1314: Bees | Skeptical Sunday

1314: Bees | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Jessica Wynn. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks. From spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers. On Sundays, though it's Skeptical Sunday, where a rotating guest, co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic, such as diet, supplements, the lottery, [00:01:00] reiki, healing, ear candling, crystal healing, diet pills, energy drinks, and more.

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Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're flying into the topic of bees. You know, 'em small, yellow, mildly threatening. They make honey, they sting you. And every few years the internet tells us that if they disappear, civilization collapses. So what's going on?

Are they just backyard annoyances or the tiny workforce secretly holding up the entire global food supply? Because that sounds like a lot of responsibility for something that I will swat out of my car window. Joining me to see what all the buzz is about is writer and researcher Jessica Wynn. So here's what I know about bees.

Jess honey stingers flowers, there's bees, there's wasps, which seems like they're just bees that have chosen [00:02:00] violence. And the internet keeps telling me all the bees are going extinct and we'll all be dead soon as a result. What am I missing?

Jessica Wynn: Well, that's actually not a terrible start, but we need to dramatically expand your bee universe.

So there are over 20,000 species of bees on this planet.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. 20,000. I thought there were like, I don't know, 10. Bumblebees killer bees, murder, hornets and wasps.

Jessica Wynn: So wasps are not bees at all. Okay? They're totally different family, different ancestry, different biology. In fact, wasps go after bee colonies.

They raid nests, steal food, kill larva, even attack and kill honeybees.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. That's like an insect crime syn. So not even other bees or bee type insects, like wasps, they're just universally reviled. Got it.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Everybody hates wasps, although in fairness, honeybees, they raid each other too.

Jordan Harbinger: That's true.

That's true.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: You know what? If I saw the other day. A guy removing a hornet's nest, and [00:03:00] he basically had vacuumed all of them up out of this hole, dug up the nest, and then he fed the nest to a squirrel. Did you know squirrels eat what? Hornet's nest? No, I did not know that.

Jessica Wynn: I bet they're delicious.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, maybe.

I mean, it looked pretty gnarly. Like this squirrel just going to town eating this nest. But I guess it totally makes sense. Anyway. Good on squirrels. They're cute and they eat wasp nests or hornets nests, whatever this thing was. Yeah. So, okay, so these, they're kind of like insect crime syndicates raiding each other and stealing and

Jessica Wynn: Yeah.

Yeah. And and then every 10 years the news is like also killer bees are coming. Yeah. Which we've been hearing since like the Reagan administration. But when you hear Africanized honeybees know that they're just more defensive honeybees. Okay. They're not deadly. They mostly just really hate it when you're near their hive.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I've heard that. They will chase you further and they'll sting you more, or something like that, but it's like, okay, so if you're not getting stung by regular bees, you're probably not going to have [00:04:00] to worry about Africanized killer bees, whatever. Right? So did bees with boundaries. All right. What about murder?

Hornets, remember those headlines? And they would show like this huge wasp that you probably can't even find anywhere outside of China that's the size of your hand, and it's like, oh, these are going to kill everyone.

Jessica Wynn: It was also like the season finale of 2020. Yes. Right? Yes. It's a big, scary, terrible name.

Jordan Harbinger: It's a fake name. I bet. I bet the journalists made that name in real. B researchers are like, yeah, these are just called whatever. Hornets

Jessica Wynn: insect pr. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Jessica Wynn: But they did show up briefly in the Pacific Northwest and were pretty immediately eradicated, and they weren't hunting people. They were attacking other insects.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So don't judge a bee by its murderous name, I suppose. Right.

Jessica Wynn: And something else most people don't realize is that over 90% of bee species don't even live in hives. They're solitary. They don't make honey. There's no queen. They just live alone nesting in the ground or in [00:05:00] Hollywood, pollinating flowers and just minding their business, never bothering anyone.

Jordan Harbinger: So they're kind of the introverts of the insect world and Yeah, it's, it's the equivalent of the old guy living out in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Got it.

