

haven't thought much or learned much about it. There's a reason why they're neither plants nor animals. And the truth is, they're a weird sort of in-between thing. There's a reason they're their own whole kingdom. And sort of the more you learn about them, the more you're like, are they from space? We had a reason, yes, be like, they may be aliens. And obviously, you know, that's a bit facetious. But in the same way that sort of, you know, every once in a while, a researcher will be like, you know, I looked at a cephalopod genome and like this is the most alien animal in the world. Like, when you look at fungi, it's like, what the heck, where do these come from. And but mushrooms, you know, most of us see and are familiar with their fruiting bodies,

but underground there are these huge mycelial networks and all of that is just mycelium, these little filaments. But the same stuff, the mycelium that we see in the form of those little filaments also just comes together to make the fruiting body. So if you take that mycelium and put it in the right substrate, it's going to grow mushrooms. Asterisk, maybe. be. But that's everything that technically needs to happen is those little threads go in a substrate, and they will eventually, you know, theoretically turn into whole, whole fruiting body mushroom over the ground. Now, as anyone who's ever tried to grow mushrooms from scratch in modern times knows, and I don't mean you like get a little grow kit. I love that those exist. You know, you can get

a plastic bag full of substrate that's already got icelium growing in it, or you can get like inoculated little pegs to hammer into a log. And those can still go wrong, but like most of the hard work's been done and you just need to sort of like give, give that puppy like a nice moist, warm area. My my psychology professor used to say like, hey, get in the bathroom, which, you know, depending on how you feel about the, the smell of, you know, moldering hay and mushrooms might not be great, but it is a wonderful place for the mushrooms to grow. But if you've ever tried to truly do this from scratch, you know, sort of harvesting that mycelium yourself and trying to get it to spawn. If you've ever done that without a sterile environment, you know that it's kind of a crapshoot.

You're very liable to get some kind of contaminant in there. It might keep the mushrooms from growing at all. They might grow and then die pretty quickly. You might grow a bunch of other stuff that you didn't intend to grow. Yeah. I had a lot of fun times in my mycology classes in college under the laminar. flow hood, you know, sterile environment, my hands in those big weird gloves inside the hood. And you, like, have to be careful about what parts of the mushroom the scalpel touches

because you're trying to, like, get out a little sterile bit from the inside that hasn't touched the dirty woods. And yeah, I found that very fun and satisfying, but I also don't have a laminar flow hood at home. So if I tried to do that with just random mushroom from the woods, it might not turn out so well. And for much of history, that was that was sort of the deal with mushroom cultivation. Obviously, people have harvested wild mushrooms, you know, for good and ill since we've, as long as we've foraged anything. But in terms of cultivation, even though it dates quite far back in our history, like, you know,

at least more than a thousand years, your results may vary. It was only in the 1800s that the Pester Institute came out with. with steromycelium spawn because they were getting wise to the whole germ situation. And that was pretty dope. People were excited about that. And that really allowed people who were cultivating mushrooms to reliably cultivate them at a bigger scale. But these weren't quite the little white buttons that are so ubiquitous today. It was the species that we're talking about, this agaricus. The original wild species had a pale, grayish brown cap with kind of like a scaly appearance on top, a little rough.

And if that sounds like a cremini or a baby bellow, that's because that's what a cremini is. So, yeah. So long ago, the whole Western world was eating these rustic-looking brown mushrooms in harmony, but then everything changed when this guy Lambert in Pennsylvania, he spotted just like a little mutant, freaky, bright white one while he was out in his cultivation area in 1925. You know, fortunately, I guess, for us, if you like the way button mushrooms look today, he was not just a casual farmer.

He was a mycologist by training. And he had actually already perfected a method for sterile mushroom propagation at home. So he took some spawn from this chalky white little guy. And it grew both uniformly in terms of like creating these very white, very buttony, little mushrooms that were like roughly the same size and shape. It also grew prolifically. Like this was, this guy wanted to live. Wow.

You wanted to spread the good word of being a freaky little white mushroom. And so when he sold these, as I think he literally called the, the cultivar snow white, not only did it become the leading commercial mushroom by 1933, but because they were growing it, farms were producing more mushrooms than ever because they just took to the substrate so well. So basically all little white mushrooms that you buy at the store today are descended from this one freaky little guy in 1925. No much genetic diversity then, hey? Yeah.

Oh, absolutely. No, they are, they're all the same. No mushroom diseases, please. Yeah, it's so true. So true. We don't want that. And what's really interesting here is that there's a fun sort of cultural story here because this happened as people in the U.S. especially were getting very into mass production, quality control. They liked the idea of food that looked pristine in a very particular way.

And there's like a lot to unpack here. there's some racism, some xenophobia, some classism, but also a very reasonable backlash to the sort of pre-quality control industrialization of food. You know, people wanted to be able to see that the food that was being sold to them was not full of sawdust and what have you. And so that sort of just created this general, like, vibes-based preference for things that looked pristine.

And compared to a sort of... of rustic-looking brownish, grayish, scaly mushroom, what looks more pristine than a little white button mushroom? Aw, and they are cute. Yeah, yeah. I have some of it tonight, so. I'm a big fan of mushrooms. Yeah, I mean, I love mushrooms.

Me too. And honestly, like, while the white buttons, I am never mad to see one if that's the mushroom in the dish, like really my least favorite option for just like a pile of mushrooms on a plate, you know. And I'll get it more into that sort of what we lost by turning in this direction. It's sort of a similar story to white bread, which was gaining popularity around the same time. It was seen as this triumph of industrial purity and modernity. My mom, who is southern Italian and Sicilian and her grandfather owned a like industrial

Real Bakery in Newark. She always tells me the first time she saw, like, white bread in a plastic bag with, like, a little, you know, bread tie from the store. She was, like, 10 years old at a friend's house and was like, what is that? And I think, like, normal reaction. Yeah. Well, and I mean, obviously that would have been, like, around 1970. So not the exact era we're talking about.

