Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Bee Attack - NOT THE BEES!!!

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Bees. This story takes place down in the hills of Hueco Tanks down in Texas, and involves two men getting swarmed by bees at a moment of total vulnerability. Of all the animals we've covered on the show so far, bees might just have the weirdest and coolest collection of behavioral and biological facts, and Wes does his best to scratch the surface of what makes them so unique.  ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds                          Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to another episode of Tooth and Claw. This is a podcast where we talk about true stories of wild animal attacks. This time around, we're talking about bees. Specifically, we're going to be talking about two men that get swarmed by bees in what might just be the worst location to be stuck in, at least as far as getting swarmed by bees goes. And for this one, Wes put together what might be the most interesting set of facts for an animal that we've done so far.

So we think you guys are going to learn a lot, just like Jeff and I did, and really enjoy this one. All right, that's enough talking. Let's get to the show. Hey, everyone, welcome to Tooth and Claw podcast. We are a podcast that talks about animal attacks. We kind of do it from the animal's point of view. We're trying to teach people what they can do. We do it from the animals point of you?

We're trying to let people understand why the animals are doing these kind of things. And how it's usually a person that makes some sort of mistake that leads to an animal attack. It's not so much animals are like hunting us down and trying to attack us, although occasionally that does happen. And just so everyone knows, Wes is a wildlife biologist. That's where he gets all of his info. He just has it in his brain.

A lot of it's in my brain. He's been reading about animals since he's a little kid. So he knows a lot. And then I was his field tech for a while, and Mike's good at tech. I don't know. Field tech? You guys tell me. Yeah, you know, average.

I'd all settle for that. I don't want to set expectations too high around here. Yeah, I'm a wildlife biologist, been mostly working with bears my whole career, but always been obsessed with animals. And Jeff mentioned sometimes this stuff is just in my brain already, but sometimes I have to research. And today, I actually had to do quite a bit of research. Well, let's not have any spoilers. Yeah, I was... Don't...

Mike, how would you define a spoiler? I don't know. What are you guys getting at here? Well. So, Mike texted us that he saw Dune, and I've been wanting to see Dune. We all read the book. I've been really looking forward to it, so like right away I responded, don't tell me anything. So I didn't. He's just been.

I was like that Simpson's character. He's been on one now. He responded, I will never tell you anything about Dune other than the only things I've already told you. but after that we will never speak of it again. I'm already pissed that I saw it and spoiled the whole thing for myself. Now I know exactly what happens. I hate spoilers. Why would I want to know exactly what happens throughout the entire movie?

I wish I hadn't seen it. Did you let it go? Huh? Did he let it go after that? We were going to meet for lunch before we record today. I said, hey, text me when you're like close. And he said, okay, I'll spoil my location for you. If you think about it, seeing the movie is kind of like the ultimate spoiler.

One of my closest friends and I almost got it. We got into like probably the biggest fight of our friendship over spoilers. Oh, did you? For the first Star Wars movie, because I was in the Arctic when it came out, like the first of these new newest ones. Okay. And he got really mad that I didn't even want to know what he thought of the movie. and I just didn't want to know. Like, I wanted to go into it completely blank slate,

and we got a big fight over it. So it wasn't even that he spoiled something for you. He wanted to tell me. He wanted to spoil it. He wanted to tell me how much he liked it, and I didn't want to hear anything. And he got mad because I left the room. But he was going to say stuff.

Yeah, he didn't even get it spoiled, and they got in their biggest fight ever. But I truly don't think it was my fault, because he took it really personal after that and started, like, saying personal insults to me. And then it turned into a big thing. So I'm glad. You guys haven't talked since.

We haven't talked since. No, I'm glad it didn't turn into that for you guys. But I'm also glad you didn't spoil a movie for us. He said, I'll just say that it was by far one of the movies I've seen of all time. I think that's a pretty good little. You didn't spoil it. No spoilers at all. This is one of the movies I've seen of the year.

That's all I'll say. And that's all I say. And that's all I said. True to my word. After I watched it, you spoiled your feelings on it and told me it was like one of your favorite movies ever. I couldn't help. Man, if you guys haven't seen Dune. Go see Dune.

It is amazing. It's incredible. It's incredible. Dude, spoiler. I'm sorry. You just told them it's incredible. I can't help myself. Thousands of people.

I tried so hard to keep my feelings bottled up. And you know what that does to a man like me. I would say we all like movies quite a bit, the three of us. and we all agree on this one. This is a movie that we all really liked. I love Dennis Villanueva. Yeah. Did I do it right?

I don't know. How do you say that? Honestly, so I've always said Deney Vianov. I think it's Vianov. But I've heard respectable people who know what they're talking about call him Villanov. So I don't know. I think the last name can go either way. What's your favorite of his movies?

Mine's Sicario. Oh, man. Yeah, Sakaria. He did like enemy, a rival, play, The one of 2049, prisoners. The one. Prisoners is up there. Yeah.

They've all, they're all great. The one that's stuck with me, weirdly, is enemy. Enemy's good. It's like, I think about it almost every day still, and it's been a long time since I watch that. Yeah, great spider moment in that movie. Oh, man. Spoiler. Whoa.

This is spoiler cast. Mike. Yes. You don't want one of your favorite animals, bees to be spoiled for you. you might want to leave the room for this episode. You should just go. Or I'll close my ears and just go, bzz, the whole time.

Wait, I want to give one quick update before we start. Okay. So, a few episodes ago I talked about how I've been playing fantasy football against just robots. And the listener, Justin, was super cool and, like, invited

me to his NBA one. I won't get into the details, but pretty much, like, I played the commissioner of the league The commissioner is like the guy who has all the power. He organized it. And he just like blatantly cheated and lied about it like the first week to make himself win after I had already won. And I acted like I didn't know what I was doing and got him to admit it all. And then I put it all in the group chat and like just blew everything up.

Like everyone was getting mad. And the league almost ended in like its first week. So I don't know. Maybe don't invite me. I love how some wonderful listener invites Jeff to join his league and then he just destroys it. Just sets fire to it. Maybe that's why my last one didn't work out. I hope none of them were really close friends because I think he just ruined a lot of them.

Just destroyed everything. It was good though. I respect you outing a cheater. It needed to happen. I always think about you, Mike. You say that you love people who just keep lying. and like that's what he did like the group chat

it like kept track of everything he did and like showed that he was lying and I would just screenshot it and put it back in the group chat and he would come up with like a new thing didn't you say you like knew a kid who said he wrote the first page of the Harry Potter books

the seventh Harry Potter book yeah incredible man people that lie it's just so fun well our other brother had a friend that like pretended to have cancer for years. Oh, really?

That's like a big one. Yeah. What animal did you say we're talking about? Beets? Beets? Beads? Yeah, we're talking about bees, specifically Africanized honeybees, commonly known as killer bees. So, Mike, you've made it clear throughout our episodes that bees are one of your favorite

animals. We're going to learn a lot about bees today. I can't wait. I hope you're excited. Yeah. But for someone whose favorite animal is a bee, that's not my favorite favorite animal. I don't know a whole lot about bees.

We're going to talk a lot about bees. Yeah, you were telling me, Wes, it was a little overwhelming just how many, like, little bee facts there. Yeah. This, of all the episodes, like, trying to put in the biology information for this episode was probably the hardest because there's so much and it all seems pertinent that I had a hard time deciding what to include and what not to include. I only scratched the surface.

And then I also just want to make it clear that I'm not a bit. bee expert and there's probably apiarists out there or people who like work with bees that are going to like cringe at some of the stuff I'm saying but if you do if I say anything wrong please let us know and we'll make a correction because I really tried hard to like cross check all my information and make sure it was all right yeah okay Jeff do you know what an apiarist is um from the context probably what is like studies in flying insects maybe it's a beekeeper it's a fancy name for beekeeper okay so that is kind of right yeah because bees are flying insects.

They don't study them, but they keep them. Jeff for honey. On a technicality. All right. So we're going to launch into our story to start. And then in the middle, I'm going to take a break and talk about biology. But our story involves this guy named Doug April. In 2015, Doug is living by himself.

He's in an RV in Hueco Tank State Park in southwest Texas. It's pretty close to El Paso. The 46-year-old divorced father of three was finishing up a six-month gig as a campground host in the state park, and he's preparing to leave for Afghanistan in a few weeks. In Afghanistan, he's going to be doing, like, reconnaissance missions as a private military contractor. Briefly, I should say, I got most of this information from a few different articles, primarily from a story that was in Reader's Digest magazine, which they have great stories. Mom sent you this one.

Hey, Reader's Digest, underrated. Yeah, they're, like, drama in real life stories and their animal texts are always very deep. detailed. They should start a podcast. Yeah. Anyway. Just them, the whole staff of readers. They probably have one, to be honest.