Jessica Wynn: Exactly. There's mason bees, leaf cutter bees, mining bees. They're just all out there doing essential pollination work without any of the social drama that we associate with bees.

When Americans say bees, we usually mean honeybees.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. The ones that live in the little set of drawers, Republican thing. Right.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And those aren't even native to the United States. So our honeybees are basically livestock. They were imported from Europe in the 16 hundreds. Mostly the European honeybee ais Ferra.

So beekeepers treat them like tiny cattle with wings.

Jordan Harbinger: I didn't realize that they were bee immigrants. I just figured they were here for a million years. That's crazy.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And meanwhile, the truly native bees, which are the [00:06:00] solitary ones, they're losing habitat because we've paved everything over. Sure.

There's no more dead trees like there used to be. There's no bare soil, no nesting spots. We've basically bulldozed native bees homes.

Jordan Harbinger: We just seem to be obsessed with honeybees. Specifically. Why is that? I mean, my wife was a beekeeper for a while and she didn't have to deliberate what kind of bee she wanted.

You know, you just get honeybees,

Jessica Wynn: right, because they're useful to us.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Jessica Wynn: And honeybees can pollinate more than 130 different crops. Apples, cherries, almonds, pumpkins, you name it. Crucially, they're mobile. You can move entire hives around like equipment.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Well, they're mobile. They have wings. What do you mean you're moving the hives around?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Not just flying, I mean portable.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Jessica Wynn: So in the 1850s, this Ohio clergyman named Lorenzo Langstroth figured out something called B Space.

Jordan Harbinger: That sounds fake. What is that?

Jessica Wynn: I know. It's actually super precise. So bees [00:07:00] naturally leave a gap of about three eighths of an inch, roughly six to nine millimeters between combs.

So they can walk through. And if the gap is smaller than that, they glue it shut with propolis. Bigger than that, they build more comb and then seal it up.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So they're tiny architects with very strong opinions about hallway width.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, Theni. Yeah, exactly. And it, it makes sense. It was a minister who did this because back then ministers traveled all the time.

They were setting up churches with land and gardens. So beekeeping was kind of the perfect clergy hobby. It was quiet, contemplative plus honey and beeswax actually paid the bills. Churches needed candles, sugar was expensive. So keeping bees was like the 19th century version of a side hustle.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's right.

They're called Lang Langstroth Hives. Right, right. The drawer looking thing. 'cause before that, it kinda looked like this. The Winnie the Poh beehive, right. That little [00:08:00] swirly basket looking thing, that's pre Langstroth. I don't know what those things are called.

Jessica Wynn: That was pre Langstroth. I don't know what they were called either, but they weren't as sustainable.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. So

Jessica Wynn: he developed the

Jordan Harbinger: modular whatever,

Jessica Wynn: modular hives.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Okay, so cool. So it is a side hustle for ministers sermons on Sunday, honey on Monday. And you just sell it or use it to make your candles or whatever.

Jessica Wynn: Got it. Right. And Langstroth realized if you design a hive that keeps every gap in that sweet spot, the bees won't cement everything together.

Which means you can slide those frames in and out.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Right.

Jessica Wynn: So before that, if you wanted honey, you basically smashed those baskets and destroyed the hive and you had to start all over.

Jordan Harbinger: Ugh. Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: So his design was those, the wooden box with removable frames, and it meant you could move entire colonies around without killing them.

And once hives became modular boxes, you could stack them, load them onto trucks, ship [00:09:00] entire colonies across the country. So we're talking billions of bees shipped every year for pollination because of Langstroth,

Jordan Harbinger: right? Yeah. We used to have bees here. Like I said, my wife and and I had a bee suit and stuff 'cause I'd go out and help and sexy.

You'd open it up. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Hot too. Literally, you'd open up the hive and they would you have to open it up like every week or so, or every few days? I can't remember. And the reason is because those frames, they don't just like neatly and nicely build inside the frame. They do, but then they're trying to glue the frame to the side and they're trying to glue the frames together.