But I still, I think, says a lot because it was sort of. you know, the all-American pristine food industry was definitely in sharp contrast to the you know, southern Italian immigrant food industry and mushrooms were no exception. Yeah, there was even ad copy at the time for these snow white mushrooms that promised

quote, no wilder foreign mushrooms. You know, they were fresh and clean and picked in their prime. Okay. They weren't dirty. They weren't those dirty Italian mushrooms. There's nothing particularly Italian about these mushrooms, by the way. Even the day of portobello, we're going to get into it. It's made up. Okay.

So one quick thing to note here, you will see people all over the internet saying that white button mushrooms grow into cremini mushrooms as teenagers and then eventually into portobello's, which is slightly wrong to split some hairs to split some mycelium. They are all the same species. So I guess it's also technically not wrong. but not the way they think. So it's not like if you just keep one of these snow white mushrooms growing, it will eventually look like a baby bellow and then eventually the kind of portabella you buy at a store. There is the brown variety, which is, you know,

how they started out naturally. Then there's the white variety, which is almost everything that we grow to make button mushrooms. They're both harvested young while they're small if you're looking to make a button mushroom. Now, the Grimini might be harvested a few days later just because the, just because the sort of uniformity is less of the appeal. So it's sort of like more acceptable for a box of Kermini mushrooms to like be some wonky sizes and shapes. So they might not be harvested when they're still like that perfect quintessential button.

But again, they are slightly different, you know, different color ways, different straight. of the same species. You're not just going to get one if you let the other grow. That being said, if you let something that looks like a cremini be harvested a few days later, it will, you know, its cap will broaden out. This will happen with any mushroom of this species. But if you, the classic portobello is that brown varietal overgrown. Now, according to America's Test Kitchen, the brown buttons really do taste a bit better,

or at least different. a lot of people disagree on this. They're blind taste tests where people are like, these are the same mushroom. Who can say? I haven't done this taste test myself. I think they taste different. Yeah.

I think they taste different. Totally believable. Totally believable because, again, the white buttons are all descended from this one mushroom. So totally plausible that there's some of that coloration, that we lost something when we lost that coloration. you know. And even if it's, even if a lot of it is sort of site-based, that's an important part of like flavor perception. So, you know, it doesn't matter. And, you know, some farmers

kept growing them and eating them, maybe even selling them on a smaller scale. But the big overgrown ones were definitely not marketable. Because again, you know, in this like mid-century U.S. food landscape, you weren't going to have. have a big, misshapen, scaly, brown mushroom? No, absolutely not. Unacceptable. Who wanted that? But then, enter the 1970s when there's a backlash against super modernized, sterile food. Hippies are around. People are feeling counterculture in multiple ways. They're starting to talk about health food. Health food stores are opening. Literally, what would a health food store have meant before 1970, probably a weird, creepy apothecary where a guy sold you, sold you

freaky stuff. And then during the 80s, we start seeing these big, lusty brown mushrooms sold as portobellos. They're a meat substitute. They're earthy, natural, wholesome. She's not like other girls. She actually looks dirty on purpose. She'll have you know. And clearly, this took off because Portobello's big business. We, you know, people, people love them. And they also are just like so clearly, they are a distinct thing for a different purpose than the little white button. You know, if the little white button mushrooms are like Betty Draper from Mad Men, the portabalas are those hippies from the cult that Roger's daughter ran off to join. It's, the world is just changing and the mushrooms are changing with it. Here's the part that is going to

haunt me. I'm excited. So let's talk about portabella's, this thing that happened in the 80s. We know that in 1986 there were like references in print to the portobello mushroom. There are no agreed upon theories or even as far as I could find existing reasonable theories for who started this. You know, people will say it was a marketing group, sure. That's very vague. What does that mean? Yeah. What marketing group? Where? Who? You know, just one example, you might see the name spelled Porta Bello. You might see Portobello. You might see Portobello. You might

see Portobella. There's no correct name because it's not a real word. One idea is that maybe it's a reference to London's Portobello Road, which was the lane to Portobello House, which was named actually for a place in Panama, captured by the British in 1739. Interesting. So not an Italian thing. And yeah, I think if you ask most people on the street, you know, is Portobello an Italian word? If they were in Italian, they'd probably say, yeah. Probably.

Yeah. Decent guess. Yeah, but no. And we don't know what it's a reference to because we don't know who came up with it. We started it. There's no health food store that was the first store that tried to sell these. There's no farm that has admitted that they did this in the 70s. Miriam Webster says that the word is perhaps an alteration of the Italian pratayalo or a few related worms or patera roo. which is like a word for meadow mushroom, but you know, which could be, maybe. We don't know who pulled the greatest con in mushroom history. We have no idea. And these mushrooms are now ubiquitous.

And just have to come get your flowers. Like I genuinely feel this could consume my life. And you should be proud because there's no reason for us not to be eating these mushrooms. They're good mushrooms. And this is where I just close my own personal connection to big mushroom, which is that my grandma's, cousin Roweo started a mushroom farm in the 70s, which is now one of the major suppliers in the U.S. I got to visit once for like a family reunion when I was a kid. It was very cool. If people aren't aware,

most of like truly almost all of the mushrooms that are grown and sold in the U.S. are grown in this one little area in Pennsylvania. This is cool. I know I'm talking about mushrooms for a long time. I'm almost done. I promise. So around the Kennet Square area in the 1880, There were a lot of Quakers around, a lot of Quakers in the Philly area. We love that. And this florist, William Swain, had the idea that he could grow mushrooms underneath his carnation beds. You know, it was a way of using waste, using space. It was great.

And wild mushrooms were quite popular in Philadelphia. But because this was right before that sterile spawn came out for sale, it was still pretty hard to cultivate mushrooms at scale. So there was no. sort of mushroom farming industry, so to speak, in the U.S. So he then imported spores from England, started growing them under the carnations, covered it in burlap. And then this went really well. And, you know, the business grew.