So Doug was familiar with war. He had already done two tours in Iraq. And in Hueco's Tank State Park where he worked, he would climb like all these different rock formations. He was a pretty avid climber. And he found that climbing helped him turn off his brain and forget a lot of this horrible stuff that he had seen while he was in Iraq. So on a beautiful May morning that,

year, Doug decided to do some climbing with his buddy, Ian. Ian Capell. Ian's a 38-year-old geologist, and he lived in that area with his wife, Melinda. So Ian's this big bearded guy. He's pretty bulky. If you looked at him, you wouldn't think, oh, that's a typical climber. Like, he's a pretty big dude. But he had over the years learned the ropes from Doug. Wes. And had slowly become more hot today. So funny. Become more competent of a climber. How do you do? it. And as they kind of formed, as they climbed together, they formed a pretty close friendship in the process.

That's cool. That's a cool hobby. Yeah. All you climbers, just keep climbing. Yeah, keep doing it. Sure. Jeff's stamp of approval. It is a great social activity, too.

It is. Yeah. And it's good workout. Yeah. I mean, you're on the rock by yourself. It's like going to a movie. But like you're, you got like someone's holding your rope and it's like the ultimate. Maybe it's just me.

It's a good trust exercise. Sometimes when I'm around a lot of climbers and they're talking and all their like terminology and all their slang, it gets to be a little much. Like sometimes I'm like, okay, calm down. Okay. So Jeff and I are pro climber. I'm pro climber. I'm pro-climbing. I think sometimes climbing culture gets to me a little bit.

Yeah, I get that. I'm very pro-climer. I did a tooth and class presentation at Front Street climbing gym here in. Isn't it just called the front? Or, yeah, the front climbing gym in Salt Lake. It was really cool. Yeah. And I'm going to probably go back there once I'm recovered.

Cool. But yeah. So Ian knew that this is probably going to be one of his last chances to climb with Doug before Doug leaves for Afghanistan. And so when Doug asked him what he wanted to climb that day, Ian quickly said he wanted to climb this climb called Indecent Exposure. Ooh, that's kind of a cool name. Yeah.

I like that. So when Ian says this, Doug kind of has to pause for a minute because Indecent Exposure is one of the hardest climbs in the park. It includes two pitches. So a pitch is essentially like you climb that area, both of you climb that, then you stop, and then you do the next one. So there's two climbing sections in this climb. It's like dangerous too because you have to unhook and re-hook onto other stuff. Right.

And so there's two pitches and it had passages that would leave climbers really exposed. I think that's why it's called decent exposure. And they'd be hanging over a nearly 250 foot drop. Sounds cool. So Doug had done this climb twice before and it always made him a little uneasy. And especially because halfway up, there's a plaque that memorializes a climber that died on that climb. He was like a University of El Paso student. And he had died on that climb.

So it's just kind of a spooky thing to pass when you're climbing, like this plaque telling about how someone had died there. So Doug knew this would probably be his last big climb for a while. And so he's like, we might as well go all out and just do this hard climb. So they decided to climb in decent exposure. And he decided that Ian would lead the first pitch and then he would lead the second. So I don't know a ton about climbing, but I'm pretty sure they're doing what's considered sport climbing. And so in sport climbing, the anchors are already put into the rock. And so the lead climber will climb up, he'll continually be clipping into those anchors as he's climbing up,

he or she, or are they? And as they get to the pitch, the end of the pitch, they'll unhook and then they toss a rope down to the other person. And that person can, like, use that rope to climb up. So it's harder to be the lead climber when you're doing this kind of climbing. That could be completely wrong, but that's how I understand it. This summer, serve up the cookout classics, Oscar Meyer hot dogs and Heinz mustard. Grill up a dog, add classic yellow mustard, or loaded Chicago style. We all know it's not a cookout without Oscar Meyer and Heinz.

So as Ian led this climb, or sorry, as Doug led the climb, he pulled, no, sorry, Ian led the first half. He's pulling himself up over the handholds and footholds. he's clipping into these permanent anchors, and he passes this plaque with this kid's name on it, and he thinks about it. He thinks he even recognizes the name from the university. And once he reaches the ledge, he sends the rope down to Doug, and Doug quickly climbs up to where they rested on this ledge, about 130 feet up. So the second pitch is a bit harder, and it requires Doug to make this big step out onto the right and move pretty far out to the right. And while he's doing that, he has to navigate these holds that are only big enough for his fingertips. in his toes.

So it's like a really tricky part of the climb. And he, before when he had done this climb, he had really struggled in this part. But on this day, he confidently maneuvers through it and he's really happy. And he yells out to Ian. He says, that was great. And Ian's now 10 feet below him and about 25 feet to his left. And right after Ian hears Doug yell, that was great. He hears him yell, where are all these bugs coming from?

So I forgot for a second. I got so caught up in the climbing. I forgot this is an episode. This is going to be about bees. I've been waiting for the bees. Okay. So Doug's confused. He suddenly feels a bee on his neck.

He doesn't know it's a bee at first, but then it stings him. He slaps it. And then his mouth drops in horror as he watches from a crack nearby a cloud of bees come out. Oh, man. Like so dense that he can't even really see through it. Okay. Pause. We're going to talk about bees.

Like I mentioned, there's a million bee facts. And bees are really complex, especially socially. So we're going to talk a little bit of. about how like a bee colony works. But first, there's eight recognized species of honeybee worldwide. We're talking about honeybees here. There's lots of subspecies. They likely originated in South or Southeast Asia.

And then they naturally spread throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa. They were brought to North America in the 1600s. So the first records of humans collecting honey go back to 7,000 BCE. And beekeeping like... B.C. I saw Jeff was going to make... Warriors. Beekeeping likely began in ancient Egypt.

Beekeeping? Yeah. It's just the word. Oh, man. They're the only domesticated invertebrate. So some scientists would argue that the term domestication doesn't apply here, but they are considered domesticated insects. You guys got any other bee puns you need to make before you want?

I was just thinking, also maybe a little funny. I don't know. Just wasn't even a pun. Fine. Not at all. Just repeating the actual word B. When I think about domesticated animals, I think about like a cat who will kind of crawl up and sit on your lap. Yeah.

It's not like that. Personally, I don't think it really applies. You don't think you could pet a B? I've done it before. Okay. But at the same time, would you say like, would you say a cow is domesticated? Yes. And like, meanwhile, you can't really go up and like touch cows.

They usually are pretty angry. Sometimes. But it's a good point. Yeah, I see where you're getting. So it's like, I think in this case, domestications used in that this is an animal that we've made do something for us. Okay. That's a nice word for slave labor. Yeah, essentially.

There are little slaves. Okay. So honeybees have an insanely complex social structure. Hives contain a queen who's responsible for all the laying of eggs for making more bees. They also contain female worker bees, which do everything from maintain the hive, raise young, and forage for food. And I didn't understand that all the worker bees are female. And then there's drones, which are male bees, that are pretty much just responsible for mating with queens.

Yeah, I was thinking, I read that too. I was like, when people asking me what animal would you want to be, I'm kind of thinking a male bee. Like you're a whole purpose. All you got to do is go have sex. Just wait a second. A colony can have upwards of 60,000 bees. It's mostly comprised of worker bees.

We're going to talk about what happens to drones. So what type of bee would you say is the busiest bee? Worker bees. Okay. Queen bees are constantly laying eggs, and they're busy doing that. But they're also, like, being fed and everything. Worker bees are doing all sorts of things. So when you call someone a busy bee, you're talking about workers bees.

I think so. Okay. Which are female. Yeah. So just keep that in mind. A colony can have upwards of 60,000 bees. It's mostly comprised of worker bees. There's a small percentage of drones, and then one active queen. And then all the larva.

So queens are fertile, and they're, female bees that are larger than other females. They have a fully reproductive tract, a fully developed reproductive tract. So this is kind of interesting. When fertilized eggs, when fertilized eggs are laid by an existing queen, they're fed for a few days by worker bees, and they're fed this secretion called royal jelly, which is something I think you can buy it. People use it as like skincare or something.

Yeah, but it's a bee secretion and all larva will be fed out of their first three days. and then larva that aren't intended to be queens get cut off, and they start getting fed bee bread, which is like pollen and nectar combined. And then potential queens keep getting fed this royal jelly. So if they're trying to make new queens, they just keep feeding them royal jelly, and that's what helps them develop a reproductive tract. Oh, weird. So at some point, if you have like a hive with a queen and everything's working,

the existing queen will move to a new area, which in itself is like a really fascinating process. essentially all the bees will like surround that queen and they fly to find a new hive and as they fly they stop and they'll send out little scouts to go find new hive locations and the scouts return and they do a specific dance to tell the rest of the bees where the new hive location is oh that's sweet and then they decide on which hive to pick based on the level of excitement in the dance that the scout is doing no way that's so cool and that process is called swarming so when a colony breaks into two different colonies and they go to find a new one, it's called swarming. And so in the nest that's left behind, if they need a new queen, these growing queens, these babies that they're growing into queens, they'll fight to the death once they reach adulthood, and the surviving one will become the queen.

