Get Buzzed

Imagine a world where every action is for the benefit of the whole. That's the reality for the honey bee. In this episode, we delve into the selfless existence of these remarkable creatures, examining how their intricate social behaviors prioritize the colony's survival above all else. From foraging to defending the hive, every bee plays a part, asking nothing in return but the continued flourishing of their shared home. Discover how the honey bee's unwavering commitment to the collective can inspire us to rethink our own approach to service and selflessness.

Sources:

https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/bcnews/science-tech-and-health/earth-environment-and-sustainability/pandemic-quiets-the-earth.html 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/25148486231221017 

https://www.perfectbee.com/newbee-questions-expert-answers/how-drone-bees-benefit-the-colony

https://blythewoodbeecompany.com/blogs/news/the-life-of-a-drone-bee?srsltid=AfmBOor9Uhdw1DlDC4K4NJmNpoWdcNWkwB0IT3vOzmjiNEPJ3ieLQCcI  

https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/general-information/initiatives-and-highlighted-programs/peoples-garden/importance-pollinators 

https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/how-many-flowers-can-a-bee-pollinate 

https://www.nrdc.org/bio/daniel-raichel/no-bees-are-not-okay 

Music by Soulful Jam Tracks

Transcript

Todd Pabst: 0:01

Welcome to Animal School. Grab your pack and gather around. Big cities have their own energy, a restlessness, a hum, their own special buzz. Thousands upon thousands of individuals moving, working, and communicating. Zoom in and you can see the individual going about their day, following their to-do list, coming and going. Zoom out even modestly and that individual is lost in the crowd. morphing into a collective, a commune, a society, a culture. Rarely do we hear pure silence. Noise is the sound of life. The buzz is proof that life is happening. The height of COVID changed the way we live, the way we worked, moved, and communicated. It changed the noise we made as a species. Scientists called the term anthropos, a sort of global quieting of the seismic noise that humans collectively produce. Movement, manufacturing, transportation, it all stopped. The anthropos moved like a wave, starting in China and traveling to Europe and then to the rest of the world, a measurable global effect that showed in stark terms just how much our daily existence was changed by social distancing, remote work, and widespread lockdowns. The measurement of seismic activity historically has been used for recording the strength of earthquakes. During COVID, the same type of measurement wasn't used to quantify major seismic disturbances, but to quantify the lack of seismic activity by humans. The effects were widespread. The drop in emissions from traffic and production improved air and water quality globally. Animal life was quick to reclaim lost habitats. Songbirds moved into urban areas. The romance was unmistakable. It felt like nature was healing. The world was moving closer to a pre-human state. And humans seemed to find a new love for the outdoors at the same time. Attendance at state and national parks surged. We were told that it wasn't safe to go work in our downtown office, but you could go fly fishing or trail running. You couldn't go to the gym, but you could go for a hike in the hills. For those able to move into remote work, breaking the cycle of commute, work, commute, sleep, had an impact. People noticed. People loved it. They knew what was and they saw what could be. Time Outside of the Grind had people examining how they spent their time and what they prioritized. It showed what they had been missing all this time. They questioned their time as a cog in the machine of capitalism and consumerism. If a person is happier not being a part of something bigger, what does that say about the bigger thing? Honeybees have been on Earth for about 120 million years. Homo genus, which includes modern humans, have only been around for about 2.8 million years. The hive was here long before we ever were, and they've been working the entire time. Everyone in the hive has a role. A honeybee colony has three basic types of bees, queen bees, drones, and workers. The workers have several subsets. Each role is important, but the life expectancy and life experience of each differs dramatically. Worker bees make up around 85% of the colony. They're a jack of all trades, female and infertile. During early life, workers will serve as nurse bees. caring for the larva, feeding the young, cleaning their cells. During midlife, the nurse bees become house bees and shift their focus from caring for the young to caring for the hive. Building comb, cleaning, maintaining essential temperature and humidity. Later in life, these workers shift careers again and focus on foraging, traveling long distances to collect nectar, water, pollen, and propolis for the hive. Workers can also serve as guard bees, attendant bees, and mortuary bees. Guard bees work security, guarding their hive from intruders and inspecting bees that are returning to the hive before granting them access. Mortuary bees remove the sick and the dead. Attendant bees focus solely on the health and wellbeing of the queen, feeding her on demand and keeping her clean as she lays eggs. They all are essential. In a healthy colony, drones make up about 15% of the population and their experience is very different than the other 85. They are always male. They have no stinger, and they don't participate in hive maintenance or foraging. Their role is singular. They exist to mate with the queen. Drones have the unique ability to enter pretty much any hive that they come upon. This is a privilege that workers and the queen do not enjoy. It's almost too easy to joke about the drones. The unemployed, couch-surfing males that don't work on the home, don't provide food, and don't help to raise the young. But their role is vital, and their existence is a sad one. They're essential because they provide the only real source for genetic