And then once we had that, you know, sterile spawn becoming more available, the business, like, absolutely was booming. And Kenneth Square was very close to Philadelphia, which was a major hub. And so it just became the mushroom place. And apparently, initially, these Italian immigrants were workers on the farms owned by the Quakers. But then a lot of Italian immigrants ended up starting their own farms. So, yeah, it is the mushroom capital of the U.S. Used to be the mushroom capital of the world.

Now China is growing so many mushrooms. And that is one of the places where they are not primarily these button mushrooms. you can get a lot of interesting varieties, which brings me to my final thoughts. And yeah, am I maybe going to call my like fifth cousin and say like, hey, you met me once when I was 10? Do you have any dirt on the port of bellow? Yeah, what do you know?

I got to know, please. And also, can you send me some more of your marinated mushrooms? They're delicious. Thanks. Go to Buena Farms. Anyway, here are my final thoughts, actually. Don't try to pick things that look like white button mushrooms. There are a lot of white mushrooms, little white mushrooms, little white mushroom problem.

There are a lot of poisonous mushrooms that are white and small, including my favorite name for a genus, the destroying angel, the Amanitas. They're beautiful. They're deadly. They'll mess you up. And the most famous Amanina is Aminomiscaria, which is a class. classic like Toadstool with White Spots. Best case scenario, you're going to have a bad trip. You're going to be drooling. You're going to be throwing up.

You don't want it. But the truth is that actually there are other even more dangerous aminitas that do not have a giant red cap that says, hmm, I'm kind of freaky. They just look like little white mushrooms. So you don't want to do that. Similar problem with little brown mushrooms, actually. That is like a phrase that my psychologist will use that because they're just really hard to identify. I mean, when I was doing my ecology in school, the work we would do to confidently ID a mushroom, you take a spore print.

You look, you get under that undercarriage, you're looking closely at the gills, you're looking at where the gills attach. You're making subjective decisions about the color of the spore print. You're peeling back things. you're taking little flakes with your finger saying like what what discoloration is happening? You're asking yourself, is there a veil attached to this stem? You're asking about, I could go on. You're asking questions about the smell. You know, you're asking how scaly it is.

The point is there are a lot of things that go into a lot of movement. Yeah. Yes, especially with these little white mushrooms and these little brown mushrooms. Now, what I do recommend if you want to forage wild mushrooms, first of all, check out your local mycological society. You might think, we don't have that. You do. I promise you do.

Us freaks are everywhere. So you can check them out and go out foraging with them, you know, get the resources they recommend. And what you want to do is get to know a few species common in your area, preferably starting with ones that have zero poisons look likes. and then you expand your repertoire from there. You know, good candidates, at least in the Northeast and, you know, some other parts of North America, Morels are very popular for this reason.

There are things called False Morels that basically make rocket fuel when you either cook or digest them. But to be honest, I think they look like the brain tree from Neopets and are unmistakable and don't look like Morales at all. But, you know, hubris can catch you anytime. So do be aware that there is this thing called a false morel. Chicken of the woods. Big old meaty mushroom, delicious. Similarly has a so-called lookalike in the poisonous jackalantron mushroom. But the jackalanchard has gills and the chicken of the woods literally does not have gills.

So like I believe in you, you know, you can figure that one out. But do, again, look at the mushroom before you eat it. Figure it out. Always good advice. And other lookalikes will be very obviously like wooden and tough. and that's pretty self-limiting. Like, you're not, you're not going to, you're not going to eat that mushroom. Hen of the woods.

Maybe my favorite foraging mushroom, super flavorful. Tastes so different from the button mushrooms that you're used to having. And it has no dangerous lookalikes. I can't promise you won't mistake something less tasty for it if you try really hard. But if something really, really looks like kind of the woods, you can feel pretty confident that it's not something that's going to cause you serious harm. Those are just my recommendations from somebody who learned most of what they learned in New England and the New York City area. But you don't have to go foraging to eat mushrooms that are different and dare I say more delicious than the standard button mushroom. We live in an era when these are sold in many stores.

So check him out. And just, you know, I know I said in my tease, if you think you don't like mushrooms, my husband, when I met him, said he hated mushrooms. And that was almost a deal breaker for me. It wasn't. Yeah. It wasn't because it's hard out there. So I needed to be willing to compromise on something. But recently, like within a couple of years, it sort of occurred to him that because these were all one species, you know, that most of the mushrooms he's had, that he should try some other mushrooms.

mushrooms. And he has indeed now sampled some dishes containing other kinds of mushrooms and been like, yeah, I don't hate that. So this could be you. Lyons name. Very exciting. Linesman is good. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And Lyons mane is another one that, you know, including in North America is a pretty safe one to, you know, make your go-to foraging mushroom. And, you know, if you can identify it, you're, you're going to be pretty safe. You know, and then meanwhile, there's stuff that, I was once really good at identifying that I would not confidently pick now. I would need to re-immers myself. But, yeah, those, listen, mushrooms are great.

And if you have any dirt on, who came up with, again, one of the greatest cons in food marketing history. And one that I think should be celebrated. This is not something to be ashamed of. these were good mushrooms that deserve to get eight and now we're eating them. And that's all thanks to a mystery portobello person. Yeah. The way it's described on the internet, it's as if we all are fine just assuming there was some, you know, mushroom cabal.