Or maybe something drips or falls and then they cement that up. So you have to scrape all that off and sort of maintain it. And then you take all that wax and you can just chew it. It's delicious.

Jessica Wynn: It is.

Jordan Harbinger: And you take the propolis or whatever that other stuff is and you can, I don't know, there's a million things you can do with bee products.

It's like you can use everything. So. All right. So honeybees. What makes them so special physically, besides the fact that they somehow convinced humans to eat their vomit and call it a delicacy?

Jessica Wynn: I mean, [00:10:00] I guess you're not entirely wrong there, but it's not exactly barf,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

Jessica Wynn: Honey never hits their actual digestive stomach.

So they've got a separate little storage pouch, basically a honey tummy just for nectar.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so not puke, more like a lunchbox,

Jessica Wynn: right? They collect nectar, stash it in their extra stomach, fly it home, and pass it to other bees. Then enzymes and evaporation, turn it into honey. It's food processing, not vomiting.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that is slightly less disgusting. I mean, it's still a little odd, I suppose. I don't know. We're we're just thinking about food too much 'cause you're doing that, uh, agriculture stuff. But they do really have a, I don't know. Bees are quite amazing. Jen would never kind of get over that. When she was a beekeeper.

It was like her favorite thing ever.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, they're incredible. And they have this incredible anatomy. So for starters, they have five eyes,

Jordan Harbinger: five eyes. I guess I knew they had fly like traits, but when I imagine a bee, I just see two big black eyes [00:11:00] in my head.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And most of us do, but they have five, there's two large compound eyes on the sides of their heads, but they're made up of thousands of tiny lenses.

Plus they have three smaller, simple eyes on top. They detect light levels and help them navigate.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So they have sensors right. As well as eyes. That's crazy. So, yeah, I guess, uh, you don't want glasses as a bee, you're in trouble.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, there might be a cool design there, but

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Jessica Wynn: With those eyes, they can't see the color red, which is interesting.

So red looks black to them, which is why beekeepers would never paint hives red.

Jordan Harbinger: So to a bee, a beautiful red rose is just another black flower.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: So goth somehow.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, they're gothy. Mm-hmm. But here's where it gets cool. So they can see ultraviolet light, which creates patterns on flowers that are completely invisible to humans.

So a lot of flowers have these UV like landing strips that guide bees [00:12:00] directly to the nectar. They're like runway lights at an airport.

Jordan Harbinger: So flowers are nature's invisible bee airports. That's cool.

Jessica Wynn: Yes. I didn't know that. Yeah. And there's even a color called bees purple, which is a combination of yellow and ultraviolet light that only bees can see.

It just doesn't exist for humans. So some beekeepers paint their many hives the same color, but draw unique symbol on each hive with an ultraviolet pen so bees can differentiate the hives.

Jordan Harbinger: So bees have access to exclusive colors that I'll never experience in my lifetime.

Jessica Wynn: Right. And bees have three types of photoreceptors giving them this tri chromatic vision.

So it's similar to humans, but we see in red, green, and blue. BC in ultraviolet blue and green from their compound eyes. So they just can't process red. It's crazy.

Jordan Harbinger: That is crazy. I can't imagine life without the color red, I guess. Well, they probably think the same about whatever [00:13:00] purple UV colors they're seeing.

Right. That is cool. It's, it's kind of jealous. They can see colors that I can, it must be kind of interesting.

Jessica Wynn: I know. Well, don't be jealous. You have opposable thumbs.

Jordan Harbinger: That is true. And

Jessica Wynn: they don't.

Jordan Harbinger: That is true. And a lifespan of more than, I don't know, 48 hours or whatever some of these things have. Right, right.

So how does the honey transferring work? Is this the dance I've read where bees communicate via dance? Or is that a, a weird myth?

Jessica Wynn: No, the dance is very real and it's also very complicated. It's so sophisticated that an Austrian scientist named Carl vre. He won the Nobel Prize in 1973. Just for figuring out what it meant.