diversity, which is vitally important for the health of the colony. For a queen to breed properly, she needs 12 to 15 drones to mate with her. Mating happens in flight where the virgin queen meets with the drone in midair, attracted to her pheromone release. Chemical control through and through. This process happens multiple times during the virgin flight, and the sperm from all those males is stored by the queen where she uses it to fertilize the next generations. She only makes this flight once. Only fertilized eggs will be female. Once the drone's job is done, he doesn't get to stick around. There's no other job for him to do. After mating, his endophallus is ripped out mid-flight and he dies shortly after. When his work is done, he's done as well. He doesn't experience the career arc of the workers who can be caretaker, homemaker, forager, or protector. He never sees home again. He never knows how he contributed to the health of a diverse and vibrantly buzzing hive. When times are hard and food is scarce, young drones are used as food. The drone's life cycle is the shortest. Their ending is always violent. The typical drone will live about 55 days. Workers can live up to four to six months, but it depends heavily on seasonality. Winter means more time in the hive and an easier life overall. Summer workers have significantly shorter lives. The queen outlives them all. The queen enjoys a life that is generally two to three years and can extend all the way to five years. This is due largely to their secure place within the hive where she's protected and cared for as long as she's producing. After her mating flight, she spends the rest of her life deep in the hive laying eggs. Numbers matter. The expectations on her never drop. Slowing egg production is noticed by the hive through a decline in pheromone production and plans are laid to create her successor. Queen bees are produced by feeding a young larva, royal jelly, which creates a female bee that's larger in size and capable of reproduction. A noticed drop in pheromone levels and egg production triggers this replacement process among the workers, and the creation of a new, more fertile queen is officially underway. This process is called supersedure. What happens to the old queen when the new queen arrives and starts to come of age? A sort of mutiny occurs. As the new queen is established, the sitting queen also meets a violent end, typically killed by either the workers or the new queen, all of which are her offspring. It's a game of thrones. A weakening queen isn't the only behavior that will rally a hive into action. Climate is carefully controlled within the hive, and it's the workers that do the heavy lifting here as well. When it's too hot or too humid, they'll collectively fan their wings to circulate air and evaporate water to cool things down. When it's too cool, they'll collectively shiver their flight muscles. The friction warms their environment. This heating and cooling is known as social thermoregulation, and while the queen doesn't participate, she does dictate. It's her preference that the rest of the hive follows. This microregulation is especially important in the brood nest, where eggs and larvae develop. A hive that grows too large overcrowded to be effectively managed is another instance that creates a strong collective reaction called swarming. Swarming is caused when the queen is so successful with her egg laying that the hive grows large enough that it needs to effectively split in two. This happens in bee colonies when there's extreme heat or overcrowding or insufficient space for honey storage. The queen initiates a swarm by leaving her nest with a gang of workers in a sort of cloud. They will eventually settle in a cluster temporarily, often on a branch or structure, while the scouts look for a suitable home. When the new home is found, the old queen moves in with her crew of workers. In the old location, the creation of a new queen begins with the introduction of the exclusive royal jelly diet. All bee larvae get a little bit of royal jelly as they grow, gaining benefit from the enhanced nutrition and antibacterial and antifungal properties. Only the queen gets this diet exclusively, and that's where this special food serves as an epigenetic trigger. Royal jelly is responsible for dramatically influencing gene expression, creating a queen out of a would-be worker. Honeybees are some of the best dancers in the animal kingdom. They call it the waggle dance, a sophisticated form of communication that is only found with honeybees. This dance is the primary mode for communicating the quality, distance, and location of nearby food sources. The intricate dance involves a figure eight pattern and a waggle run that involves the vigorous shaking of the bee's abdomen. The duration of the waggle run corresponds with the distance of the food source. The vigor and intensity of the waggle run communicates the quality of the food. The angle of the waggle run relative to the vertical comb of the hive indicates the direction of the food source in relation to the sun. The more enthusiasm in the waggle, the better the food source is. All of these nuances culminate in the recruitment of others to follow the dancer using their antenna and the sounds created during the dance to take in all the information and locate the food. This precise communication lets workers combine their efforts and focus on better sources that are closer in proximity. It's how honeybees optimize their foraging ability. In their foraging, honeybees help to feed countless species. 