Rescue Rebels
From hermit crabs, to horses, Rescue Rebels covers the good, bad and the ugly of the modern age animal rescue craze. Is it a lifestyle, hobby, a scam or something entirely different? We're here to flip your ideals upside down and break into a whole new idea. Rescue is Rebellion.
Rescue Rebels
021 | Happy Bee-Day Abbi
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Hey Rebels! This episode was supposed to drop on July 19th in honor of Abbi's Bee-Day. However, I (Elle) suck and was unable to properly post it. It saved as a draft then life escaped me and well.... Here we are. Bee-ter late than never, I guess.
Please enjoy this passionate trip through everything bees and please share. Wish Abbi a very bee-lated birthday in the comments and we will see you at the end of August with another episode!
Here's our news article.
Thousands of sheep and goats die after ship sinks in Oman
And remember- Bee-Kind!
Special Thanks to Nick Panek for music sourced through Pixabay.Com
This episode is intended to be for educational purposes and personal opinions only. The content herein does not reflect on organizations mentioned within the episode.
Hey Rebels, it's Al and it's Abby, and welcome to Rescue Rebels Podcast. You should just see me. I just did like a cheesy piece of it. Yeah, she thinks we need to film it, but I'm also like, oh my gosh, I do not want to see all 17 of my chins.
SPEAKER_02I've I've been working on mine. I've been doing exercises.
SPEAKER_01Oh, look at her.
SPEAKER_02See?
SPEAKER_01Camera. So we just filmed an episode to update you guys on what's been going on. You are not going to officially hear this episode until July, but that's okay. You guys will get that little update and you'll know what's going on. You'll know that we are both extremely mentally ill and struggle busing through life right now, but that's okay. We're just going to jump into the episode because Abby is bringing us a fantastic one today, all about bees.
SPEAKER_02Bees. Buzzing bees.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, which is actually good because you're going to encounter them a lot this summer. And we want to just encourage you guys to be kind to our pollinators.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and just it's a good episode on facts and stuff about bees, things that you might not know about or understand.
SPEAKER_01Because bees are animals. And that's something that a lot of people, when I talk to them about veganism, about the concept of like anti-speciesism, right? Is people are always like, bugs aren't animals. They're part of the animal kingdom, bruh. Yeah. They're animals. And they deserve just as much compassion as we do. And when you actually look at the inner workings of bees and the way that they live their lives, like you can't say their own.
SPEAKER_02Just wait. Yeah. I when I was doing my chat GPTing it up for this, I was like, dang.
SPEAKER_01You're going to need to either get closer or speak up a little bit more. All right. So first we've got some animal news and trigger warning. We're going to talk about animal death with this animal news. So even though the episode is probably going to be not super dark and doomsday-ish, this news sucks. So just trigger warning now. Got some bad news coming from worldanimalprotection.org. Thousands of sheep and goats die after a ship sinks. All right. So we've heard about live export of the meat trade, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right. So we were hurt, we were hearing when we had a Spiridon disaster. So around 4,000 sheep and goats have died after a live export ship caught fire and sank off the coast of Oman. The animals were trapped on board and unable to escape.
SPEAKER_02Oh wow.
SPEAKER_01So here we are. We're right back to the beginning where we need to stop exporting animals because this is heinous. It's absolutely unheard of. And it's so depressing to think that. You know, I I always say there's like multiple horrible ways to die, right? But we always think about like fire, like burning to death and drowning. That happened to both of them. Like both of those things happened to these animals. The ship caught fire. Depths depths of water freak me out. And then they drown.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So they were like, okay, we're just gonna throw both of those at you. Just the anguish, I can't even I can't even begin to think about it. So the vessel was called the MSV Haji Ali, with traveling from Berbera to Somalia. And that fire broke out, and luckily all 14 crew members were rescued.
SPEAKER_02Well, you gotta think of two, like the environmental factors on that in the water and everything else.