What if there's like a bee that's just a super good dancer and like break dancing and stuff? But his spot's not that great, but he's like, yeah, he's like, yeah, doing a head spin. You know what they call break dancers? Bees, bee boys. Do they? Yeah. So this new queen that managed to kill off all the other virgin queens,

as a virgin, like before she has sex with drone bees, she can lay eggs that will turn into drones. So drones... Before she's mates? Yeah, drones don't require fertilized eggs. Wow. Like, she can just lay eggs and they turn into drones. They only need the chromosome from mom to become males.

So there's no, like, male lineage in a, like, a bee colony? there's no like father, grandfather. It's just the queen bee. That's just for the males. Right. So she can lay these virgin eggs and they turn into males. And then she also will release pheromones in the hive that assert control over the remaining worker bees. So when there's a new queen, she puts out these pheromones and all these worker bees that start obeying her, which is pretty crazy.

That's weird. I've seen cool videos where a beehives in the wrong place, like in the middle of a city or business or something. and it's really cool because all they have to do is find the queen and grab it and then all the bees follow wherever they take the queen and they can get rid of all the bees just by finding one bee. As I mentioned, she can make these drones, but to make female worker bees, she needs to get knocked up. So what the queen does is she flies to a drone congregation point

and the drones gather there and they'll find the queen using her smell and their eyesight. They'll mate in midair and the queen will stay in these. congregation sites until her spermathica is full of sperm. So she has like a reservoir in her body that just fills up with sperm. Oh, so she has like a ton of males come made with it. Yeah. And so over a period of days, she'll mate a bunch of times with different drones. And always suspended in the air.

In the air, mid-air. That's so weird. I don't know why. But the spermatica fills up with sperm and then she's just ready to go. She can just go lay eggs for, I think, the whole season. So then she goes to the hive and she can make fully fertilized eggs that will turn and a female worker bees. And she'll lay up to 2,500 eggs per day during the height of the season.

And over a given year, they can lay up to 200,000 eggs. Wow. It's their only job. Like, once she's full of sperm, she's just laying eggs. That's, like, her job is to lay eggs. You think she's, like, pretty attractive to the male bees? I think they think she's hot. So drones die after mating because they convulse their bodies so hard when they're mating

that they die. No way. So they're probably really into her or something. Because they're, they're just like, the only one they can mate with, right? Yeah. So like, yeah, she's got it. I think every once in a while they do mate with worker bees, but it's not within the typical social structure. And it kind of causes problems in the hive.

So they really only mate with the queen. That's really interesting. And then they just die. They die because it's so. But that's a good way to die. Yeah, not bad. Yeah, you're right. It's not a bad way to die.

Convulsing so hard from sex that you die. So workers have the most complex jobs in the hive. For the first 10 days of their adult lives, they clean the hive and they feed the larva. And it's cool because they go through these different periods in their short lifespan. So first 10 days, they're cleaning and they're feeding larva. How long is their lifespan? They typically, so if they're born in the spring or summer, they live for about four weeks. If they're born in the fall or winter, they can live a lot longer because they're kind of just like almost hibernating.

No. Okay. So first 10 days, they're feeding. feeding larva, cleaning the hive. Then they start to build comb cells. So like the little honeycomb cells. Okay. Yeah. Build those out of wax. And then on days 16 through 20, they receive nectar and pollen from other workers and store it. And then after 20 days, they start leaving the hive and they work the rest of their lives as a forager. So foragers are the ones going out and finding nectar and pollen and bringing it back to the hive. Okay. Cool. So when foraging, they collect pollen and

nectar from plants and flowers, naturally pollinating them in the process. So they're taking a male piece, like pollen from a male plant and depositing into a female plant without realizing it. So that's how they pollinate. And the nectar stored, they are drinking this nectar. It's stored in a second stomach. And then they digest it to make it into a simple sugar. And that raw honey is spread into those cells of the honeycomb. So they spread that honey into those little honeycomb cells to dry. and then all the bees in the hive flap their wings a certain way to create a draft through the hive. No way. And that dries that that honey out.

And it takes, because it's mostly, it's really watery. And that dries it to where it turns into the syrup that we kind of recognize this honey. Oh, cool. That's so cool. Yeah. So once it's dried into that surrepy kind of honey, they cover it with beeswax to preserve it. So when you pull out like a honeycomb, it's got beeswax and stuff, but you bite into it. And then there's all the honey.

It's pretty crazy that we, like, Honey's good. I love honey. And it's regurgitated nectar from a bee that they've dried in little pods. It's pretty amazing. That's so cool. Yeah. And it's one bee and its life can make like a teaspoon of honey or something.

It's a tiny bit. So it's like, I don't know. When I like hear stuff like that, I'm like, man, it's pretty cool that I have just so much access to honey. Right. I think we don't, we just have had so much honey in our lives. We don't realize this is a product of a plant that's passed through an insect that's then coming to me. It's pretty cool. And I think we need to really be appreciative. I wish we could teach that to bears. So bears would be a little more appreciative of their honey. Yeah. Yeah.

You know. So wait, a be you said a beel make over its lifetime a teaspoon of honey. Maybe I can't remember exactly how much it is. It makes me, every time I'm going to eat honey from now on, I'm going to remember the effort at Tuft to get that honey. You just got to remember there's like 60,000 bees in a colony and a lot of them are workers and they're making honey. Pretty much non. and stop. And they make all that honey to like get them through the winter and to feed other bees and to make more bees. Half a teaspoon. But modern beekeepers have maximized it to the point where they can make it so their bees make a surplus of honey so that we can take that surplus and then they still have enough to get them through the winter or whatever. Do so bees eat honey?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They feed it to their larvae. They feed it to the queen. They eat it themselves. It's what it's their food. Is that their only food? really? I believe so. Okay. Thanks for all your hard work, bees. Well, no, sorry, it's not their only honey. They also make bee bread, which is like pollen. Oh, yeah, yeah. And nectar combined. And that's more for the young bees.

Which I think we should take that from them, too. Yeah. Why not? Okay, so a little bit more about bees. Sorry, there's a lot, but I think it's really fascinating. Workers use dances to also communicate location and distance of potential food sources with other bees. A round dance tells bees.

bees that food is within 50 meters of the hive and a waggle dance will provide more detail about the distance and direction. So the exact way that the bee dances will tell other bees where they found food and how far they have to go to get it. The waggle dance sounds cute. Yeah, I'd like to see that. There's some amazing YouTube videos about dancing bees that if you guys are interested in this, you should look up.

I watched them once, and I think more so than any piece of animal media I've ever watched, it changed the way that I viewed the natural world because it just made me realize how complex A simple animal like a bee Yeah It blew me away like it made me emotional They have a cool dance where like if a wasp comes in their nest They can like all surround it and like overheat it

Yeah I'm going to talk about that Well I just did Well I'm going to give me more details Okay They also do a shaking dance that will pretty much activate inactive bees that's a lot more complex and there's whole papers about it, but that's the gist of it. They also use pheromones for almost every behavior. So everything from mating, alarm, defense, colony recognition, and food production, they use pheromones.

So when bees feel threatened by a predator, they release a specific pheromone to let worker bees know that it's time to defend the hive. So in Western honeybees, generally about 10% of workers will leave to defend the hive. and Africanized honey bees, almost the entire hive will go on the attack. Worker bees have a barbed sting that embeds itself into the flesh of vertebrates. Queen bees also have a sting, drones do not. The barbs don't always catch when a bee is stinging another invertebrate. So if they're stinging a centipede or something, their barbs won't always catch. So the old motto of if a bee stings something, it dies, that's not necessarily true.

When they sting like a mammal or a vertebrate, they almost do always do. normally true with people right but with like other invertebrates it's not necessarily I watched a video of a beekeeper who he got stung by a bee and he showed people like just let it sting you and it will work its stinger out of your arm eventually and not die because the barb if you like swat at it then it rips everything out you know yeah but they can like go in circles around their stinger and kind of wedge it out of your arm and fly off. So I think that's an exception though. I think typically those barbs hook in and the bee flying off rips the stinger out from its abdomen. Yeah. So even if you don't swat them, they do usually die.