Jordan Harbinger: Somebody won a Nobel Prize for learning the bee dance. I guess that makes sense.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Because it revolutionized our understanding of insect intelligence and communication. He proved bees use a symbolic language.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, but who's dancing? The queen bee is dancing or who's

Jessica Wynn: No, it's the workers.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, okay.

Jessica Wynn: And worker bees are all female.

So basically every bee you [00:14:00] see doing active labor is a girl. The males mostly just hang around waiting to mate and then immediately die. Zero choreography for them.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, so it's a girl boss situation.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, full matriarchy. When a forager beef finds a really good nectar source, she flies back to the hive and performs a very specific dance for other forages.

Jordan Harbinger: So she literally dances.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's incredible and weirdly precise. So she waggles back and forth while moving in a straight line. Then circles around to repeat the pattern. The length of the waggle run tells the other bees how far away the food source is. The angle of the dance tells them which direction to fly relative to the sun.

Jordan Harbinger: That's crazy. So bees are doing trigonometry through interpretive dance and they understand each other. That's nuts.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. It's like GPS, but also kind of like B Broadway.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean, think about it. You miss a turn on Google Maps. [00:15:00] Meanwhile, bees are over here communicating pretty precise GPS coordinates through choreography, literally.

It's amazing. Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: They've had millions of years to perfect it. So there's a documentary that takes a bee outta the hive to somewhere new and tracks it finding its way back to the hive. So it's this cool navigation experiment showing how in tune bees are with where they need to go.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and we've had social media for 15 years and somehow we've made communication worse over time.

Jessica Wynn: I know. I know. You'll also love this. In 2023, it was discovered that the waggle dance is learned. It's not purely instinctual. So it's culturally passed from Bee to B.

Jordan Harbinger: So there's Bee Dance school, which is probably more fun than hauling nectar and pollen. But then again, I guess that's the job,

Jessica Wynn: right? Young bees learn the waggle dance from older mentor bees and each bee develops their own individual dance style.

It's like their dialect and scientists [00:16:00] published this in Science magazine, so it's like a huge deal.

Jordan Harbinger: Bees have dialects. Wow. That's, I mean, this is amazing.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. In a way they do, bee cultures are shaped by local environments. So some colonies, they're better at dancing than others because they had better teachers.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. And I wonder if that allows them to find food more easily. I don't know. So this is blowing my mind. So if an, if an old bee is a bad teacher, the young bees just learn the dance wrong and maybe it's a little bit less accurate.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And the scary part is that some of the pesticides being used, they harm be cognition.

Could disrupt their ability to learn the dance properly. So we might be literally scrambling their cultural transmission.

Jordan Harbinger: Ooh, that's yikes. That's worse than I thought. I know. So you're not just killing a few bees, you're making it so they can't find food and screwing up generational knowledge or something like that.

Jessica Wynn: And it gets weirder. Scientists are now building robots that can infiltrate hives and perform [00:17:00] the waggle dance to command real bees. So they're trying to teach robots these local bee dialects so they can waggle dance and direct real bees to specific locations because instead of not using pesticides

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Right. We could stop using these chemicals that kill them. No, no, no. We're going to build, get me, hear me out. We're going to build tiny pe bee robots, so that just do the dance so that when we kill the dance teachers, we can replace them.

I'm

Jessica Wynn: for it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. With something mechanical. Yeah. Um, but wait, why do they want to direct bees to specific locations again, with robots?

Jessica Wynn: So first of all, they kind of look like these tiny pencil sharpeners with wings.

Jordan Harbinger: The robo bees. Yeah,

Jessica Wynn: the robo bees. And they were developed at Harvard, they're basically insect size flying robots that have artificial muscles that flap their wings about 120 times a second.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Jessica Wynn: They can hover and steer and make simple decisions with onboard sensors, and they're one of the smallest flying robots.