SPEAKER_01But just wait until this one. Oh the animals on board were left behind, trapped on a deck.
SPEAKER_02Whoa.
SPEAKER_01And they drowned. So with no way to escape. They just panicked until they died. Gotta love that. So yeah, that's you know, if you're eating meat, live export, man. Thanks for your patronage, I guess. That was sarcasm in case you didn't hear it.
SPEAKER_00Alright. So with that, I'm gonna segue into something a little happier.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Bees, bees. Bees. So we're gonna talk about tiny flying pollinating chaos goblins.
SPEAKER_00I love that.
SPEAKER_02That somehow keep our entire ecosystem alive. And humanity looked at them and said, Yeah, let's poison the flowers and steal their food. Classic human behavior.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02But seriously, bees are not tiny honey machines. They are workers, communicators, architects, caretakers, pollinators, and honestly, probably more organized than most governments.
SPEAKER_01I know they're definitely more organized than me.
SPEAKER_02Me too. So tonight, these are the topics we're gonna be diving into be species, weird defects, the truth about honey, myths versus truths, and why bees are dying, and what we can actually do to help them. So settle in and welcome to the hive.
SPEAKER_01Ooh. Maybe that's what we should call a Patreon.
SPEAKER_02That'd be so hive.
SPEAKER_01That would be something the rescue rebels alive.
SPEAKER_02So there are over 20,000 species of bees in the world. 20,000. Meaning, if you think all bees are just fuzzy yellow honeymakers, that's kind of like looking at every dog breed, saying, Yep, that's a golden retriever. Some bees are metallic green, bright, blue, tiny, huge, fluffy, solitary, and ground nesting.
SPEAKER_01I love me some solitary. The big, the big wood, boring bumblebees. Those are my they're my jam. I love them.
SPEAKER_02Some even sleep inside flowers, which honestly sounds peaceful. Meanwhile, humans are stress eating in parking lots. Been there. I feel so cold out. So human beings really watched a tiny insect insect work its entire life, turn flower nectar into survival food, and collectively said, hmm, toast popping. Like this sounds like toast popping click. Yeah. I was thinking when I was reading this over and over, and I was like, I'm totally gonna bring my toast. And then like click it and then push the button to make it pop up. But I was like, that's doing too much.
SPEAKER_01I don't know that it would even like pick it up.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's so funny. Mmm, toast. Bee vomit.
SPEAKER_02Toast. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Bees are way smarter than people realize. They can recognize patterns, remember locations, communicate through dance, and even recognize human faces. Imagine being remembered by an insect. That's so humbling. I love bees. Bee colonies also work together like one living organism. There's nurse bees, guard bees, undertaker bees, which sounds like so metal. Forager.
SPEAKER_00The undertaker.
SPEAKER_01Undertaker. The hive. The hive under the undertaker of the hive. That's like a band name.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00The hive's undertaker.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So there's foragers, and everybody has a role. Meanwhile, humanity still can't figure out how to merge in traffic.
SPEAKER_01So I love this episode. It's just gonna slam human human race.
SPEAKER_02For real, because this is like literally all about. So here's myths and truths. So a myth is bees are aggressive. The truth is most bees want nothing to do with you. Most are defensive, not aggressive, as in well, many most animals. Yeah, correct. And many solitary bees barely sting at all. Honestly, you are probably more dramatic than the bee. And I have a crazy bee story, real quick. We've been getting like the yellow jackets on our back porch. They're fine. They don't I come in and David has it in his hand. And he's like like holding it in his hand. And I'm like, Do you gotta be? I'm like thinking, oh my gosh, it's gonna sting them because those are the ones that sting you. It didn't sting them or nothing. I said, Open up your hand, let it go. And he just let it fly away. I was like looking at his hand, nothing.
SPEAKER_01He probably was like, Oh shit, it's dark now.
SPEAKER_02But that just shows you like it didn't feel threatened. Yeah, like he wasn't being like, Yep.