A really interesting thing though is that the stinger has its own muscles and glands and it can keep delivering venom even after it's detached from the body. Oh, geez. So, and then it also continues to release a pheromone that lets other bees know that that's where it's stinging and it attracts other bees to that spot to sting that same spot. So the queen bee doesn't have a barb? I don't think so. I don't call me on that though. Do they sting? They can probably rarely. Yeah, I think it's

more for when they're battling other queen bees to assert dominance. So the worker bee does die, its sting is lodged in the flesh, and it tears free from its abdomen. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh no. That's why LifeLock monitors

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Honeybees will defend the, so Jeff mentioned this earlier, they also will defend the hive from invaders using a technique called bawling. So essentially an intruder like a murder hornet or like an unknown queen or some kind of small intruder if it comes in the hive, it's surrounded by worker bees and they vibrate muscles in their body so vigorously that they raise the temperature inside of that ball and inside of the intruder so high that it cooks it to death. So they'll like swarm a murder hornet or something, vibrate these muscles so fast that they cook it to death. And then scientists recently learned that increased carbon dioxide within that ball also. helps to kill whatever they're bawling. Oh, yeah, that's cool. Yeah, it's crazy because like hornets will go in there and just start biting off heads

and kill hundreds of bees and then they just keep bawling up on it and bawling up on it until it hooks it. Yeah. So there's millions of other cool facts about bees. They thermo-regulate their hives. They have five eyes. Their wings beat at 11,400 times per minute. They can fly at 15 miles an hour.

But we don't have time to talk about facts forever. but what we do need to talk about briefly is the story of Africanized honeybees. In 1957, a scientist in Brazil named Warwick E. Kerr bred Western honeybees from Europe with bees from Southern Africa. And the idea was to combine the high honey productivity of these Western honey bees with the tropical heat tolerance of African bees, because he wanted to have bees that lived really well in Brazil that also produced a ton of honey. because they had these western bees in Brazil, but they really struggled when it got too hot.

But these African bees do really well in the heat. So he's like, I'm going to combine the two and we'll have these great characteristics of both. But these bees that he bred were really defensive because African bees have a lot of natural predators. And so they've evolved to be a lot more defensive of their hives. And like I mentioned, our typical Western honeybee will send 10% of its bees out to defend a hive.

These African bees send everyone out. So if you get stung by these African honey, Africanized honeybees, you get 10 times the amount of stings that you would get from like a Western honeybee. So they've been nicknamed killer bees. They typically deliver, again, about 10 times the amount of stings. And bee scientists say that when someone's typically stung about a thousand times, they have about a 50-50 chance of surviving a human if you get stung a thousand times.

That's pretty general though. So a better way to look at it is for every pound that you weigh, you can withstand about 10 bee stings. So, and, you know, a 10-pound child is going to only be able to take 100 bee stings. So people get stung by like over a thousand bees? Yeah. In fact, one of the guys in our stories is going to get stung. Oh, man. Okay. This scientist who had combined these bees, he had put what's called a queen excluder on the hives of his bees, which prevented the queens and the drones from leaving because they're a little bit bigger, but it let the workers still go in and out of the hive. And that was to like stop them from going out and mating with other

bees and passing on these defensive characteristics. But one day a visiting beekeeper thought that these excluders were preventing the workers from going in and out. So they pulled up this excluder and the colony spread and these Africanized honeybees got out. And they've slowly spread through South and Central America and then they arrived at the United States in the 90s. So when people talk about killer bees, they're talking about these Africanized honeybees.

And unfortunately, those were the bees that were swarming, Doug and Ian on the cliffside in Texas. Man. So we're finally back to our story. So Doug's enveloped in this cloud of bees that come out of this rock. Remember, he's on a tiny ledge. He's like 140-something feet up at this point. Ian's just below him on a different ledge.

And he's enveloped in this cloud of bees. He instantly receives dozens of stings. And the pain's spreading through his body and face. And panicked, he jumps off the cliff. Just jumps off because he's tethered in still. And he's yelling at Ian to like, He's like, lower me, lower me, lower me, lower me, go, go. And Ian feels this pole on the rope.

And he's standing on a ledge that's only like two feet deep. And he's struggling to get all this rope out to lower Doug down to the ground. Yeah, because he wasn't expecting him to jump. Right. And then he also, like, he's not totally even sure what's going on. And then he also, like, the walls undercut underneath his ledge. So he can't see Doug. So he doesn't know if he's got him on the ground or not.

when suddenly he sees this first bee fly toward it. And he completely freezes because he's like, maybe it won't sting me if I freeze. T-Rex. T-Rex. Yeah. It's a good thing. And it flies straight at him and stings him on the neck.

Didn't work. And then instantly the rest of the hive shows up and this buzzing turns into a roar. It drowns out all the other sounds in the world and bees cover every inch of his body. They're stinging his eyes. They're stinging his ears. They're in his nose. And they're pouring into his mouth as he's screaming. So, Ian knows he's in trouble.

He desperately wants to climb down. He can't because he's not tethered to anyone else at this point. Well, Doug, but Doug's below him. And Doug still hasn't unclipped himself from the bottom of the rope. Ian thinks he should be on the ground, but he hasn't unclipped. And he can just feel Doug's dead weight on the bottom of the rope. So he reaches up to try and brush the bees off his head. And he says he remembers feeling a one inch thick crown of bees on his head.

And they're all just stinging him relentlessly. So he's sitting there with no options, B venom's coursing through his veins, and he starts to think of his wife, Melinda, and how sorry he is to die this way. Because it's like a really terrible way to go and she's going to have to think about this the rest of her life. But then his world kind of starts to blur and fades and he passes out on this ledge 130 feet up. So down below, Doug is hanging about eight feet from the wall and about 70 feet off the ground still. He's yelling at Ian to untie the blue rope and to like repel down to the ground. but Ian's unconscious and neither men could even they wouldn't be able to hear anything anyway because

these bees are so loud that they're roaring in their ears. Oh, geez. So he was still being stung. He had been stung hundreds of times, but he's starting to get numb to the pain. And he pulls his baseball cap over his face to try and think of a way out of the situation. Doug sees an anchor on the wall 15 feet away and he managed to get like a swing going. And he swings into that anchor and grabs it. and then he hooks himself into it so he can release the rope that's tethered to Ian.

And then he slowly begins his climb down. And he yells up to Ian to see if he's okay. He gets no response. But he said he could see bee carcasses falling over the cliff like a little waterfall. Because all these bees are just stinging and then dying and then just falling. So the climb down takes about five minutes. And by the time he gets there, he's delirious and totally nauseous. He's like full of poison.

Yeah. And as he pulls up, as he gets to the bottom, a ranger pulls up. Yeah, venom, exactly. Remember, venom's injected. Venom's injected, poisons ingested. So, a ranger pulls up as soon as he gets to the bottom, and Doug yells at Ian, and he points to the ledge where Ian's laying unconscious slumped over in the fetal position,

and they can't even see him because he's just covered in bees. The ranger had called search and rescue, but Doug knew that by the time search and rescue gets there, his friend's probably going to die. So he decides the only thing he can do is go back up there and rescue his friend. The ranger drives Doug to his car where he grabs another rope, and then rather than climb up the face of the rock, he decides to hike up the back and repel down to Ian. Remember, he's got hundreds of stings coursing through his body still, and he hikes up this rock, and he meets two other climbing friends as he's hiking up that somehow, I guess, didn't hear all this commotion.

Yeah. But he asked if they would help him rescue Ian, and they join him. And he gets to the top of the rock, and he clips into an anchor and starts rappelling down. and at this point it's been like 45 minutes since the attack began and as he repels down he can see the body of Ian and he's still being sworn by bees and he yells out Ian and Ian actually looks up and he remembers him just being like totally swollen but he could see like a look of pure despair and incredulity in his eyes

like he couldn't believe what was happening to him and Doug remarked that he'd seen the same look in people's eyes when they were shot like a war flashback yeah people when they're shot or like blown apart would have that look in their eyes. How is this happening to me? So he lowers himself down to the ledge and when he gets there, the bees start stinging him again, but at this point he's totally numb to their stings. And he hooks Ian up to the belay and he lowers him down to the ground about 130 feet below. And just as he gets there, the first ambulance shows up. So he watches as the Rangers and paramedics collect Ian and then he hooks himself back in and lowers himself to the ground. And just as he gets to the ground, they're loading Ian into a hell

He's getting stung a ton again now. Yeah. They load Ian into a helicopter that takes off for El Paso, and then just as that happens, search and rescue finally shows up. So paramedics tell Doug he should go to the hospital as well. He feels pretty woozy, but he decides not to go. He's like, I'm not going to go. I'm fine.

I'm not going to die. And the bees aren't stinging them anymore. So he turns them down, which is probably what I would do just because I know how expensive hospitals are. Expensive trip. And if I'm like, if I don't have allergies and I'm not dying, and I'm like already, it's over. You know, like... You just repelled down a cliff.