And they're, they're [00:18:00] just really detailed. So they're used for artificial pollination, search and rescue and environmental monitoring.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I kinda want one. How do they use these in search and rescue? What are, what's a B robot going to do if someone's trapped in a well?

Jessica Wynn: Well, they're not lifting anybody out like a tiny EMT think more like a flying GoPro.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. So they can slip through cracks and collapsed buildings, you know, think what's needed after like a big earthquake, they can map these tight spaces, detect heat or carbon dioxide from breathing, maybe find survivors where humans or drones can't fit.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So they're not rescuing you, they're they're judging you and reporting your location.

Jessica Wynn: Right. And they send messages like human located still in Well, seems dramatic.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It needs to calm down. Yeah. Okay. That makes way more sense.

Jessica Wynn: Right now they're mostly prototypes. There have been greenhouse pollination experiments, environmental monitoring, that kind of thing. [00:19:00] The idea is swarms of robot bees that will go places nothing else can, but it'll cost you if you really do want one.

The ones used for greenhouses run about 10 grand each.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Okay. Is it a good idea to build robots that can speak bee in, command them, because this is sort of like planet of the Apes slash Black Mirror.

Jessica Wynn: I know. I mean, I don't think the bees are planning an uprising, but

Jordan Harbinger: Yet,

Jessica Wynn: yet. But be nice to them in case, I guess.

No, because bees can recognize human faces.

Jordan Harbinger: What?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. They use the same configural processing that humans use, recognizing the spatial relationship between facial features. They can distinguish between different people and remember them,

Jordan Harbinger: man. So if you've ever been stung by a bee, maybe you didn't do anything.

He just thought you were ugly.

Jessica Wynn: Right? Right.

Jordan Harbinger: It's ugly. So if I, if I swatted a bee, it might remember my face and potentially [00:20:00] hold a grudge.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it might, and it might communicate that to other bees.

Jordan Harbinger: Cool. So yeah. Yeah. You're, you're on like a, the sting list, right? Somebody goes back and does the waggle dance and is like, get that guy with a crappy fascist haircut.

Go sting that guy.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, I think we're all probably on that list, but that's actually why beekeepers use smoke. So it scrambles their alarm pheromones. So the hive can't smell, you know, intruders. Otherwise, every time you open the hive, they remember you and they'll get progressively more aggressive. But it's thought though over time that this stresses the bees out too.

Jordan Harbinger: Not using smoke or using smoke

Jessica Wynn: using smoke.

Jordan Harbinger: If you think your workplace is toxic, just remember bees literally murder underperforming

Jen Harbinger: leadership. We'll be right back.

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Jordan Harbinger: Don't forget about our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser. Two minute read every Wednesday. Something practical. You can apply right away, right outta the box. It is a great companion to the show. A little bit of wisdom from the show, a little bit of wisdom from our daily lives, [00:23:00] something I promise you will not regret taking the time to read.

Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now back to Skeptical Sunday. Yeah, there's definitely been times where, I mean, we used to use smoke in the beehives. You basically have this little tea kettle with like a trigger and you squeeze it and smoke comes out and they just go about their business while you rip huge parts of their hive out and scrape wax off or like take honey out or take honeycomb out.

But yeah, I mean I didn't know that they would remember it. I kind of, that's Wow.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. They're smarter than you think.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I imagine bees kind of gossiping with their little dance, you know, it's just sort of like, hey, that the guy's got a copy of Cat Fancy and he is not afraid to use it. I mean, who would think insects have memory at all?

That's insane to me.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, and something that might make you feel a little safer is that only female bees can sting. So male bees, which are called drones, they don't even have stingers. Their only job is to mate with a queen. That's it. And then they die immediately.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Death [00:24:00] by sex. Immediate death by sex.

Jessica Wynn: Yes. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Lame.

Jessica Wynn: During mating, the reproductive organ tears away when they detach from the queen. So they basically just fall out of the sky.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God. Think about that. Just think about that guys. You just detach it. You put it in, but you can't take it out. The

Jessica Wynn: power of women. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's, wow. That's horrifying.