And the truth is, it may have been, you know, my cousin Roroa and several other Italian ladies sitting at a table together in Pennsylvania. Yeah. So maybe it truly was just kind of a vague mushroom cabal, but I would love to know. Wonderful mystery. Yeah, I'll write the book one day. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. This back to school season, spend less on your kids with Amazon. Hi, I'm Laura Clary, mom, overthinker, and someone who has a complicated relationship with a back-to-school supply list. Can we just be honest for a second? Kids are expensive. Last year, I went all out on my daughter's

school supplies, color-coded folders, the fancy pencil case, gel pens and 17 colors she absolutely needed. By October, she had one pencil left. One. I don't know what happened to the rest, and honestly, neither does she. Amazon has everything your kids need for back to school at prices that won't make you want to cry in the school supply aisle. Great prices, huge selection. And when half of it goes missing by October, at least you didn't break the bank. So remember, with Amazon's low back-to-school prices, just spend less on your kids because every dollar you don't spend on them is a dollar you haven't spent on them. Okay, we're back. And Sarah Kylie, thank you so much for sitting through my long mushroom story. I'm always here for a mushroom story, seriously. I'm like a mushroom freak.

I just want to eat buttered mushrooms all day. Please. Please. Well, I appreciate it. And would you tell us about your fact, please? Yes. Okay, I'm excited about this one, which will be, it will become clear why I'm excited soon. But I've just start with some, like, less, like, super fun info. And if you live in the Northeast, this story is probably going to sound familiar because it's kind of, there's always around this time of year, a little bit of news hub up about this because

my first creature in this story of two creatures is the invasive spotted lantern lie. Because they are a problem and they're a kind of like modern problem. We hear about invasive species and you kind of feel like they've been here forever. But these guys, these guys are only, you know, they were cited in Berks County and Pennsylvania in 2014. So they're kind of like a new menace to the, you know, we got a lot of menaces around, but this guy's pretty new. And they're from like the Shanghai region, which is important. There's going to be some context shortly. But now they're in, you can't find, it's, I've been struggling to find the exact number of states

citizen, but it's at least like in the teens. I keep bumping into like 17, 18, 19 states. So there's, there's a handful of states that these lantern flies are all over. They kind of have grown exponentially. So I found, I've been on a lot of like college of life sciences, uh, websites. And I think this was like the Penn State one. But it took a hundred years for spongy moths just to move from Massachusetts to New York. And if you think about like how it's basically been 10 years and these, these moths are everywhere, it's really, I don't it just. spooky, just how fast they've gotten around. And the U.S. isn't the only place that these guys have kind of, you know, taken over and done some unpleasant behaviors in the early 2000, South Korea and

Japan. Got a swarm of them as well. And they've all kind of shown up via imported goods because they're a little sneaky. I mean, any, any creature can be a little sneaky if you're transporting goods all over the world, which we are. So that's how invasive little creatures sometimes happen. And what makes these guys so powerful, you may ask. And it's adaptation to city stankiness generally is kind of one of the ideas. There was this genomic analysis that was published earlier this year that demonstrated that the spotted lanternfly underwent three sequential bottlenecks of like genetically, which kind of reduced the genetic diversity of these guys and elevated inbreeding,

which actually kind of made them even spicier for, you know, taking over because it It kind of, bottlenecks normally spell trouble for an animal population. You want genetic diversity. But the researchers kind of have this idea that the selection may have made it easier for the lanternflies to exist in urban locations filled with heat, pollution, pesticides, and they have adaptations and genes associated with stress response. So they're like, we're city girls. These lanternflies were like, we love it.

We came from Shanghai. We're here in New York. We're here in Boston. We're here at a party. So a little bit nerve wrecking, at least. So yeah, these guys, they like the city. They like the Northeast. They're here for a good time.

And they sound kind of harmless. I mean, spotted lanternfly sounds really cute to me because if you like lanterns and polka dots, it's kind of like really exciting combination at first. And they're kind of cute. And it's, they're really cool looking. That's a bummer about all these invasive species. Like lionfish, hello. I'm like, I just want to look at them and I feel bad.

But then you go down to Florida and you're like, please, please shoot these things. with your pokey sticks. For a couple of years, it was like almost cliche for somebody to post a picture. Being like, what is this beautiful bug? Unfortunately, it is the lantern fly and you have to kill it. As recently as last year, I saw someone have that happen. And I was like, wow, the world has changed so fast. Truly.

Like, it's crazy. Because, yeah, these invasive guys, they really, they come looking cute and they say, we're here to stay. But yeah, you're really not supposed to. And it's not because they're like really like innately bad for people or animals off the bat. Like there's some like talk about maybe like because they are so cool with pesticides that like your dog really shouldn't eat them or something. But like and that's still like up. I mean, don't eat them.

Please guys. Don't eat. Please don't eat the lantern flies. But they the problem with them is not that they're like bitey. They have these like sucky mouths that suck up tree sap. And that's a nightmare for certain crops. And the wild and less urban areas. they like to snack. Some of their favorite snacks are the tree of heaven, which is another

invasive species called like the stinking sumac as well. And they've reproduced really quickly and aggressively and like, you know, take over where other native plants like want to be. So those two are already, they already are talking to each other. But the black walnut, maple, willow, river birch, black cherry, tulip poplar, all sorts of trees that are, you know, up here in the northeast. But yeah, these spot of lantern flies are like, that's delicious. I want that. And the big problem in terms of crops and these guys is vineyards. They're super duper menaces for grapevines and other fruit trees because they basically they're like, delicious sap, let me get some of that.

And they suck it out and then they leave something behind, which is just like this like sugar water called honeydew. And so this has like a double whammy of dilemmas for everybody involved here, except for the lanternflies. They're enjoying this. So it depletes like the stored starches in the plants. So like sap is basically like, oh, yes, this is my emergency granola bar for later. So they take the emergency granola bar of the trees and they leave behind like this just stuff.