SPEAKER_01I love when I go to like pumpkin patches in like late September and the wasps are trying to get their last seed in, you know what I mean? Before they die for the winter. Yeah, they're and so they're like everybody's apples, yeah. And I love to watch them. I think it's so cute. And like the way their their abdomens like bob and vibrate when they're like, Oh god, I think they're so cute. I actually have a picture to show you before we leave today. It's a bubble bee on my spinach. Okay, keep going.
SPEAKER_02So the myth is all bees make honey. The truth is most bees, bee species never produce honey. Honey bees are just the species human industrialized.
SPEAKER_01Yes. You get to talk, do you talk about how they're even native? It doesn't the European honey bee is not even native to America.
SPEAKER_02Okay, we'll see. I don't I can't remember.
SPEAKER_01She's like, well, you know, okay, we'll figure it out. Okay.
SPEAKER_02Figure it out. We can do a deeper dive on.
SPEAKER_01Spoiler alert.
SPEAKER_02So the myth is bees are just bugs. The truth is, bees help pollinate roughly one-third of the food humans eat. No bees means fewer fruit, fewer fruits, fewer vegetables, damaged ecosystems, and humanity surviving emotionally on plain rice slash. Hold on. She's gonna go back and read this without laughing. Okay. So and damaged ecosystems and humanity surviving emotionally on plain white rice in despair.
SPEAKER_01I mean, that's just me.
SPEAKER_02I love, I'll just eat rice.
SPEAKER_01Dude, you gotta have a little bit of soy sauce, but we're gonna wouldn't they even pollinate rice plants?
SPEAKER_02I don't know. I don't think rice going.
SPEAKER_01I'm looking it up.
SPEAKER_02I don't think rice flowers. Okay. So the truth about honey. This part may might make people uncomfortable. Honey is not extra food. Honey is survival food. It's winter storage, emergency rations, life support for the hive. To make honey, bees need to collect nectar, store it internally, break it down with enzymes, dry it out, seal it into wax combs. A single worker bee may only produce around 112, which is a teaspoon of honey, in her entire life. Think about that. An entire lifetime for one tiny amount.
SPEAKER_01Update.
SPEAKER_02What is that?
SPEAKER_01Yes, rice plants do pollinate.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01But unlike many plants, they do not rely on bees or other insects.
SPEAKER_02Interesting.
SPEAKER_01Well, good job, AI.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Which AI is also poisoning the world, but hey, you know what?
SPEAKER_02Hey, I know. You know, we needed a quick one. Yep. And it helps. You gotta fucking choose your battles. Yep, pick and choose your battles. Commercial bee farming can involve stress from transportation, replacing honey with sugar syrup, overworking colonies, clipping queen wings. And look, not every beekeeper is cruel. Some genuine genuinely care deeply for bees, but industrial systems they often treat living beings like production units. That's the issue.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, I actually have a family member that has uh an apiary, and I'm definitely not gonna like you know smack this individual for keeping bees, but the thing that I notice is there's a lot of this is the only way to do it. It's very much like farming. So even though this individual cares very much for their bees, they do a great job of beekeeping, they try their best to do what's best by the bees, it's still a very methodized farming practice. There's not a lot of like natural, I don't know, stewardship of the bees. Like it's all same boxes, the same, it's all very farming-based. Like st it is farming.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I don't think it's something that I would see myself doing ever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Just because I just want to leave them to be where they're naturally supposed to be.
SPEAKER_01Which is not in America.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Honey bees are not supposed to be in America. They are not a native species.
SPEAKER_02Oh, interesting. Humanity really said, thank you for pollinating the planet. Now hand over the honey. So why bees are dying? Bee populations are declining because pesticides, habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, monocrop farming, crop, monocrop farming.
SPEAKER_01Monocrop, yep.
SPEAKER_02We destroy wildflowers, spray chemicals everywhere, obsess over perfect lawns, and then ask, where did the pollinators go? Brother, you demolished their kitchen. So what can you do? This is where we can stop doom spiraling, which we do often.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. That's all this podcast is, is just constant doom spiral.