Nature does not do subtle does it?

Jessica Wynn: Right. And the drones who don't get to mate, they don't forage. They don't build, they don't defend the hive. They don't clean, they just live in bachelor pads outside the hive, just kind of hanging around, eating honey, waiting for their shot,

Jordan Harbinger: literally. So it's a frat house.

Celibate, but no chores.

Jessica Wynn: Right. But only until fall the season.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: So then the worker bees kick them out of the hive to die in the cold, to conserve food during winter. So you'll see dead drone bees around the hives when autumn comes.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. Yeah. They're actually all over my driveway. Yeah. And I have to kind of be [00:25:00] careful when I'm working out.

'cause if you're doing like burpees, there's just dead bees everywhere and they can still sting after they're dead. That's sort of a mechanical process. So let get this straight. Male bees either die during sex or they spend their entire life eating honey and contributing absolutely nothing until they're left to freeze to death.

Jessica Wynn: That's the deal. Yeah. And bees don't mess around, man. The workers meanwhile run the whole place. People say they have an age-based career ladder. So when a bee is born, she starts as a janitor, pretty much cleaning cells in the hive. Then after a few days gets promoted to nurse bee feeding larva, then she becomes a processor making honey.

Then she'll handle climate control and defense. And finally, when she's older, which is around three weeks, she becomes a forager flying out to collect nectar and pollen.

Jordan Harbinger: So bees have kind of like a corporate structure where you basically start in the mail room and you work your way up to senior management.

That's, I did not know that either.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, basically. But it's flexible. [00:26:00] What's really wild is when older bees have to take on jobs, usually done by younger bees. Like if the hive loses a bunch of young workers, for whatever reason, their brains stop aging. So the mental stimulation of learning new tasks keeps their old bee B brains young.

Scientists are literally studying bees for dementia research because of this.

Jordan Harbinger: That does make sense though, right? Yeah. Because if everybody aged out and you lost all your young workers, there goes the whole hive. So this is an evolutionary pressure coming.

Jessica Wynn: Right? Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: It's incredible. So when I'm 80, get on the equivalent of TikTok.

Keep learning, I don't know. Learn a new language and start dating a 30-year-old. Got it. Okay,

Jessica Wynn: cool. I like your confidence, Jordan, that a 30-year-old will want you when you're 80.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, that's, it's amazing how much just a few million dollars can overcome the widest of age gaps. Love in a giant Swiss bank account really conquers all

Jessica Wynn: so romantic.

Yes. And kind of gross.

Jordan Harbinger: Yep,

Jessica Wynn: that too. But [00:27:00] think less of a midlife crisis and more brain gym. So when older bees switch jobs, they have to learn these new skills. Their memory and learning ability improves. It's like cognitive physical therapy.

Jordan Harbinger: So all those in a midlife crisis, listen up, don't buy a motorcycle, learn some Chinese or something like that.

Duolingo over Tinder.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, that's much healthier advice I think at any age, but a lot more research is needed. But the takeaway is that learning new things and staying mentally active can literally reverse aspects of brain aging.

Jordan Harbinger: How long does an average bee live?

Jessica Wynn: I mean, it really varies. So for honeybees, a queen can live one, two up to five years, actually.

So think of it like an odometer, not really a calendar. You know, worker bees live about 30 days in the summer, but they'll live one to 200 days in the winter because they're not working as hard. Male bumblebees, they can live as short [00:28:00] as a week.

Jordan Harbinger: The life of a male bumblebee is rough. So once these bees graduate to leave, they go pollinate.

What is their life like then?

Jessica Wynn: Well, bumblebees can do what's called buzz pollinate. So some flowers like tomatoes and blueberries, they hold their pollen really tight in structures that don't just open up. So bumblebees grab onto the flower, detach their wings from their flight muscles, and then they vibrate their entire body at high frequency to shake the pollen loose.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. So bumblebees, twerk, pollen out of flowers. Yeah,

Jessica Wynn: pretty

Jordan Harbinger: much. Bumblebees are out here grinding on flowers to get the goods

and make it rain pollen afterwards. Do other bees throw nectar at them?