Right. So he turns him down and then he runs into two hikers in the parking lot that had Wilderness First Aid training. And they told him that like, you don't want to use tweezers to pull these stingers out because when you tweez and you squeeze a little bit. Tweeze and squeeze. Yeah, the old tweez and squeeze. It squeezes more venom into the, into the site.

And so what they had him do was strip off all his clothes aside from his boxers. And then they ran credit cards up and down him. and that just scrapes all the stingers off. So they scraped hundreds of stingers off him onto the ground. Good to know. So Ian's doctors... I kind of want to keep them, I think. Keep them in like a little bottle?

Yeah, just like put him in a little thing and be like, I was stung by all of these at once. Yeah. Ian's doctor's guess that he had been stung over a thousand times. So he got stung a lot more because he had passed out on the ledge and was stung the entire time. That is enough times to kill a person. Again, at 1,000 doctors say you have about a 50-50 chance, but he would survive. He needed to stay in the hospital overnight just to let the venom clear his system.

So I guess Doug was kind of smart for not going to the hospital because I'm sure by the time Ian got to the hospital, he was fully awake and everything, but they still made him stay the night, which I'm sure ran up his bill like another $6,000 or something. All right. So months later, Doug gets back from Afghanistan. The two go climbing again in Hueco tanks. Not again. They don't go on indecent exposure.

And there's kind of like a little anecdote about Ian telling Doug while they're up there like how much he appreciates him saving his life. And Doug just kind of waves him off. And Ian knew that there was never any decision for Doug. He was going to save him. Yeah. I mean, what Doug did was pretty heroic. Incredible.

Yeah. Under those circumstances. Yeah. And probably really did improve the chances of him surviving. Ian surviving by a ton. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Like the helicopter came.

I don't know. Maybe they could have. But like, lowering someone down and all that takes time. I mean, he could have easily gotten stung another thousand times. I wonder if, like, the rescuers would have had a B-Su done. Yeah. So they did. When Doug went back, he had like some mesh that he put over his face.

But that was all he had. Anyway. I can't think of, well, maybe a couple, but that's maybe a top five worst situation to get swarmed by B-Zo. Yeah. That's on a cliff. Yeah. What, you can't do anything.

Exactly. Oh. Yeah. It's a bad one. And that's why I wanted to pick this one, because there's a lot of stories of killer bees out there. But this one was especially interesting to me just because of the location. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. You guys have any questions about the story or about bees? No. I was going to bring up the 14,000 wing flaps per minute. 11,400. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. We also did, we have a mini in our catalog or a bonus episode over on Patreon where we talked a little bit more about.

Bees, I know. Yeah, which one was it? So it's the animals with jobs, and we talked about how they can find mines, find bombs and mines, and they use them in airports to track explosives and stuff. Totally. So if you're not on Patreon, that's a really interesting episode that Mike led us. So, all right, well, let's move on to our ouchies then. How many outchies are you guys given this story? I don't, I mean.

A thousand outgies. It seems like it, right? I will say, like, I usually go like a few years in between bee stings or wasp stings. and then when I get stung again, I'm always just like, holy shit, that really hurts. It's really surprising how much it hurts. It's not just like you're getting pricked by a needle. It really, really hurts.

The venom stings. I'm not giving it a 10. No. I'm giving it an 8. A single bee sting hurts so bad, first of all. And it sucks. And like obviously our outchy scale, it's all extreme. Like, no matter what number we're giving.

it, it's like, yeah, we know it really hurt everyone that gets attacked by these animals in our stories, right? Yeah. But I'm just putting it at an eight because, like, some of our stories, they take a couple months of rehabilitation and recovery. And these guys were like fine the next day, but not to take anything away from getting stung hundreds of times of ideas. For the same reason, I'm giving it a six.

Getting stung by a ton of bees sucks, but I agree with you. It's like pretty short term. And they got stung enough to where they went numb to it. But I agree. They like didn't have to spend months in recovery. They didn't lose any body parts. They didn't have any massive trauma. So six and a half for me.

Mike. I'm going to go more along with Jeff's score with an eight because that just seems like the kind of thing that you would have recurring nightmares for the rest of your life. All of these attacks, obviously, you're traumatized. But like you feel any little thing crawling on you. Like just getting swarmed. completely covered by an animal. Plus, on top of that, all the stings, and you're up on a cliff.

It just seems almost like a psychologically devastating experience to have to go through. I don't know. It sounds absolutely awful to me. We've told this before on the podcast, but I fell into a wasp nest when I was a kid and Cyrus helped me out of it. But I got stung a bunch on my ears, on my eyes, on my mouth, like all over. Probably, I think I got like 20-something stings. It really, really sucks. It's miserable.

But it is kind of like your adrenaline and everything is pumping so much that you don't feel every individual sting. And that was me at least. I can't speak for these guys. Maybe they did feel every single sting. But for me, it was just kind of like this blur of pain. And so, yeah, I'm going to stick with mine, six and a half. But you guys both give it eights. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's like low prices in every aisle.

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If it was just one B, where do you think the worst place it could sting you would be? Eyeball. Eyeball? Or a ball? A ball? Yeah. I don't know. You probably took all that.

What if you like swallowed it? I kind of feel, started stinging you from the inside. Tong or lip would be really bad. I got stung on my lip a bunch times. Did it suck? Yeah, it sucked. It's spoiled up. It looked like Brent's lips.

All right. And then you'd probably like bite your lip the next whole week while you're eating so then it just gets worse. That's a, that's like a nine on the Aouchy scale. All right. So that's it for the story. No more question. No. Nope.

Hey, all you beautiful listeners, this is Wes. I just listened to the episode and I realized we forgot something pretty crucial, which is what you're supposed to do if you are attacked by bees. We talked a lot about the story. We talked a lot about our favorite bees, but we kind of missed that. So I did want to kind of just pop in really quick and let you know what you're actually supposed to do if you run into a hive of bees and if they're swarming you. So first and foremost, I think on this podcast a lot, we'd say, you know, you're not supposed to run from certain animals.

It triggers a response. With bees, you 100% are supposed to run. You want to get out of there as fast as possible. They're just defending their hive. So if you get out of there, it's probably going to make them stop. It's going to get you away from a lot of other bees that haven't come out of the hive yet. So it's really important just to get out of there. So that's the number one most crucial thing is just run away.

The number two most important thing is you don't really want to flail around and swat at the bees a lot. If you kill bees, they do put out a pheromone that tells other bees to attack. And it also just kind of makes you look like you're this angry predator that's trying to attack their hive when you're flailing around like that. So really, as you're running away, you want to make as little commotion as possible. You don't really want to be swatting bees, even though that's really hard when they're stinging you. Speaking of stinging, we did mention that, Duff. and the story waited to get rid of his stingers until he found some people with credit cards

and they helped him scrape those stingers off. And the reason he did that is because he was worried, he had heard that if you try and pull those stingers out, it can pump more of the venom into you. And that's not really, it is the case, but as I mentioned, those stingers have a little muscle in them and they can continually pump venom into you. So you actually just want to get them out as quickly as possible, no matter how you have to do it, whether that's using tweezers or just rubbing them off or using a credit card or whatever, you just want to get them off because either way they're going to be pumping more venom into you. So don't leave them. Just get those stingers out as quickly as you possibly can. A couple other little things. Sometimes when you're

close to a beehive, they'll send bees out to figure out what you are. And those bees will actually bump into you. They'll like fly into you and not sting you. And they're kind of testing out to see what you are and if you're a threat and when they do that you're probably only a few seconds away from them actually sending the hive out to sting you so if you're getting bumped by bees like that you want to get out of there there's a good chance that they're sending more bees out to come sting you and then finally one other thing it is true that sometimes if you hold your breath when they start to come at you it'll buy you a few seconds because bees are using odor to kind of navigate the world and they're using the odor of your breath to figure out where you are.

So it's essentially like shutting off the lights for them. It's not going to buy you very much time, but it might buy you a few seconds. So there is some information out there that holding your breath can help. But really, the number one thing is just running away, getting away from that hive as quickly as possible. So there you go. There's a few tips for you guys. Those of you who are wondering how to get away from bees. Sorry if my voice sounds a little weird.

I lost it the other night. So I'm still getting it back. I hope you guys are all having a great week. And you had a great Halloween. Okay. Well, we will get into our categories then. Let's do our favorite. Beautiful.

I can't think of anything. Bees exhibit a lot of interesting behavior, as West just showed. All right. Let's get into our categories. Our favorite B from pop culture. So you want me to start? Sure. So I'm going to go with two.

Okay. I'll choose one over the other. My honorable mention was just Job's bees from the rest of development. I was thinking about that. And his jokes. But my number one is Nick Cage in the Wicker Man. Oh, that's a good pick. Wait, he's like, not the bees.

