Here Is Why Bees Die After Doing This !
Category
đł
AnimalsTranscript
00:00 Bees happen to be very complex creatures with more to them than meets the eye.
00:04 Did you know our phones are causing them to leave their colonies?
00:07 How that works you'll have to see for yourself in just a moment.
00:10 Another great mystery we'll solve today is why bees die after making love,
00:15 which seems kind of counterproductive. And why in the world do they make love
00:20 out in the open while flying as if they don't have a super intricate hive?
00:25 Are they scared? These are just some of the bee mysteries we'll be buzzing about today.
00:30 So without further ado, let's get started.
00:32 Bees are blind without the sun Earlier we mentioned that bees are blind
00:37 without the sun, but how does that work? We don't learn this stuff in school even
00:42 though it's very fun, so we'll do it for you. You know when you're in a car and you see a field
00:47 of flowers pass by? It all seems like a rainbow of colors mushed together because of how fast
00:52 the car moves, right? Well, our beloved bees don't see that.
00:56 They see every single flower clearly. That's because they're used to flying at so much speed,
01:02 and just flying also helps them see depth as well as distance.
01:06 Much like us, bees are also trichromatic, which means they have three photoreceptors that they
01:11 base their color combinations on. We base them on red, blue, and green.
01:16 At the same time, they base it on UV light blue and green.
01:19 They can't even see red. But we can't see their purple,
01:23 which is sort of a mix of yellow and UV light if there's no sun.
01:27 Phaedon can see any color, or anything for that matter.
01:30 It's almost like bees have a literal case of night blindness.
01:33 Zombie Bees Beekeepers know a lot about bees and their
01:39 behavior. But there have been instances where some bees went crazy and turned into zombies.
01:45 And what are those, you might ask? Well, we'll explain.
01:48 A guy named John Hafernick found a hive of bees. And since he was a biologist,
01:53 he didn't want to get them experimented on. He set up some traps at night and found out
01:57 that 80 bees were there. Now think about how many bees you've seen at night. Not one.
02:03 That's because bees are technically blind at night. More on that later.
02:07 But this was not standard bee stuff. Later on, he saw that a parasitic flay had injected its
02:13 eggs into their bodies, which caused them to act all sorts of strange. And before dying,
02:19 it performs a dance of death after being attacked by the apocryphalis insect.
02:24 It goes out into the night looking for artificial light and boom! Falls to the ground right there.
02:31 After being dead, the bees start to wiggle. After wiggling their heart out, maggots burst
02:36 from their body like a scene from the movie Alien. The worst part is that these bees were
02:41 found in many areas all over the west coast and bay area. This is just a survey from the US.
02:47 Think about all the zombies in other countries.
02:50 Bees Learn Colors
02:53 If you were a bee, this is what your life would look like. This is what your life would be like.
02:59 But that begs the question, which flowers do you go to first? Is it all random? Do bees just want
03:05 to choose any flower or do they have favorites? Who even found out that bees can see color?
03:11 All these questions were answered by an experiment done by Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch.
03:16 He taught his bees to eat up nectar from a small dish. Then he placed that dish on some blue paper
03:22 so that the bees could see it. Then he placed the dish on top of different shades of gray paper
03:27 along with a blue one. If bees can't see color, they should just feed on anyone, right? But bees
03:34 went straight to the dish on top of the blue paper. Apparently, bees learn colors and associate them
03:40 with high rewards. In the wilderness, bees don't check if every flower is there. They remember
03:46 which ones had the most nectar and go straight to them. And according to that, the plants get
03:51 cross-pollinated. That goes without saying how complex even the tiniest little creatures are.
03:57 This is also why bees make the world go round.
03:59 Honeybee Dance
04:01 To be a bee, what do you have to be? A good dancer, of course. Bees might buzz a lot,
04:08 but they can't really communicate like that. So they do it by dancing. They have different dances
04:15 to convey different messages. The first one is called the round dance that describes the
04:20 announcement of a food source. Typically, the source is about 25 to 100 meters away from the
04:25 hive or closer. First, the bee distributes some of their newfound nectar to the other bees,
04:30 perhaps to show off a little. And then it goes in circles about three times,
04:35 but rarely more because they get very buzzy. This dance does really give them directions,
04:41 like a GPS. To find the real place, they have to use the odor of the flower.
04:45 Moreover, the scalp bee actually leaves some of its odor from the scent gland so others can find
04:52 it. There's another dance called the waggle dance, which bees do when the food source is
04:56 much farther. It's sort of a gradual transition dance that looks like the number eight. Each
05:02 move is calculated so it's not like they're dancing for fun. They express distance or
05:07 the energy it would take to get there by the number of repetitions of that dance cycle.