Jessica Wynn: No, they just move on to the next flower. To do that, they use their incredible sense of smell that is processed through receptors on their antenna. So this sense allows them [00:29:00] to locate nectar for miles around.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, so they smell through their antenna.

I didn't know that either.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And the ability is used by scientists to detect explosives. So they have 170 odorant receptors, which makes them way more sensitive than dogs. So scientists have trained honeybees to detect bombs and landmines. By associating the scent with sugar water rewards.

Jordan Harbinger: So let me understand this.

We have weaponized bees to de weaponize bombs. That's awesome. Yeah. That's really cool. It's

Jessica Wynn: so awesome.

Jordan Harbinger: That is the most human thing I've ever heard. These creatures are dying in mass. Ecosystems are collapsing, but first can they help us with our wars somehow?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And it turns out they're really good at it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I don't doubt that. I'm just, I'm sort of questioning our priorities here. We're building tiny war drones and they're trying to keep the house warm and it's, I don't know. So they're, these are amazing creatures. Really?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And in winter, some worker bees, they become heater bees. So they [00:30:00] vibrate their flight to generate heat without flying, maintaining the hive temperature at an incredible 95 degrees Fahrenheit, even if it's freezing outside.

They can do this for months because they rotate shifts, so no single bee has to do it the entire time.

Jordan Harbinger: That sounds like the bee equivalent of a union. I know. They kept their hive warm. I just forgot about how they do it.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's incredible. And actually the whole hive operates collectively, so bees figured out collective bargaining way before humans.

They're really organized. Bumblebees leave scent markers on flowers they've already visited, and they can distinguish between their own scent marks and those left by other bees to avoid wasting time on depleted flowers.

Jordan Harbinger: So they can tell the difference between their own scent and the scent of other bees on a flower that they've already went to.

That's cool.

Jessica Wynn: Right? Yeah. So they don't waste energy revisiting flowers that they know are empty.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Jessica Wynn: And their brains are just the size of poppy [00:31:00] seeds, so, which is incredible when we see the things they can be taught. Like playing football.

Jordan Harbinger: You mean like soccer? So are they, are they like golden retrievers?

How do they play football? I don't get this.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. To study their cognitive abilities. Scientists taught bumblebees to roll tiny balls into goals and exchange for sugar water rewards. Wow. I mean, it's documented. You can look it up. They learn the game. They played a little B version of football

Jordan Harbinger: that's adorable and fascinating that they can learn tasks that are completely unnatural to them.

Right. It's not a different dance or a different way of flying or something. It's an actual game.

Jessica Wynn: It's a game. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. So are they, are they, what are they? What else are they doing? Are they. Writing young adult fiction, are they, are there bee podcasts?

Jessica Wynn: Not that I know of, but maybe in another million years we'll get some of

Jordan Harbinger: those.

Yeah. All right. Tell me about the queen bee. Because I feel like this, we we're always taught, you know, the, she's the Beyonce of the Hive, whatever, running things with an iron fist or an iron wing or whatever. But I don't know, I'm, a lot of the things I feel like I thought I knew about bees [00:32:00] are just totally not true.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. The queen bee, I mean, there's a lot of common misconceptions. The queen doesn't rule anything. She doesn't give any orders. There's no strategy meetings. Her only job, literally her only job is laying eggs.

Jordan Harbinger: So the queen is just like a baby factory?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, mostly. But she's not useless, you know, she controls the hive chemically, so she releases pheromones that keep everyone organized, who works, who reproduces.

When the hive stays calm, she just kind of sets the tone for the hive.

Jordan Harbinger: So less queen, ruler, authoritarian, more sort of vibe, more dj. More vibe manager.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I have a friend who works at his kids' elementary school as the, literally it's called the Vibe manager. He just hangs out in the hallway. But anyway, that's

Jordan Harbinger: weird.