Bees. That's a great pick. So that's my number one. Killing me won't bring back your goddamn honey. Yeah. Oh, classic. That's in all time, like, don't watch the movie, but watch the YouTube highlight clips. I still need to watch the original, because the original is kind of good.

I like it. It's kind of, well, whatever. It's a little slow, but then when it hits it, it's hard. When he punches the woman in the face. And he's in a bear suit, incredible stuff. Man, I love Nick Cage. My favorite B, so this is a little bit of a deep cut. When I was really little, I had my mom rent out this little VHS tape from the library.

You're doing a deep cut? Shocking to everyone. I have a B that no one's probably heard of before. But Pixar's very first animated work they ever did was a little short called The Adventures of Andre and Wally B. I think that's what it's called. And you can actually find it on the Disney Plus subscription service. This isn't a plug for Disney Plus. You can find this on YouTube.

You can also pirate it on the internet. I'm sure it's on YouTube. Yeah. In fact, just go to YouTube. But I remember this is like pre-Toy Story, pre any kind of like computer-generated cartoon work ever. And this little short is of a little guy and his friend Wally B. And I remember just being so transfixed by this animation that I had never seen anything like it. And it stuck with me for all these years.

It was just a really formative moment in my childhood. I feel like those, like, early CG cartoons were so mind-blowing. Do you guys remember the Saturday morning cartoon reboot? It was, like, these CG characters, and they were, like, fighting, and then they could enter this weird virtual reality game, where they would, like, do all these other crazy, like... Yeah. Here, it would, like, these are what they looked like.

The green guys. Yeah. Yeah. I remember just being, like, so into that show because CG was such a new thing. It's like the coolest looking thing ever. Yeah. All right, well, my favorite B, there's an episode of The Simpsons. I can't, I think it's the episode where they're telling a bunch of stories.

It's like one of the anthology episodes, but Smithers and Mr. Burns are out on a ride on a tandem bike. And while they're riding, Smithers is like doing all the pedaling. And a bee lands on his face. And he tells Mr. Burns, he's like, I'm allergic to bees. Can you just pedal? I don't want to move, so it'll fly away. And Mr. Burns is like, no, keep pedaling. And so he starts pedaling and it's stinging.

him on the eye, and then he's like having the severe allergic reaction, and Mr. Burns demands that he keeps peddling. And he pedals all the way to hospital, and then he gets to the hospital and, like, falls over. And when he falls over, Mr. Burns falls out of the bike, too. And these ER guys rush out and grab Mr. Burns and take him to hospital. Anyway, that's, like, my favorite bee from pop culture, I think. And we should mention, like, bees are really dangerous to people that have allergies. You know, to everyone else, they're dangerous, like, on.

a small level, but then to people that have allergies, a single bee sting can kill you. So that's a whole other level of danger to bees. All right. Our cage match. Let's put it, let's do it this way. Okay. Let's put, like, all of our animals at 200 pounds. How would a bee be be?

If it's a 200-pound bee, we've done this before. I know. But it's like, how else are you going to do it? Well, no, let's do a swarm of bees. A hive of bees. A hive of bees. Okay, sure. I think a hive of bees could kill a lot of our animals, but not all of them.

How many bees are in a hive, typically? Like, average. Up to 60,000 bees. 60,000, you said that. Bears don't give a shit, right? They'll just go into a hive. Bears, like, most of their body is protected. Their face and, like, their ears and stuff aren't.

So it's annoying to them, but it's not devastating and they're worth, like, it's worth getting the honey. Yeah. But if all 60,000 bees came out of them, it might be too much. The bear might run off. Can you imagine if they did the, what was it called, the grouping or the ball? Were they overheating? On a bear.

It's a huge ball of bees. Yeah. Well, let's do a little math really quick. So we had that figure that said it would take 10 pounds or 10 bees per pound. Yes. So if there's 60,000 bees in a hive divided by 10, so that's 6,000 pounds. So technically a hive of 60,000 bees. And that's a big hive.

Could kill an animal that weighs 6,000. pounds. So that pretty much is any of our animals. There's a few of them that get bigger than that, like our orca. Hippo. I think hippos. So I was actually going to bring up the fact that I was just doing a little bit of reading before recording that elephants are afraid of bees. And the buzzing sound of a bee or a hive of bees actually scares elephants away from, you know, wherever. So they're actually using bee sounds to scare elephants away from, you know, territory. They don't want to Elephants got those big old ears. True, so they can really get stung in their ears more than anyway.

And their nose. It'd suck to get stung on your nose and your ears and think of an elephant. That's where they're hitting stung. Yeah. It makes sense that they just not want to mess with them. So I don't think, though, that we can say, like, that number works for other animals. Sure. Because for humans, like, we're very thin-skinned.

And, like, a bear, for example, like I mentioned, they really only can get at bears on their face. The rest of their body, they have enough fat. Stingers aren't going to stick in. That it doesn't really get them. So I do think there's a good percentage of our animals that are going to be just fine if they're attacked by a hive of bees. But some of our animals are going to struggle. And I don't know which are. The Nile monitor, they could probably.

What about like a honey badger? No, I don't think they could get the Nile monitor. Those things seem like they can take venom like no other animal. And they just have really thick skin and stuff. So they'd be all right. You can call them whatever bad name you want and they'll just not care. Really? I don't really know what of our animals bees could actually kill.

Spider. Spider, bat. We got the bat. You don't think the lizard. The chimpanzee they could. The chimp, okay. Yeah. The lizard, I don't think.

I think the lizard's too thick-skinned. The cats? Any of the cats? Maybe. Cougar. Yeah, maybe the cougar. Wolf could be a good match because they don't have a ton of fat. So yeah, I think those are our main ones.

Cool. Chimpanzee, cougar, wolf, and the little ones. So a hive of bees is. kind of like... Mid-range. Yeah. Low mid-range. Yeah.

All right, should we do some listener questions? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Should we start with our patron once? You want to start with them? Yeah, why not? Yeah. Let's give them priority.

Mike sends me the questions, and he wrote here, Ryan and a few others. So I don't know who they are. Well, so after you mentioned some... Well, you'll read the question, but a few different people had this question, and I just pulled it from Ryan's comment, so... Okay. So you other people, we recognize you. We love you.

We recognize you. You're important to us. This is the sake of time. So on the most recent bonus episode, West talked about bumping Grizzlies up to number two on his favorite list because of his work at Yellowstone. He seemed to be saying that he's developed a newfound respect for the potential danger they can represent. I was hoping that he could say more about that and about what he's been seeing.

Thanks. Love the show. So basically to explain that, grizzly bear were your number one, black bear were a close second, very close, and you just recently bumped black bear up to number one, you want to explain? That's a constantly fluid list for me between like grizzly bears, black bears, polar bears, and great white sharks. Those are always kind of in that top spot and circling out. And remember, like grizzlies, they were neck and neck with black bears. but recently I've been in kind of enough somewhat like high risk situations with Grizzlies to where I felt less comfortable around them.

And it's just kind of made me remember how nice it is working with Black Bears. They're just, I think for me it was just that kind of stress created this like slightly. It just knocked them down a peg because I was like stressed about them at the moment. But like if you were to ask me today, I'd probably say Grizzlies today. So it's just constantly changing for me. They shouldn't read that much into it. Yeah. Have there been any fatal grizzly attacks up in Yellowstone this season?

Not in the park, but right outside of the park. In April, a guy was killed. Now, I understand that line of thinking. I'd rather be with an animal that won't kill me. I'd prefer that animal. Yeah. Well, and part of it, too, is that so much of my work has been focused on Grizzlies that seeing Black Bears is like kind of this fun distraction for me.

because I can be a little bit calmer and more relaxed around them. And it's just kind of like... Let down your hair. Yeah. So I just slip into something more comfortable. But then the thing I like best about Grizzlies is how they make you have to like be completely alert and like tap into this weird primal kind of thing that we all have. The cool thing with Grizzlies too is there's still, I think of like every animal, at least land animal that I've seen. They're the coolest to see from a distance.

Yeah. They still look cool. They still look cool even from far away. I mean, I'm sure an elephant would be pretty cool from a distance, but I haven't seen one. Bs aren't that cool from the distance. You got to be pretty close for a B to be cool. All right. Good question, though.

Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard, but not the pipeline? That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions. My boss asks for results, so I open my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign. Turns sick conditions apply. From Jack, which criped animal? Crippid.

Bigfoot. Lachness. Now I'm nervous. You say it. Chooka Cobra. Chupacabra. Chuka Cobra. Okay. If any, do you believe could exist?