SPEAKER_02You can help bees. Even small actions matter. You can plant different types of flowers: lavender, bee balm, thyme, sunflowers, clover, milkweed, and any kind of native wildflower. And it might be different for the specific area you live in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I mean, it could be as simple as like, even if you're you say you live in a housing development and they mandate that you like mow your lawn so you can't grow the clover up because you know, monocultured lawns is a thing.
SPEAKER_02Oh wow.
SPEAKER_01You know, trying to find a way to maybe put some container planters in your backyard behind your privacy fence full of some bee balm. You know what I mean? To try to do your part. I grew up an entire acre of pasture for four months straight and let it go completely wild. You know, when there were a lot of bees. The clover smelled amazing.
SPEAKER_02It was great. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I loved it.
SPEAKER_02And big bold letters. Stop using pesticides.
SPEAKER_01That's true.
SPEAKER_02Everything. Just not for animals and bees and insects for us too. For our health as well.
SPEAKER_01Roundup is just causing so many soft tissue cancers, it's unreal. Wild. It's everywhere.
SPEAKER_02So tiny insects should not need hazmat training to visit flowers. Drop the mic.
SPEAKER_01That's funny. Could you imagine bees in little hazmat suits just to cute?
SPEAKER_02And here's other great tips. Leave some mess. Dead stems, leaf piles, wild corners. A perfectly clean yard is basically a desert for pollinators. Meaning that there's nothing for them to do. Put out water. A shallow dish with rocks gives bees a safe place to drink water. Tiny bee hydration station. If people want honey, you can use these great alternatives like maple syrup.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh, maple syrup. Yeah. Dude, I swear I'm I made I made that maple syrup last season. And I can't I this season, was it this year? Oh my god, it was this year. And it I could not stop. It was so in my coffee. I'm like, why am I eating so many pancakes? Why am I eating so much French toast? Like it, it was unreal. Yeah, it was so delicious. And I made it all by myself just by tapping my maple trees.
SPEAKER_02See, tap your own maple trees.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, screw it. Why not? Just do it smart and educate yourself so that you don't over tap your trees and kill them. Educate yourself. We can talk about that sometime.
SPEAKER_02So here is fun facts. Quick bee chaos. Some bees sleep in flowers. Fumble bees vibrate flowers to release pot pollen. Honey never truly spoils. Bees existed before humans, which means bees survived ice ages, extinction events, natural disasters, and then humans arrived with pesticides and parking lots. So the older I get, the more I think compassion is measured by how we treat small creatures. The ignored ones, the inconvenient ones, the ones people think don't matter because creation isn't ours to dominate. It's something we were trusted with.
SPEAKER_03Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02Preach. Humanity was called to steward creation, not destroy it. And somewhere along the way, we confused a dominion with ownership.
SPEAKER_00There's a whole podcast about that. Not podcast, sorry, documentary. There's a whole documentary about that. You should watch it. It's really good.
SPEAKER_02And that includes the forests, the oceans, the animals, and yes, every tiny exhausted bee that's sleeping in flower nearby. How cute.
SPEAKER_01Maybe we're just exhausted bees. We're just working. We're just pretending our young, we're working too much. We're sometimes dancing and vomiting.
SPEAKER_02I'll pass on the vomit. We're all just trying to survive in a world. In a world humans keep making harder. Oh, we're all just trying. Yeah, we are. Humans are making the world harder for them. They're the bees are trying to survive in a world. To survive in a world humans keep making harder for them. Maybe protecting creation is holy work. Maybe planting flowers matter. Maybe mercy matters. Maybe compassion is small and everyday choices matter matters more than we realize. So thank you for hanging out in the hive tonight. If this episode meant something to you, plant something for the pollinators. Stop using pesticides. Share this episode. Teach somebody something new, or maybe just let the dandelions live this year. Stay loud, stay compassionate, and remember the world survives because of those tiny creatures. Keep showing up every day doing invisible work. Oh, you see. We'll see you on the next episode.
