The Poppies of Terra #79 - The Bee's Knees

Back in 1983 Isaac Asimov wrote: “Science popularization today is essential, far more so than at any time [...] it is now life and death for the world.” The same continues to be true today, and as the stunning new, two-part National Geographic documentary Secrets of the Bees illustrates, it may be a matter of life and death specifically for bees.

Hosted by the personable and knowledgeable Bertie Gregory, executive produced by James Cameron, and warmly scored by composer David Mitcham, this series, which involved filming a single hive with custom equipment over three years, captures bee activities never before documented on film. These include, among others, the first shot of a vulture bee nest and the first footage of honeybees defending against a Varroa mite invasion. 

The two episodes provide a truly immersive and cinematic experience while consistently presenting astounding facts about the complexity and diversity of bees. While the brunt of it focuses on the “superorganism” comprised of honeybees—merely one of over 20,000 bee species—famous for its queen-plus-workers hierarchy, here are other bees that make an appearance: 

• Red-tailed mason bee: A solitary bee that has unique talents, such as searching for empty snail shells to use as nests. Because of its habit of camouflaging its nest with hundreds of sticks, it is nicknamed the broomstick bee. This is just one of several examples, incredibly, of tool usage.

• Asian honeybee: A species found in the mountain forests of Japan that has developed specific collective defenses, such as coordinating their movements to create a shimmering effect across the hive that looks like a stadium wave, and vibrating their wings to generate extreme heat to “fry” invading giant hornets. Yes, you read that correctly. Bees can roast a giant hornet to death by swarming it in a dense ball and vibrating their wing muscles to raise the internal temperature to 115°F—a temperature lethal for the hornet but safe for the bees.

• Buff-tailed bumblebee: Noted for its problem-solving skills and its ability to act like a "jackhammer," vibrating 400 times per second to blast pollen loose from tubular flowers.

• Firebees: A species found in the Amazon jungle that “farms” sap-sucking treehoppers for their sugary honeydew when flowers are scarce. Bees as farmers!

• Vulture bees: These jungle bees are the “ultimate clean-up crew,” feeding on meat from carcasses and, as though by alchemy, turning that digested meat into honey.

• Amegilla dawsoni: One of the largest bees on the planet, found in the Australian desert. They spend a year alone underground before emerging for an intense, competitive mating period.

• Common carder or Carding bees: A wild bee species where the males are highly territorial and aggressive, often driving other bees, including domesticated honeybees, away from their chosen flowerbeds. The sequences showing these defensive strikes are dramatic to say the least.

• Melipona: A genus of stingless bees found in Central America and the Mexican jungle. They’re essential pollinators that produce highly valued medicinal honey and are traditionally raised by Mayan communities.

• Megachile: A type of solitary bee found in pollinator habitats in Oregon.

In terms of its technical achievements, the series’ macro cinematography is truly remarkable. Cutting-edge technology allows the filmmakers to follow individual bees in flight for the first time. Time lapse photography is used to great visual and dramatic impact during key sequences as we count down the days towards winter. For the more technically inclined, this piece contains great additional detail.

Bees are indispensable for the production of the world’s food, and the documentary eloquently showcases their vital, complex role in the natural world, along with their extraordinary intelligence.

The first episode, “The Hive,” follows the life of a honeybee named Worker Bee 1 as she advances through essential colony roles, from nursing larvae and building honeycombs to guarding the hive and foraging, while also introducing some of the other aforementioned species.

Here are ten memorable facts from episode one:

1. Bees are responsible for pollinating one-third of the food humans eat.

2. A bee's body is covered in thousands of tiny feathered hairs that help collect pollen, and these hairs are even found on their eyes.

3. A queen bee's sole job is to lay eggs, and she can produce up to 2,000 eggs in a single day. 

4. Bee larvae grow at an insane rate, becoming 1,000 times larger than their initial size in just one week. 

5. Bees are the only animals in the world known to use wax as a primary building material. The hexagonal shape of a bee cell is an engineering marvel that uses the minimum amount of wax while providing maximum strength and space.

6. Honeybees use a unique scent as an “all-access passcode” to identify members of their hive; any intruder that smells different is immediately identified as a threat. 

7. In another gob-smacking example of tool use, bees collect fragrant leaves and smear them around the hive entrance to mask the chemical scent marks left by hornet scouts. 

8. Bees can solve two-step puzzles. In lab experiments, they’ve learned to pull a blue tab to move a red disc, then push the disc to reach a sugar reward. Other bees can then learn by watching the “pioneers” who first master a complex task, so that knowledge is transmitted through a colony through mere observation, in a mode analogous to culture.

9. Bees use the sun as a compass to find their way. They can even calculate and adjust for the sun’s movement through the sky to ensure they never get lost.

10. When caught in a storm, bees huddle together for warmth and “rotate their positions” so that those on the outside eventually move to the inside, ensuring the whole colony survives the elements.

In the second episode, “The Pollinators,” we follow the race to rebuild the hive before winter as the impoverished, queenless colony left behind after the swarm must raise a new queen and frantically store the massive amount of honey required for survival. Compelling side-trips take us along on the massive yearly bee migration to California for the almond bloom, and through the fight against the deadly Varroa destructor parasite.

Ten more astonishing facts, taken from this second episode:

1. When a colony splits, the most experienced workers, called “beaters” or scouts, are responsible for finding a new home. These scout bees will search for a new nesting site within the distance a queen can travel, which is typically about 3 km or 1.8 miles. Scaling that distance proportionally by the average length of a bee’s body to our scale, that would be the equivalent of a human scout covering approximately 135 miles in one day.

2. To communicate the location and quality of a potential home, scouts perform a shaking dance or waggle, which is considered the most advanced communication system of any insect. Even more impressively, bees then use a “democratic” process to choose a home: after a scout reports a site, other scouts investigate it independently, return and “vote” on its suitability by fanning their wings if they agree that it’s a good location! 

3. Every year, 30 billion bees are trucked to California in one of the largest animal displacements on the planet to pollinate almond trees. During this activity, one bee can visit approximately 5,000 flowers in a single day.

4.  More than 100 million almond trees bloom simultaneously in California's Central Valley. California’s almond industry, which accounts for more than three-quarters of the world’s supply, is a $20 billion business that relies heavily on these honey bees. 

5. A newly hatched queen bee actually whistles to signal her rule, causing the entire colony to freeze in recognition of her authority. Aspiring queens still inside their cells will then “squawk” back at the hatched queen to remind her that she has potential rivals for the throne! (Sadly, if she succeeds, they die).

6. Male bees (drones) have eyes twice the size of their sisters, giving them a full view of the sky so they can better spot flying queens.

7. Unlike most bee species that have only one partner, a honeybee queen will mate with approximately 20 different drones.

8. Melipona bees process their nectar into honey by blowing it into bubbles to evaporate the water.

9. A hive must manufacture and store approximately 18 kg (40 lbs) of honey to have enough energy to survive through the winter months.

10. Once the mating season ends, male drones are no longer useful to the hive and are forcibly expelled—dead or alive—by their sisters.

In the ancient world, Aristotle intuited that there was something unusual about bees, writing that “bees have something divine about them because of how they reproduce.” Marcus Aurelius found them useful for his philosophical rumination that “what is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.”

Bertie Gregory and the expert crew supporting him have produced a truly dazzling highlights-reel of bee science and wonder, proving bee-yond a doubt that what’s not good for the bees cannot possibly be good for us.