And which are your favorites? I don't personally believe in any of them. I wish I did. Because I think they're really fun, but I just, I don't. I think I like, well, my favorite one is the Flathead Lake Monster. Yeah. And that's just because it was close to home. And, like, they made this root beer that was my favorite root beer called Flathead Lake Monster Roop Beer.

and I just thought it's funny, but yeah, I don't really believe in it. I think I might believe in Skinwalkers. I was going to mention that one. I think that's maybe what I saw in my cabin that once, but I do think I kind of believe in Skinwalkers. Yeah, we have, so actually we have a listener question about that. Yeah. About that.

Okay. I like a Yetis. I think Yeties are cool. I like the pictures of Bigfoot that people put on the internet. Like Bigfoot's. Bigfoot's probably my favorite just because it's funny seeing like these super blurry images of like a guy in a suit and everyone's convinced it's Bigfoot. All right. From Rachel, what's your advice when encountering a warthog?

And would they also apply for a wild boar? I've spent a little time in Africa. I've seen a few warthogs. I think just give them plenty of distance. I don't know a ton about it, but I think you would treat them the exact same way you would treat a wild boar. Just don't get close to them. Don't harass their young. Don't ever approach one because they do have big tusks and they can do some pretty good damage.

But yeah, just view them from a distance. And if one is coming close to you, I would just slowly back away. Clim a tree. Yeah, you could climb a tree with them and you'd be good. Don't drink wine and go hunting them. Or else you'll die. Like Robert Barathean. Yeah, we're circling back to that.

All right. Yeah, so H2O. Ken's, H2O Ken's. Okay. She was asking about that. Is Wes's Bryce Canyon haunted cabin story real, or did he Photoshop those figures? Yeah, you're going to have to-you're going to have to listen to our most recent Patreon episode to know. Mike, are you ready for that? I can't wait. It's already out. I don't know what you guys are talking about that. That's true. Time warp. That was it. It is real, though. So Jeff and Wes, I'm going to include Mike in this too. Oh, you don't have to you.

And I'm just going to change this guy's question. Okay. This is from Z. This is a question from Jeff. So Jeff, Wes, and Mike, while in the field, what was the strangest place you've peed? I'm just going to say, Jeff, Wes, and Mike, what's the strangest place you've peed? Okay, I got a good one. Okay.

When I was a kid, probably, I'm guessing like six or seven, but I'm not sure. Somewhere in that range. One night I slept walked and I was kind of like half asleep and I went into our laundry room and there was a laundry basket on the floor. It was like one that had all those little openings in it. So it's like a net one. It wasn't a basket that's enclosed. And I peed in it and it went everywhere like all over the floor, all over this basket. And then I just went to bed.

Sleep rocking, huh? Kind of. The next morning mom like stormed upstairs. and was like, who peed in a laundry basket? And I just ate my breakfast and didn't say a word. And I was like, not me. And she 100% knew it had to have been me. That's really funny.

Because at the time, it was either me or Cyrus or dad or mom. And it was like one out of two. It was either me or Cyrus. And I thought I could get away with it. She for sure knew it was me. Mike, you got anything? So maybe this is a little weird, but I was just on a bike. ride out. I don't even know where I was exactly, but I was kind of rounding my way around the

backstop of a baseball diamond. That was part of an elementary school. And I don't know what I was thinking, but I stopped behind kind of the boards that are about waist high to stop the ball from kind of like rolling back behind into the crowd. And the second I started peeing, you know, you reach a point where like you're committed, you can't like back out. So the second I hit that moment, recess was called in like 30 elementary school kids were like splinting at me. So I was like, I kind of like curled into a little ball like down on my knees and elbows. I mean, you guys don't need to know. It's too much more.

You're not on the sex offender list. Yeah. You're on a few elementary school lists now. Jeff, what's yours? Yours made me think of one that's really embarrassing to me, I think. But I guess I'll tell it. When I was like in way too old, middle school age, I had this thing where I had to pee. like every 10 minutes at night and I don't know why so then I just got frustrated and started

peeing on the floor in my bedroom just like on the floor and like did it for like a few weeks and then realize like this is stupid and then like two months later like the smell just had gotten not I don't know the times but the smell got really bad and dad thought a pipe had burst I didn't know anything about it And so then he was going to like Pay all this money to fix it So then I was like Dad I got to tell you something

And he was It was one of the more I don't know He just was just like I think he would just regret it Having a third kid for a little bit So wait was it It was carpet

And like my room was like Right next to the bathroom. Yeah, like truly, like, 10 feet away. That's really funny. Wait, I have another story about Jeff. When we were doing bear work and Bryce, there was, like, this one really windy day where, like, the wind was blowing right up this cliffside. And if you stood on the cliff side, it was like blowing the wind up at your face.

Like, the wind was going up. And Jeff was like, I'm going to try peeing off this cliff. And it was like, me and my friend Lindsay there. Jeff like tried peeing out into this wind and it just blew up into his face the whole time he's peeing. It was completely covered like the whole front of his chest and his face would pee. That was in the field too. So that answers this question. All right.

I guess I wasn't in the field. So mine doesn't count. You were in a baseball field. Jeff changed it. Oh, that's true. Good catch. Alex Molina 23. Fight a chicken every time you drive or annual sword fight with an orangutan.

This person sent us that meme, too. It's a good question. I think I'm going to do the chicken, just because I don't want to kill an orangutan. Wait, every time, what? Every time you fight a chicken every time you drive. So every time you get in your car, you have to fight a chicken or sword fight an orangutan once a year. I'd do the sword fight. It would be kind of cool just pumping yourself up all year for your annual sword fight with an orangutan.

Yeah, I'm doing sword fight. I'm just going to have them yield. I'm not going to kill them. Okay. Fair enough. Do you yield? Do you yield? And then I'll do it again until he finally yields.

Die as of old age. From Bryn J. Thorne. Always talking about your top animals. So what animals do you guys hate the most? I hate this question. This is the easiest question I've ever been asked. What's yours, Mike? Horse.

You don't think they're just overrated? They're like your least favorite. No, they suck. Like more than a mosquito? Probably in my person. opinion, yes, I would rather have no more horses than no more mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are, I don't think they like me very much. I never get mosquito about spiders.

But they're still annoying. Spiders are dope, but like mosquitoes make it annoying noise. How about like fleas? Would you rather have fleas or horses? I've, I don't know. Flee's, I've never like noticed a flea causing me problems. Okay, fair enough. What's yours?

The animal I hate, I don't hate any animal. So the animal I like the least. like the least is probably centipedes. I don't like centipedes. Yeah, we've talked about centipedes. We come back to that one of the line. I'm not a big centipede fan. I don't like mosquitoes.

And they, I don't even react when they bite me. I don't get itchy. Yeah. But, like, I don't like their little buzzing noise. They do a lot of damage. They also feed a lot of animals. A lot of animals eat mosquitoes. Is that true?

I don't need to like them. Fair enough. I don't love chimpanzees. Fat clock from, Fat clock did. Fat clock dick. I can't say it fast or I say it wrong. Fat clock did.

Yeah, I don't know. You want to try? No, I'm good. I think you've covered all possible options, Jeff. What is your guys' favorite animal moments in a movie or TV show? And one of you guys want to go first? I'm just going to go with Game of Thrones. I really like the dire wolves fighting in battles.

I thought they were super cool. I probably liked Rob Stark's the best. Mine is the T-Rex stepping out of the enclosure for the first time in between the two cars. Yeah, I'm trying to think of one that we haven't brought up yet over the course of the podcast. Mine's Jurassic Park, just in case anyone out there doesn't realize that. Yes, thanks, Wes. Well, it was for everyone else, not for you, Mike. You know what?

I'm going to go with a different Jurassic Park one. I've got to be true to myself. But it's at the end of the first Jurassic Park movie when the banner falls down in the T-Rashic. Rex kind of takes his territory back from. We like dinosaurs. I'll go with the T-Rex eating the lawyer on the toilet. There you go. So we can all have a T-Rex.

Okay, so this question is from Got Blankets. Ooh, my friend Nate. Did Wes wear tooth and claw merch last night? So Nate went to the movie with us, and he knows that I did wear tooth and claw merch. Do you wear your shirt very often? I wear it quite often. Yeah. I really like my shirt.

Yeah. And it's funny you should say that because we have shirts available on the website again. Where they're back? They've been off line forever. They have. We've got a new order. That is funny. If you've been putting it off, you should buy it now because we don't know when we're going to run out again.

We've got the original like Robin Banks design, black and white, the three of us in the boat with the shark. And then Justice, our friend Justice, they made a really cool design for us of like a tiger head that we have that shirt. available and soon our friend Randy also made a design and that design will be available probably in a few weeks so yeah if you don't have the money for the merch right now maybe just say that you have cancer yeah and start a go fund me yeah or steal it yeah yeah an elderly family member that doesn't know do whatever you need to do to get the money no the money oh the money yeah the money or the medicine volunteer they probably won't have the shirt Old people have a lot of good pills, too.