And so, yeah, the Guardian did a story on this earlier this year as well. There was a whole bunch of stuff that came out this spring. So if you're interested in this particular story, you're in luck. The people are talking about it. But they talk to these people at a vineyard, a farm in Leesburg, Virginia, who said these insects played a role in the vineyard producing half as many grapes as usual in 2020. So it's a big deal that these guys are around. And some research estimates that if these bugs are like, you know, just like left to do their thing,

they could cost millions for New York grape growers. Specifically in like the areas of like Lake Erie and the Finger Lakes, these regions over like the course of a couple of years, it could be up to like 1.5 for an 8.8 million in the first, second and third years of infestation. So it's a problem that just keeps probleming if you're a northeastern grape grower. And also, like, the honey-do stuff is not only just like a terrible replacement for the sap, but it's a really beautiful place for sooty mold fungi to grow. So less delicious, obviously, than a portobella mushroom and way more annoying,

because this mold fungi can make it harder for plants to photosynthesize. And the honeydew stuff itself smells really fermenty and delicious to wasps, which means, like, if you set up a little picnic under a tree that has been, visited by a spotted lantern pie. Like, you may, may bump into some stings, which is just really stinks for picnic goers. But yeah, and the rules for people that see these things, generally it's just squish it, which, yeah, so if you see, if you see one, even if it's pretty, the, the experts say you got to squash it.

I was like, I was on all these different county guideline websites, which are being updated right now. And so Fairfax County and Virginia, you get a shout out for dealing with them. They updated this earlier this week, and the best piece of advice was to vacuum them or squish them while they are still young, which vacuum just made me laugh. I'm like, please go out there and vacuum your trees. But you're supposed to do this while they're still young. And when they're still young, they don't like look like pretty flies or anything. They look like blackberries with legs. So if you see some blackberries with legs on your trees, like get out your vacuum.

Or if you're not afraid to squash, it's squash in time. But yeah, it'd be, you know, it'd be pretty sick if we could just squash all of them before they could hatch, though. Because nymphs are just like, that's like, when they're in Blackberry mode, they're like little, little babies. And the eggs are a little bit tricky. And so I was on, I was, again, in all of my open tabs on all of these guys. Cornell had a pretty good, like, rundown of, I know, another school with a wonderful agriculture website, which we love to see it. But basically, these eggs can be found anywhere on a hard surface. and they are kind of like these masses that are on the underside of branches or objects.

So like underneath like a like plastic chair or whatever. And they're like an inch and a half long and three quarters of an inch wide and they're like gray splotches of mud. So that's pretty, that's some pretty sneaky behavior. You're not always going to notice those. And our human-y eyes aren't great at saying like, oh, yes, I see that splotch of mud. And I think that that is a lanternfly. So and people are specially trained to do, to find them, of course. And now we get to talk about my favorite part, which is the potential secret weapon, which is probably my favorite creature ever, which is normal dogs, just normal pet dogs.

Yeah, not even specially trained dogs because I'm a longtime crusty white dog enthusiast. I love a dog that doesn't have a job and does not want one. But this, even a crusty little silly, funny dog can do some hard work in preventing lantern fly spread. So, and there are special dogs to hunt and train for these things. And actually in Pennsylvania in one county, the 2025, 2026 budget put aside like over 100K to support their second lanternfly detection dog named Ruby. So there are some dogs getting some bank, you know, to learn how to do this. But apparently there's all of this new research that kind of shows that a lot of just ordinary dogs can be great about it.

So my story, the second half, the fun part, is about, yeah, pet dogs that are pretty good at detecting this stuff. So there's a team in Virginia Tech that has put out a couple of studies over the years, notably one last year and one that just came out this week, basically about volunteer dog owners who have helped their dogs figure out how to find these things. So the 2025 study, so last year, in this one, the Virginia Tech team took 182 volunteer pups from a thousand or so interested owners where like, I want my dog to learn how to do this. But of course, you get whittled down because dogs are old and stubborn or, you know, don't want to do it or whatever. People are busy. And so they have 182 of these dogs. And they're a mix of breeds, ages, sizes, you name it. There's like German shepherds and Labrador retrievers, which is like, yeah, those dogs be sniffing.

and they want to do things. But then the fun ones that I saw were a miniature poodle and a Boston Terrier, which totally like fall under my category of like dogs. Like I have a Katonda Toulayar. She doesn't have a job. She doesn't want a job. You know, like, and like I really, I really respect that in a dog. So there were some unemployed dog vibes going on, which I really love.

And so over three to six months, they trained these dogs. They were taught how to detect like devitalized eggs masses, which were basically like the egg masses that had been frozen, so they weren't going to hatch, but they still like smelled. You know, like they still had the vibe. And after their training, they were assessed three times on their ability to find the eggs,

and it was in a controlled environment outside, and then if they could spot like live ones, so no longer just the frozen ones, but the actual thing. And for test one, the dogs were given like 90 seconds to distinguish the box of eggs from five distractions, smelly things,

like grass, tree barks, medicinal gloves, all sorts of stuff. And they got 10 tries. And 82% of the dogs passed at least eight rounds and got to move on to test two, which is, you know, pretty cool. Because for me, I would immediately be distracted by, if someone put McDonald's French fries in one of these boxes, I would be done for. So I'm pretty impressed just by that at the beginning. And so test two, so we have our 82% of these dogs that go on to test two.

And it was an open outdoor field. And they had to hunt down three to five concealed egg masses, like out in the wild. And about 60% of the dogs here figured out where all or all but one of them were in five minutes, which again is very impressive because now we're outside where all the fun stuff is. So more than half of the dogs are like, you know what? I could get these eggs. And then test three was kind of like a rerun of test one, but instead of frozen eggs, they were live. And, you know, I'll be darned, but 92% of these doggies could do.

it like so they were like ready to go they're like this stinks extra like i i i totally will know what's happening here so yeah and even if they weren't perfect they were considerably better than their human counterparts which is where we kind of end up oh yeah like hello hello we we're getting into the good stuff and so the latest study that came out a couple days ago the pets again the little d'loggies and their handlers were basically had a little like one v1 with the training landern fly egg hunting humans and the humans or did not do great the dogs have performed the people by more than two to one in densely vegetated areas so like the dogs and again and this is not just the german shepherds like there's this great picture in the press release from the study of like the

boston terrier a 12 year old boston terrier just like absolutely like killing it and i'm like okay i love this i love this and yeah and they're they're not all ruby from pennsylvania basically They're not all dogs that have a bunch of training. It's just regular, you know, little dogies with a scent and a dream. And yeah, and so now that this has been shown that it's just like, again, like, it can just be like an ordinary dog can be trained to do this. And they're hoping to see if they could do more than just like the lantern flies. Because, you know, if they can do this, maybe they can do something else. And there's like a, you know, it just really open.