SPEAKER_01So the European honeybee, which is actually one of the most popular species of honeybee. Is considered invasive to America. And the reason that they are considered invasive is because of resource competition. So the European honey bee has tens of thousands of bees per colony. Because of that, they forage much more efficiently than some of our native pollinators. And a lot of people don't realize that the carpenter bees are native pollinators. They do pollinate. They don't understand that wasps and yellow jackets are pollinators. They don't know that either. Brown bees are pollinators. So you have all of these pollinators that are more solitary or live in smaller groups who are being outcompeted by these giant swarms of the European honey bee. So when they're coming in, wiping out all of the resources, that's leading to lower population numbers of our actual native species. Because of that, they're also disrupting the pollination of native plants because they're getting these highly specialized relationships, which are generally kind of getting in there and messing up the food web. So you have certain animals that rely on others, and when you add in another animal to that web, it kind of screws up the whole system, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. It's like that in other places too.
SPEAKER_01So the other issue is species. By pollinating invasive plant species that our native insects ignore because they know that that's not a food source for them, they are inadvertently helping invasive plants spread. Yeah, so the save the bees thing really tends to focus on those honey bees, which are not native.
SPEAKER_02And they're not the they're not the ones that are going extinct. It's the native bees that are.
SPEAKER_01Correct. Correct. So when we look at the save the bees, we want to really think more about native bee species, like bumblebees, mason bees, leaf cutter, leafcutter bees, um, who are the most threatened. They're significantly more effective and efficient at pollinating local flora than the European honey bees. So it's kind of crazy when you think about it. You know, that's like saying, okay, we're gonna move in an alien planet, and they're so much better everything than we are. All that happens to us, we just get pushed out because we can't compete with their, you know, I know massive amount of population or whatever that they're bringing to our and I'm I'm talking about outer space aliens, so don't comment me. I'm not using people against people here. I'm using, you know, an alien species from Mars. Okay.
SPEAKER_02Martians.
SPEAKER_01But it's the same with us. Like if we went to if we went to Mars and there were Martians on Mars, we would be doing the same thing. We would be the European honeybees. Probably not, though, because we'd probably all die. Our fragile, fleshy selves. Thank you guys so much for listening. It was a lot of fun. That was a really cool episode, and I think it was really on brand for you. So that was fun. We hope that you guys keep listening. We hope that you share this episode. We hope that you leave a comment. We hope that you email us with an episode idea. That would be great. Because we're always looking at what we should do next. We hope that you, if you want a sticker, leave us a rating and email us your address. And go back and listen to our last update. Comment be labeled update. And hear what we have in store for you guys next season. So until then. Well, thank you guys so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And remember that rescue is rebound.
SPEAKER_00The bees. Yeah. The native bees.
SPEAKER_02Hold on. I wanted to see if I could say a couple of the titles that were kind of funny.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Let's hear the titles. Sorry, my sinuses are going crazy.
SPEAKER_02I don't know if I'm gonna be able to find I think I actually have it.
SPEAKER_01Hold on.
SPEAKER_02And your phone. Because I sent that. Isn't the pictures that you sent me?
SPEAKER_01We could do a tier on Patreon that could be like That's cool.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01So we have Are you ready?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Episode title Ideas. Holy hive gospel according to bees. Honey, blood, and pollination. The tiny martyrs of the garden.
SPEAKER_02I like that.
SPEAKER_01But it's kind of depressing still. No gods, no masters except bees. Hive mind apocalypse. The world ends quietly without bees. The ocalypse now. Sting of creation. Does kill humanity. The bees we portra betrayed. Portrayed. The bees we betrayed. That's funny. And then the demon monkey eyes.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Sends me a picture of a monkey.
SPEAKER_02With black, his whole eyes are black. Yeah. And I'm just like, oh, he's cute. And then inside my head, I'm like, he's