They got a lot of stuff to steal. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for the question, Nate. All right. Last one. M. Lulu, 191.

How would you haunt the other host if you died? Well, so the most effective one, because Jeff is always going to the bathroom, I'd be like the Harry Potter ghost that just lives in that toilet. Yeah. Because I wouldn't want to haunt Jeff. I just kind of want to hang out with them. And that seems like the place we'd be able to meet the most. What are the possibilities? I would just, if I was haunting Mike, I'd always be making fresh lasagna and then just packaging it up before you can have any.

I'd be like, you know what, that lasagna belongs to that ghost. I have no rights to it. That's what I would say. If I'm haunting you guys, I don't know, I'd probably like turn into a horse for Mike. He's standing them over all the time. I'd be fine with that. I'd like, I'd open a cupboard drawer. every once in a while, because we watched paranormal activity, and he just thought that was the scariest

thing. He's like, oh, that door moved an inch from yesterday. A couple of footsteps every once in a while. Paranormal activity scared me because it seems real to me. But fair enough, it's dumb that that's my scariest movie, as a horror fan. I'd put like a shadow in front of the window once. I think I'd be too lazy. You'd have two cabin stories.

We'd never hear the end of it. All right. That question's going to make us get in a fight. All right. We're going to move on from listener questions to how are we messing things up for bees. This one's kind of a scary one. So over the past, like, Spooky.

Over the past, over a decade, we've been losing a lot of bees. And people that keep track of bees and be scientists and beekeepers have noticed that there's been really big decreases in bee numbers. And in fact, like in recent. years, they've been really pretty dramatic. So in the U.S., from April 2020 to April 2021, beekeepers reported losing, losing 45% of their bees just in the last year. So bees are dying out really quickly, and scientists are rushing to figure out what might be happening. And they think it's probably a perfect storm from a lot of different factors. Those factors include parasitic mites,

which might be like having an easier time getting at bees because of climate change. The some bee viruses, also likely related to climate change. Poor nutrition due to monoculture farming. So sometimes bee hives are like close to monoculture farms and they're just eating that like, they're just getting nectar from like one type of plant. And that's like not nutritious for them. It's like if you were just to constantly eat only blueberries, you know, you're not getting everything you need.

They also pesticides are affecting them, which we spray plants with. And then food loss just from general climate change, them having less plants to access and whatnot. So that's happening to like honeybees and the native bees it's also happening to. They're especially important for pollination because they've evolved to do it more efficiently than these bees that we brought from other parts of the world. So bees are one of the main pollinators of lots of different plants. A single bee can visit over 2,000 flowers in a day. So they put in a lot of work to pollinate plants and they probably pollinate about $15 billion dollars worth of produce in the U.S. alone.

In the world, it's almost $200 billion that we, like, attribute to bees in pollination. Wow. So they're really, really important, and we're really messing things up for them. There are a lot of groups working toward figuring that out, but it's kind of a scary one because we don't really have a fix for it. There's not anything right now that we're just like, okay, this will solve this problem. And we don't really even totally know why it's happening. Oh, yeah.

Also worth noting, I learned this while I was doing preparation. for the bonus episode. If you see a beehive or a bees nest anywhere around your property, don't spray them and kill them. You can contact local, the wildlife services or whoever it is. Yeah, lots times local beekeepers will come. Beekeepers, they'll come and take it away safely. No bees will be harmed.

And they do it for free. Yeah. They just remove the nest. Well, they're happy to do it because they then have another colony of bees to produce honey. So, yeah, don't kill bees. There's a big difference between like wasps and yellow jackets and bees. Bees serve a really important purpose, so don't ever kill them. And just try not to get stung by thousands of Africanized honeybees.

Well, try every day. A quick, doing pretty, we should make like, doing pretty good so far. Bee spray. Bee spray? Yeah, we have bear spray. Yeah, that's a good idea. Oh, like non-lethal spray to just like spritz. If you're on a cliff rock climbing and you're getting attacked by a thousand bees.

Oh, yeah, so something about the Africanized honey bees. They can only survive in warmer climates. So they haven't really pushed past the southern U.S. A global warming will take care of that. Actually, that's something I read that as the climate worms, they are slowly inching further north. All right. So we're to our final category, which is how much do we like this animal? How many claws are we going to give it?

I'm going to give bees nine claws. Are we going African bees? We're just doing honey bees. Honey bees? Yeah. I'm giving them nine claws. Mostly because I love bees. I think bees are cute.

I think they like serve a really vital purpose. In the ecosystem, I think they're really important. I just love honey. Like honey eat. Oh, yeah. I got in a real honey phase this year where I was just constantly taking little spoonfuls of honey and eating it. So they're one of the only animals we talk about where like on a day-to-day basis. I'm benefiting from them.

So I'm giving them nine. I'm giving them 10. They were already in my top 10 as we covered in the Patreon episode. We did not too long ago. But, I mean, even this episode just makes me like him even more. I think they're the coolest little animal. They are. Jeff?

I'm going to give them a B on an A through F scale. I don't get it. How many claws are you giving them first? I'll give them eight. And I'm going to rank 83rd. All right. Well, that's our first B episode. We might do more in the future.

We got a lot of B facts still we could talk about. I loved learning about bees. We've been wanting to do bees for a while. So I'm glad we did it. I'm glad we're all together. Good job, Wes. Thanks. Thanks.

You're good at research and animals. Thanks. Hey, Jeff, say chupacabra. Whoa, chupacabra. I think you got it. Was that right? Yeah, you got it. Chupacabra.

Good. All right. Thanks everyone for listening. As we teased, we got a Patreon out there. So if you guys want to listen to our Patreon. episodes, just go ahead and sign up. It's pretty much, you get all these extra episodes for the price of a sandwich. I mean, you're paying about what you'd pay for a sandwich a month and you get all these extra episodes. So it's a pretty good deal. Sandwich is a pretty good too, though. Yeah,

but I mean, just cut one sandwich out of your monthly diet and eat a bowl of cereal or something instead. And you can subscribe to our Patreon. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks again, and we will talk to you soon. Thanks guys. Thank you. Bye. Yes! So, looks like we reached the end of another episode of Tooth and Claw together. Can't believe we did it again. We hope you all liked this one. We had a lot of fun, as you could probably tell.

A lot of laughing, hopefully it wasn't too annoying. Also, we had something happened that we, I don't think has ever happened before. Wes kind of came in, cut his own track, and went solo there for about three minutes talking about what you should do in the event of a B-attack. Hopefully you guys like that too. Well, actually, hopefully you guys didn't like it too much because Jeff and I would feel a little bad if really all it took to make you guys happy was Wes alone. But, you know, we totally get it if that's how you feel. I could listen to Wes's sultry dulcet tones anytime, anywhere.

All right, we're getting weird. Let's get on to thanking each of the new patrons by name. This is a shout out to everyone that's joined us as a new subscriber over on our Patreon account. Hopefully you're all enjoying all the bonus content and all the perks. that go along with that. I've been seeing a lot of you get, uh, get those stickers that we sent out for free, not just the Patreon stickers, but we did a little bit of a giveaway for everyone subscribed over there. Looks like some of you guys have been inventive with where you're putting them. That makes us happy to see. But let's get to it. Without any further ado, thank you so much to all of these

new subscribers. First, we have Effie. We have Ivan. Laura, Amanda, Alyssa, Anderson, Gilberto, spelled G-I-L-B-E-R-T-O-E. Since confirmed, that's not actually how he spells his name, Gilberto. We have John, Samantha, Mac, Tabitha, Sheena, Mo, Tony, Bryn, Meredith, Larissa, Jamie, Charlie, J-L-Gas, Nicholas, Dwayne, Zachary, Carmela. Carmela? Oh, I don't know where to put the emphasis on that one. Great name, regardless, we love it. We have Jiminy Frickett.

longtime contributor to the show, at least as far as Instagram comments go. Thanks, Jiminy. We have Jackie Ray, Ashlyn, Kate, Charlie, Cherokee, Brittany, Katie, Morgan, Alyssa, Rosie, Francesca, Vanessa, Rachel, Evelyn, Julie, Sydney, Roberta, Christina, Kate, Sarah, Carlos, Matthias. Or Matthewis, I'm going with Matthias. Noelani, Vanessa, Ori, Matt, Jeffrey, Hena, Ramiro, MJ, Jungle's Fury, Anna, Krista, Ella, Amy, Beth, and Shannon. Thank you so much again. We really appreciate it, and we've loved getting to know you guys

as you send us questions and comments through the DMs over on Patreon. You're the best, and we'll catch you in the next one. Bye!