One of the quotes from this press release was like, it really opens people's eyes to what their dogs are capable of. Your dog, regardless of its breed, could do this, which, again, like, is very heartwarming to me. Like, I love that. And a lot of times on here, if you listen to me ramble about these things a lot, I kind of like end my weird things with like a parable of like how this story kind of like, you know, means more than what it is. Because this story is great. And landflights are an issue and dogs rock. But it's kind of for me, as someone who does a lot of reporting, on sustainability and climate change and like just in general, like the scary stuff out there,

it kind of just shows us that like all like a lot of the solutions to the problems we're facing are literally, you know, asleep on our couch right now or just right in front of our faces. And you don't necessarily need to be like a PhD or someone working in the lab to, you know, do real work in the science field. Like these, these are citizen scientists and their pets that are doing this amazing work. So yeah. So basically we got to we got to take this. The solution's sleeping on our couch, seriously, you know, which is really wonderful.

And yeah, give your doggies extra TLC because they're out there observing things. They know so much more than we know. When it comes to think stinky, stinky bugs, at least. Maybe not everything. But stinky bugs, I think they clearly have us beat. So. But yeah, that's my story for today. Together, dogs and toddlers can combat the lanternfly crisis. I've seen so many happy little kids stomping bugs.

So, like, leave, leave the bugs that we need alone and just let them go crazy on the lantern flies. You know what I mean? Like, the bees, leave the bees alone. Get the flies. All right. We're going to take one more quick break. And then we'll be back with one more fact. This episode is brought to you by L'Oreal Group.

Beauty is a powerful force that moves us. That's why Loreal Group has built a business that is inclusive. at its heart with 100% of its brands, championing diversity. With 25,000 professional opportunities for people under 30 worldwide and 54% of leading positions held by women, diversity is a strength that helps L'Oreal Group create the best beauty products for all people. Visit Loreal.com to learn more. Okay, we're back. And speaking of leaving the bees alone, let's hear about some bees. Yes. Bees getting down to business.

Yeah, well, before I get to the like, be sexy time on the theme of dogs and bees. So I've described two new species of bees so far. Wow. There are so many, like, you think we know all the bees, right? But we don't. Like, in Australia, we estimate there's 500 undescribed species. Like, that's how many mammal species are in Australia. Wow.

So huge amount of taxonomy to be done. But I've described two. The first one I called Leopropto Zeffer. And Zephyr is my dog. So I named a new species after my dog. So that's how much I love dogs and how much I love that story. Because I was like, oh, my God, I love dogs so much. And Zephyr, like, she passed away a few weeks ago.

So I'm like, still grieving. It's very hard. Yeah, she was my baby. You can't know it's a podcast, but if you're, if you're visualizing, I'm actually wearing a t-shirt. Beautiful face. And her, and her beautiful namesake bee. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

She lives on in her bee. Exactly. She lives on in her bee. So, yeah, I love dogs so much. And then the other species I named, I need to name. I've got another dog. So I need to describe more species. So the other dog isn't left out.

Yeah, exactly. But the other one I named Mega Chilly Lucifer. So Lucifer is the name of the devil. And this little bee has devil-like horns. And it's really cute. I'm glad you think cute because after I described it, it got picked up on news outlets all over the world. And some of them were like, oh, in the land down under,

there's this devilish nightmare bee because everything in Australia is going to kill you. And I was like, there's just a little bee, there's some cute little horns. And yeah, it's just a baby. But I also named it Lucifer for two other reasons. One is, so scientific names are in Latin and Lucifer means Lightbringer. And I wanted to like bring to light all the issues facing native bee conservation, like how everything is honeybee dominated.

And in Australia in the West, honeybees aren't introduced species. Yet they're getting on the theme of invasive species, they're getting like so much. much attention and funding, but they can harm our little native bees by out competing with them. So I was like, I want to really bring attention to the fact of how many native bees they still are to be described and we need to conserve them. Like this little bee visits a critically endangered plant. And before I did the surveys, no one even knew what visited that plant. So bring that to light.

And then I love the show, Lucifer. So Tom Ellis, if you are listening to this podcast, Please reach out. And yeah, I want to tell you all about the Meg A Chili Lucifer. But two like devilish stuff, bees can get down and dirty. Rar. Love that. Yeah.

So my tease was that they don't have many sex positions. What sex position do you think they use? Oh, man. It's not a question I thought of before. Well, I don't even really know what sex parts were working with with the bees to be. Fair. Yeah. I wouldn't. Okay. So, yeah, I don't know. It's true. I wrote a book about sex and I can't say I know what bees are working with. Well, we need to do like a follow up book on bee sex because it's wild. Yes. Please. Yes. A lot of this stuff is taken from my show, the birds and the bees. But we'll start with, I guess, like, how do bees have sex? Well, bees do have an intermittent organ, aka penis, aka penis. Yes, a beanus.

The beanus. I coined that term. I'm very proud of it. So they do it doggy style. That is they're their only sex position because like six legs. Makes sense. Hard to imagine their bodies. Yeah.

Doing anything else. Yeah. The six legs would like get in the way. And even with the sex legs, it can be a little bit tricky because, you know, bees, they are in bedabrites. They've got a exoskeletal. Melodin made of Kiten. All, like, all this is weaving together. I love that I'm bringing all the threads of mycelium together.

But, like, Kiten, like our fingernails, is quite slippery. So it's a little bit hard for the male bees to hang on. So sometimes they're doing it doggy style, and they're just sort of like falling back. And the male bees are typically smaller than the females. So there's a little bee on the back, and he's just like hanging on by his. Yeah. So that's how they do it. But how they do it and they're mating strategies between species is like huge diversity.