75% of the world's flowering crops and 35% of the world's food crops depend on pollinators to reproduce. About one out of every three bites of our food is a result of honeybee pollination. With each flower that a bee lands on, it leaves some pollen from the flowers before and takes new pollen to those it has yet to visit. It's an elegant process that is absolutely crucial for food production, biodiversity, and vibrant ecosystems. The foragers work relentlessly. A worker bee is a perfectly optimized machine that will pollinate as many as 5,000 flowers in a single day. A single hive will visit up to 225,000 flowers in a day. In honey production, a colony will collectively travel over 55,000 miles and visit 2 million flowers to produce a single pound of honey. And what about the wax that they make their hive from? The wax that holds the honey, holds their young, and makes their home? The house bees are responsible for this production, and they collectively ingest 6 to 8 pounds of honey to make a single pound of wax. the math for wax production starts to get difficult to wrap your mind around. So what can honeybees teach us? The teamwork is obvious, and teamwork implies selflessness. Being selfless is a journey, one that moves an individual away from their wants and needs towards something greater, something more resilient, something more lasting, an idea, a belief, a value structure, a legacy. Selflessness is a journey of action and accountability, replacing ego with purpose. Individually, we're limited in what we can accomplish, but by uniting behind a shared cause, the collective ability grows exponentially. Crowdsourcing is powerful. A crowd has the ability to organize, to specialize, to seek motivation and inspiration from one another, to hold one another accountable. The life of a honeybee is filled with hard work and a singular purpose. Dedication to the colony. Dedication to the superorganism. An unmotivated drone is removed from the nest by the collective. After removal, they wander alone until they're taken by exposure, starvation, or some other threat. Motivated drones die shortly after their only job is done. Worker bees work themselves to death, especially the foragers, embarking on countless flights until their wings are too tattered and frayed to keep flight or their bodies are too weak to return to the hive. Workers almost always die outside of the hive. They die alone and away from home to avoid becoming a burden. their self removals and altruistic behavior. Comes naturally, accountability through and through. How are honeybees doing today? They're struggling. There are currently about 20,000 bee species on the planet and one in four are at risk for extinction. While there are more bee colonies today than 20 years ago, this is largely due to beekeepers breeding more bees to offset the staggering losses. Not surprisingly, humans are acutely responsible for the vast majority of these losses. The honey badger, as tenacious as they are, comes in at a very distant second place when it comes to hive losses. Neonicotinoids, commonly called neonics, are the world's most widely used pesticide and are among the most destructive pesticides produced since DDT. Just one square foot of grass treated with neonics has enough active ingredient to kill a million bees. Neonics are designed to permeate the entire plant, making the plant toxic from the inside out. They also permeate ecosystems and persistent soil and water. Their levels build up over time. A growing number of studies continue to show the devastating impact that these pesticides have, not just for honeybees, but for wild bees, butterflies, birds, and fish. Neonics were found in 95% of pregnant women that were tested. Climate change, habitat loss, parasites, and nutritional deficiencies round out the list of threats that honeybees are facing. The honeybee is a powerful symbol across cultures. For obvious reasons, they're commonly associated with industry, community, and diligence. Their hive structure symbolizes the lasting impact of teamwork and cooperation, and their tireless work ethic is associated with productivity and prosperity. A perpetual machine. In some cultures, the bee's life cycle is connected to the concept of resurrection, the ongoing cycle of life, death, and rebirth that is at the foundation of the superorganism that is the colony. The life of the queen has been connected to both royalty and to matriarchal leadership. What makes your life hum? Your friends, your family, your work, your interactions? What gives your life life? As imperfect as humans can be, and collectively, we can be a mess, we are a species that is better together. Organizing, collaborating, specializing, creating, innovating, rallying around a purpose. loving, and growing. We need it. We need others in our lives, for friendship, for support, and for community. How much would you miss that buzz of life if it was gone? Imagine that long silence, deafening and complete. As a species, we're overstimulated and disconnected. Our daily experience has become overly digital. Social media promised us friendship and connection, but gave us echo chambers controlled by algorithms. A carbon copy of life that isn't life at all. Edited, filtered, and refiltered to make someone else's experience appear more fun, more exciting, and more attractive than her own. Comparison is the thief of happiness. Social media gives us a trailer for a movie that never existed, chasing engagements and feeding us little hits of dopamine. The dopamine pop leaves as fast as it comes. It leaves us wanting more. It's a different type of chemical control. Humans have been responding to threats and crises for millennia, and for the vast majority of this time, the problems were local ones. A threat to ourselves, to our family, or to our community. These are threats we could organize against. Opportunities to band together with those around us. We could take action. Today, the news media has us growing ever more anxious about markets we don't understand, and conflicts halfway across the world. A front row seat to human suffering in high definition. Fear and war. It's as exhausting as it is addicting. Find a way to contribute to your community. Volunteer. Find a cause you care about and be a part of it. The more local, the better. Meet local people. Do local work. Make an impact that you can actually see. Look in the eyes of the people you're helping. Pay attention to how it makes you feel. I bet you'll get a little buzz. Thank you for listening to Animal School. My name is Todd Pabst and I am not an expert. I'm learning just like you are. Until next time.