05:12 It may dance eight to nine times in just 15 seconds if the food source is 200 meters away,
05:18 four to five if it's a thousand, and just three if it's two thousand. Imagine having to do so
05:24 much math, even when you're a bee! Bee venom is medicine. If you were one of those kids that
05:29 would poke at every insect, then there's a big chance you were stung by a bee, and it probably
05:34 hurt a lot. That's because bee venom has a lot of biologically active compounds, but now things are
05:40 different. This exact string has been found to be a possible cure for many diseases. It's now
05:46 called apitherapy, which it's been around for centuries since ancient Egyptians reported using
05:51 it. In fact, Hippocrates used bee venom to fix his joint pain and arthritis. With an increasing
05:58 interest in natural medicine, the value of bee venom has grown. But what even is inside it?
06:03 Scientists don't know what's inside it, but the few compartments we know of are melatonin,
06:09 adolipin, and apamine. Basically, the concept behind all of this is that the inflammatory
06:14 reaction accuses an anti-inflammatory response by the immune system. Consequently, it helps with
06:20 arthritis and even MS, multiple sclerosis. But the crazy part is that some people get the venom
06:27 right from the stinger. Moreover, bee sting therapists for everyone. Some people have been
06:32 known to suffer from anaphylactic shock after an initial bee sting. Luckily, only a small percentage
06:38 of the population is allergic to it. Whatever you decide to try, just get ready for the worst pain
06:44 of your life. In-flight mating of the bee and why bees die after mating. Unlike humans, bees don't
06:52 really care much for getting a room. When it's time to make love, these creatures will do it out
06:57 in the open, in the air, just like that. In fact, there's even a unique way the queen bee mates with
07:02 a drone, whose whole life revolves around getting it on with the queen bee. They're usually more
07:08 prominent than worker bees and have to always keep up with the queen bee or she'll fly away,
07:14 or worse, start mating with some other drone. When a drone finally gets to mount the bee,
07:19 inserts his endophilus, and ejaculates, there's a little bit of an issue. The endophilus has
07:26 actually ripped away from the drone and stays attached to the fertilized queen.
07:30 When the drone shows up, he simply pulls out the previous endophilus and goes on to do the same.
07:36 The poor old drone bee immediately dies after his endophilus is ripped out because it also
07:42 rips open his abdomen. But that's all the resume requires him to do, so he's too crucial after that
07:48 in the first place. Honey bees fly between 50 and 80 kilometers an hour, yet they can change
07:55 direction quickly. What's the secret to this? In the middle of their M-shaped body, there's a tiny
08:01 brain which tells the next section how to move. Bees can fly up to 50 to 80 kilometers per hour,
08:08 and despite that, they can make perfect turns without any side slips, which happens when
08:12 someone like a bus turns too quickly and you fall over. From a physics point of view,
08:18 bees aren't even supposed to be able to fly, but here they are. When bees make a turn,
08:23 they cleverly reduce their speed so that their centrifugal force is constant. So the sharper
08:28 their turn is, the faster the bee will go. And it's not a learned behavior because when they
08:33 were observed making turns, their dynamics were all the same regardless of their context.
08:38 Moreover, bees always avoid collisions. When two of them approach each other head-on at the same
08:44 altitude, both of the bees turn left to avoid any collision. Sometimes they even say "whoop"
08:49 when they bump into each other. It's a vibrational pulse that they produce. Many scientists thought
08:54 it was just a sign to tell them to stop the other so they don't bump again, but it might
08:59 just be an expression of surprise. They might not be so different from us. Bees collect blood,
09:06 dead meat, dung, sweat, feces, urine, and tears. Honey bees aren't as sweet as you think,
09:13 among the natural honey nectar and sugar talk, we forgot to mention sweat bees,
09:18 which is just a colloquial term for bees with other food sources. These bees don't just collect
09:24 pollen and nectar for food, some of them like to feed on the bodily fluids of the living and
09:29 dead animals. This includes blood, sweat, tears, over meat, feces, and even urine. They're not so
09:36 cute anymore, are they? As you can see, this little sweat bee is trying to snack on a person's
09:42 salt sweat. Sometimes stingless bees have very diverse tastes and collect animal tissues as
09:48 their primary protein source. This brings us to a weird and painful new story from a few years ago
09:54 where four live bees were found in a woman's eye. They were sweat bees, so they were definitely
09:59 looking for tears. Yikes, sorry for the nightmares. Colony Collapse Disorder - How Phones Kill Bees
10:08 One of the most unusual phenomena prevalent in the bee world is CCD, or colony collapse disorder.
10:14 It occurs when most of the worker bees leave the bee colony, leaving behind a queen, all their
10:20 food, but only a few nurse bees to take care of the baby bees. We have no idea why this happens
10:26 and how to stop it. On top of that, our phones are making this worse. It sounds like a bizarre
10:31 concept. How can our phones affect bees in any way? Well, here's the reason. Bees use electromagnetic
10:39 fields to find flowers and have pollen sticking to them. But a massive boom in the tech industry
10:45 leads to more electromagnetic radiation, or EMR. Usually, Earth and every living creature emit EMR
10:52 on a lower level. What scares the researchers is the excess of waves caused by cell phones and
10:57 Wi-Fi signals. Many organizations have confirmed that bees themselves use the electromagnetic field
11:03 to navigate their way. However, there is still evidence that EMR radiation can cause damage in
11:08 honeybees. If you are about to throw your phone away from the bees, just calm down a bit. Let the
11:14 researchers do their work. Then we can whip our iPhones into the trash. For the bees, of course.