So I'll start off with the honeybee because that's what everyone gets told about and school about honey bees. But they are such a poor representative of bee diversity. So honeybees, the males are drones. And with the females, most of them don't reproduce. They're the work bees. They're sterile. And there's one, the queen bee that does.

and she goes after she emerges and kills all her competitors. Like people think that honeybees living in harmony. No, the queen, the first queen to emerge, she'll go and like sting the other developing queen so there's no competition. And then she'll go on a nuptial flight. So she'll go on a flight and all her pheromones will be out in the wind and the drones will get, hmm, I want some that. Come to her and they will, like, she'll get mated by lots and lots

of drones and just store all their sperm. So for the rest of her life, she has just like all this sperm in her body, like allowing her to fertilize hundreds of thousands of eggs. For the male bees, though, like, they, they have a good time and that's all they have because they speculate so hard that their penis blows off. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's a honey nut chiro. Oh, no.

Yeah, at least they died doing what they loved, though. Yeah, go out with a bang. Go out with a bang. Yeah. So that's, that's their life. Bang and then really like Venus bangs off. But for the majority of bees, the male bees get to do it again. So their beaness is intact.

Beinuses are really important for people like me. Maybe I should have like rearranged that, but for taxonomy, and I'm a taxonomy. Dieness is a really important because like every species has a different venous structure. It's like a key and it will only like fit and work in the right lock, which is the female bee vagina. So really like really important for taxonomy. But yeah, so the other other species, males get to have sex again, which is great for them. And then like how they do it varies between species, how they get the girls.

Some bees are like Hylaeus Alcyonius, which is this little, they can sometimes be confused for wasps because they're not fuzzy, they're black with yellow patterns, like a little mask on their face. And the males will sit on tops of benches, which are these like flowers in Australia. And they will guard the flowers because the female bees want them and they'll sit on top. And like if another male bee goes to his flower will chase them off. Some of them even have little spines on the underside of their abdomen to be like, this is my patch. So that's how they get the girls here. And then other male bees, they, like my, I think this is really beautiful. And I think maybe male humans should do this.

But you sereni bees, they have evolved really, really long antennae, like really long. And they massage the female while they're having sex with their antenna. which I'm like, okay fabulous. Like guys listening, take notes. Like booktop girlies. This is, get rid of the wings. This is what is necessary.

Yeah, yeah. And then the mega chili, I love the mega chili. Some of the males, they've had these like big expanded forums. And we don't know exactly know why. One of the hypotheses is that like big forums are attractive to females. like yes but it's also like maybe not so much the size

that how they use them you know it's not the size and they cover up the female's eyes while they're mating why why why so there's again a few hypotheses one is that the sex is like so bad and boring

that they like cover up their eyes so she can't fly away and she just has to They're like, I'm embarrassed. Don't look at me. Turn the lights off, please. So that's not my favorite hypothesis, but the one that I feel is maybe more likely, and I also like it better, or maybe not. So the males also have scent glands on their forums.

And so when he's covering up her eyes, he's also putting the, underside of his arms into her antennae and bees smell with their antennae. So they don't have noses. They smell with their antenna. So wafting under arm pit smell into her during sex, like not something that would turn me on personally. But each to their own. Everyone has their thing.

Yeah. Like, hello. And like maybe, so that's likely. But then maybe, and this is the one that I just came up with myself, maybe it's like a kink. He's like, like blindfolding her. He's like, just close your eyes baby. Yeah. With armpits dang.

Yeah. With all that armpits gang. Yeah. So that's the mega chili. And then I think one that I've studied and it's one of my favorite bees is Amigilla Dorsoni. Now Amigila Dorsoni is one of our biggest bees in Australia. It's a really big bombastic bee. and they only occur in the Midwest of Western Australia.

In Western Australia, it's a very big state. And so they're about in the middle of the state of Western Australia. And then they have different mating strategies depending on their size. So we've got like two distinct size classes of Amigilla Dawsoni. There's the major males, which I sort of call the big jock males. And then there's the minor males, which I call like, they're like little geek males. And the jocks and the geeks, the majors, the majors, they've got different strategies. So these bees, they nest in clay pans.

The majority of bees in the world actually are ground nesting. So make sure that you don't put pavement over everything. Don't put fake grass over everything. Yuck. Leave some patches of bare soil for our ground nesting bees. These guys nest in clay pans. and the males emerge first. And so they're flying over the clay pans,

the major males, flying over the clay pans, waiting for a burden female to emerge. And as soon as she does, he will piggyback her and she will, like, run to the edge of the clay pan with him, like, piggybacking on her and then, like, mate in the fringing grasses away from, like, predators and heavy scientists like myself. Romantic.

But, okay, so here's where it gets a bit nasty. The competition to mate is really intense. And these major males will fight each other, even to the death. So, yeah, they will even form, like, big balls of, like, 50 to 100 males, like, all just fighting, like, rolling in a ball of these, like, virile, lusty males rolling around the clay. Oh. Yeah, when I was there, there was, like, dead. bodies of the male bees all across the clay pan so they think they really want to get some they're serious yeah so that's what the major males do but what about our little minor males

the geeky males like they there's no way they can win a fight so they have another little strategy if a female emerges and the male bears are too busy fighting each other she'll just be like you know she doesn't want sex when she's just emerged from her borrower she's hungry she wants some snacks right snacks. So she goes to the flowers, which is where the little minor males are waiting and he mates with her. So like really the females do not get a break here. No. But so I went up there to study them to help a professor from Arizona. And his speciality was the sounds that bees make, mainly in terms of buzz pollination. So amigula are buzz pollinators, which is, is a special type of pollination that has evolved independently in plants and independently in

bees that can form this. But honeybees can't do this. So the native bees have one up over the super generalist crop pollinators. And this means that the flowers, they have to be buzzed. They have to be vibrated at the right frequency. And the female bees are the ones that buzz pollinate, not the male bees, they wrap their bodies around the male anthers and vibrate. And with like bumblebees, for example, they're really good buzz pollinators and they do it by shimmying their thoracic muscles. But amygdala, they do it by banging their heads really fast. Which is like giving head a whole new meaning.

So yeah, they're doing. these bees, they're just banging their heads on the anthers, the male parts of the flower. And that's how the pollen, the plant spam, gets released. So anyway, we were going there to, like, record the vibrations of the bees. But we also like, well, you know, humans make sound during sex. Like, moans, um, do, like, do bees make sounds during sex? Like, we wanted to know for science. So, yeah, we came with like this high-tech, you know, audio recording equipment,

but it was really windy on the clay pans. They were like, oh, damn it. But, you know, we're scientists who come up with solutions. So Professor Steve Buckman, he would wait in the van and he had his equipment there, like outside of the wind. But of course, like the bees are mating on the clay band. So it was my job to like score the clay pan. And if I saw little piggybacking bees before they got to the grasses,

I like race after them, pick them up in my hands, like, while they were, oh, while they're going at it. They were like, they were having such a good time. They didn't care. And I like run back and put it inside what I called the mating arena, which is Steve's upturned a Cooper hat. And I recorded them there. And it worked.

It worked. We found they did make little sounds. Like every time the male thrust it, there was a little, er, like on the underside of the Oh my god. Abjimum with his like his mid-tarsi, his mid-arms like sliding up there. Yeah. And we also found that these bees could have sex for like quite a long time for such little critters over 10 minutes. So yeah, yeah, pretty pretty good for these bees.

Good for them. Yeah. Yeah. So these are amygila dosoni isn't the only bees that have these like big mating balls of, of males that will kill each other. So all sorts of mating strategies. But I will finish on my favorite mating strategy. So in the most rainforests of South America,

there are these beautiful bees called the Yugosini, aka orchid bees. And the males are like stunning. They're metallic greens, golds, reds, pebbles, like really beautiful. Jules of nature, right? And despite looking absolutely stunning, like so drop-day gorgeous, they don't even just rely on looks to get a female.

They rely on scent. So many like male and females, you know, we use clone or perfume to, you know, smell alluring. And that's what these male bees do too. And it's not their own body scent. They go to orchids. So the male bees, usually it's a female bee. bees, but some male bees are that are like pollinators of orchids. And usually like orchids are like jerks to bees because they they don't offer nectar. They will offer like nothing and often mimic

like plants in their habitat that do offer nectar. And so the bees are full. I know like so rude, full to go like visit them and perform their like sex career services as pollinators with no reward. no nectar award. Then there's even some orchids that, like, is wild. They will mimic the color, shape, texture, and scent of a female bee or female wars. Yes, the sexual mimicry and poor, poor, like, male pollinators going there to have a good time and is getting on and he's like, something's not right here.

I think this is awfully quiet. it. Where's the noise? Where's the, oh, daddy. So, so yeah, he, he gets Pallinia, which, like, orchid bowl sacks deposited on him. And then if he gets fooled again, then, like, yeah, the orchid gets lucky, but he does not. Oh, bless him. Yeah.

Yeah. So, like, people love orchid so much, but I'm like, oh, they're such jerks to bees, except these ones in South America. Because, yeah, they offer these beautiful scents and the male orchid bees go in there and collect up the clones. And they've also found that like the more diverse and good the floral bouquets and he stores it little like pouches on his hind legs. He's got these like little areas where he puts the perfume on his hind legs. And he's like the more beautiful the bouquet of perfumes, the more likely it is that he will get laid. So it's a really beautiful like.

pollination, mutualism there. So yeah. I like that. I think it's beautiful. And we've been using floral sense for like, like, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of years to make ourselves smell nice, especially in like, I'm sure, year old times when we weren't smelling that good. Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that smelled not nice to smell. So, yeah, we have so much to thank for flowers. and we have bees to thank for flowers because if we didn't have bees, we wouldn't have many flowers.

Like bees are the not always pollinators. Like there's plenty of other animals that are pollinators. And some bees are like really bad pollinators actually. But I love them just as much. I hate the like every time I have like a radio interview, people like, oh, like why do we need to save the bees? It's because like one in three bites wheat is due to bees. And I was like, well, no, actually, this is not even true. But even if it was, it shouldn't just be about like what some animal can do for us.

Like it's such like a, you know, human-centric way of looking at the world. And that's why we're in a biodiversity crisis because we should only save these things because they provide us with this. But I'm like, well, we should save these things because they're cool and they're part of evolution. And like, look at these bees that are collecting orchids and so, oh, look at these bees. that have all these different mating strategies. Like, isn't that interesting? It doesn't make life so much more wonderful. Learning about bees, there's a bee that's named after Lucifer.

There's a bee that's named after a dog. Like, how cool. Like, my life is so much better after I became a bee scientist and became obsessed with bees. I think some people around me may disagree because all I think of is bees. But there's lots to think about it. Yeah. So that's my facts about bees and sex and pollination. Oh, wonderful. Oh, my gosh. I had, I truly had no idea. So what a thrill.

Thank you so much for coming on today. Would you remind our listeners where they can hear more from you about bees? Oh, yes, yes. If you want to learn more about bees and there's so much more to learn about bees, I have a Patreon, the Bee Be Be Bebet, which is B-E-E-E, B-A-B-E-D-E-D-E-D-E. I got that stage name because I do, yeah, a little bit of circus performing. And I did a show for Fringe, which is a kid's show. And now I do very much as you can hear an adult show. But I'm also writing some kids' books about native bees because I have a little daughter. And everyone knows I love bees.

They give me books about bees. And they're always honeybees. I'm like, oh, no, I need to get the word about our beautiful native bees out to the next generation. so they can love our native bees. But yeah, Patreon, the Bee Babette, and my insta is Dr. Bee Babette. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts,

including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share,

tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.