11:21 Rare Male and Female Bee For the bee world, getting a job is easy.
11:27 Not because they don't have inflation, but their sex determines what their job will be.
11:31 A giant male bee is just a drone, and all he has to do is make eggs with the queen.
11:37 So when Joseph Sigersnicki opened his beehive and saw two huge yellow eyes staring back at him,
11:43 he knew something was wrong. When he looked closer, he saw that it was also weirdly large
11:49 despite its eyes being a male honeybee drone. Not just that, the rest of its body was clearly
11:54 female. From the abdomen, stinger to the wings, all of it was female. A bee expert weighed in
12:00 on this and confirmed that it was a genetic condition. The condition caused the bee to be
12:05 blind thanks to the off-pigmenting of its eyes. Bees don't have the same biology as humans,
12:11 clearly, so something like this was crazy rare. Humans get their chromosomes from their mom
12:17 and half of them from their dads. But male bees don't come from fertilized eggs and only have
12:22 one set of chromosomes, which belong to the queen. That's how male bees don't have fathers or sons,
12:28 but they do have grandfathers and grandsons. Make sense? If it doesn't, don't worry,
12:34 we don't get it either. Biology's weird. Bees and Dinosaurs Live Together
12:39 Have you ever wondered how long bees have been on Earth? We know that alligators and crocodiles
12:45 are pretty old and haven't changed at all, but how do we know how long bees have existed?
12:50 Thankfully, even insects leave behind fossils. And the oldest fossils of a bee looks more like
12:56 a wasp who, in fact, used to be carnivorous mainly. This one seemed to be a vegetarian
13:01 getting food from a tree. We know this because it was preserved in amber, which is just fossilized
13:07 plant sap. Maybe they got stuck in there and couldn't get out, something that still happens
13:12 today. All this bee history is just our background setting. What's remarkable is that bees and
13:17 dinosaurs definitely lived during the same time. Dinos appeared around 245 million years ago,
13:24 and old bee fossils have been found for 100 million years. Imagine a dinosaur getting
13:29 stung by a simple bee while trying to munch on leaves. How cool would that be?
13:33 Bees Are Nature's Most Prolific and Economical Builders
13:39 Scientists and mathematicians have for a long time argued that honeycombs are the most practical
13:44 and most efficient structures around. The walls in the honeycombs meet at a precise 120-degree
13:50 angle, exhibiting the most perfect hexagon in nature. In 36 BC, Greek mathematician Papas of
13:57 Alexandria came up with the honeycomb conjecture which shows the best way to divide a surface into
14:03 equal parts with less total perimeter, an ideology which was borrowed from the way bees construct
14:09 their honeycombs. Study of bees has led to major milestones in solving crimes.
14:15 For the lovers of the thriller genre of films, what's the one pattern that almost all serial
14:21 killers have in similarity? Well, they commit their heinous acts close to home but far enough
14:26 that neighbors never get suspicious. The study of bees has shown that they collect nectar and
14:31 pollen near their hive but far enough that predators don't find the hive. Notice a
14:36 similarity? This study of bees has led to a greater understanding of this behavior and the
14:41 findings have continuously been used in computers used by law enforcement officers to nab criminals.
14:46 Bees are a bunch of genius creatures. Have you ever heard of the traveling salesman problem?
14:52 Imagine a scenario where a salesman has a list of locations that he must visit
14:58 exactly once and has to return to the origin point using the shortest possible route to all
15:03 destinations. Despite being the only insects that make food that man can eat, honeybees are the only
15:09 animals known that are capable of solving the traveling salesman mathematical problem. Scientists
15:14 from the Royal Holloway University found that bees fly using the shortest routes possible between
15:20 flowers and their hive while collecting nectar and pollen. The brain of a bee is an alien thing.
15:28 A bee's brain is one of the most advanced brains in the animal kingdom. Some bees are hardwired to
15:33 perform specific tasks only. Undertaker bees are tasked with removing dead bees from the hive
15:39 while scout bees have a brain pattern that compels them to search for new sources of food and
15:44 shelter. On the other hand, soldier bees are wired to provide security for their entire life. However,
15:50 there are regular bees that are not wired to a specific task but rather perform multiple tasks.
15:55 These regular bees will however change their brain chemistry when they take on a new task
16:00 just to fit in. Just how amazing is that? Additionally, when aging and old bees take
16:06 up tasks reserved for the younger generation, their brain stops aging and instead works like
16:11 the younger ones. Compare this to you not only feeling young when you ride a bicycle,
16:16 but also your brain ticking like that of a young person. Ladies and gentlemen,
16:20 here's the cure for dementia. Alright, comment below if you've ever been stung by a bee or if
16:25 you've ever seen a zombie. Don't forget to like the video, subscribe to Forever Green,
16:31 and we'll see you in the next one!