Jessica Wynn: So it exists. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Jessica Wynn: But so the queen sets the mood. If her pheromones weaken, the workers go, Ugh, we're [00:33:00] going to need a new CEO here.

Jordan Harbinger: So we've been calling it a monarchy when it's actually more like a democracy.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. It's more like a collective decision making system. So the workers decide where to build when to swarm, and whether or not to replace the queen.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah. So it's actually be communism. They can just replace her. Got it.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. If the queen isn't performing well, like she's not laying enough eggs, getting old, sick, whatever might be making her underperform. The workers will just raise a new queen and kill the old one.

Jordan Harbinger: Totally on brand for communism, by the way.

Yeah. Like eh, you know what time to get executed.

Jessica Wynn: And they don't only make new queens when something's wrong. They also do it when they want to swarm. So that's when half the hive leaves with the old queen to start a new colony. The remaining bees raise a brand new queen. It's kind of like bee franchising.

Jordan Harbinger: So if the queen doesn't run things, what makes her special? Just laying eggs and reproduction.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And her diet. Any female larvae could be queen. [00:34:00] It's the same genes the workers just feed one larva, nothing but royal jelly. So biologically she's the only female bee in the hive whose reproductive organs fully develop.

She can lay fertilized eggs that become female workers or unfertilized eggs that become male drones, just off a steady diet of royal jelly.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. What is that exactly? It sounds like I'm going to go ahead and guess. People pay insane amounts of money to buy and put on their feet or something, but what is it for the bees?

You

Jessica Wynn: do see it in some cosmetics, but

Jordan Harbinger: I'm sure

Jessica Wynn: it's this protein rich substance secreted by young worker bees.

JHS Trailer: Oh, gig. Get,

Jordan Harbinger: get, get go. All right, I'm done.

Jessica Wynn: If a larvae gets fed exclusively royal jelly instead of the regular beef food. It develops into a queen instead of a worker.

Jordan Harbinger: The workers choose who becomes a queen by deciding who gets the good food, I guess.

So the queen is just chosen. I thought there was a fight or it was some kind of birthright or something. No.

Jessica Wynn: Well, yeah, it gets better when a new queen [00:35:00] is about to hatch from her cell. She makes a sound called tooting,

not quite that. She toots. It's a high frequency vibration. And the other unhatched queens, because the workers usually raise, you know, several queens as backups. The ones that are still in their cells respond with quacking sounds.

Jordan Harbinger: That's hilarious. What's the quacking about? How to be, why do they quack?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Bee quacking. It's the sound made by virgin Queens that are still inside their cells, responding to the tooting sound of a newly emerged queen. So it's a form of communication with the worker bees that signals the queen is ready to emerge and the first queen to hatch goes around and stings the other queens to death through their cells before they can hatch.

Or sometimes two queens might hatch at the same time and then they fight to the death.

Jordan Harbinger: Imagine being born and they're like, alright, you have to fight another baby to [00:36:00] the death.

Jessica Wynn: I think I would've won.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you would've won. I knew there was a fight to the death. So toot quack kill. What did, what a twist on the old classic,

Jessica Wynn: right?

And remember, the workers are watching this whole thing happen. They allow it to happen. They could intervene, but they don't.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, watching two queens fight might be, you know, pretty entertaining. Do they do it in the royal jelly?

Jessica Wynn: That would be amazing. But settle down. What happens next? It's not that sexy, so,

Jordan Harbinger: okay.

Jessica Wynn: Whichever bee becomes queen gets right to laying eggs. The workers are still making all the decisions. And if she's not performing well, she's outta there replaced like pretty much immediately.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. So she wins the battle royale fight to the death. And her prize is a job with no decision making power that she can be fired from at any time.

By getting murdered.

Jessica Wynn: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Hard pass. That sucks.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And then she's continued to be fed a strict diet of royal jelly and she's just expected to lay eggs, eggs, eggs, [00:37:00] constantly. Thousands a day.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. What a prize for winning the queen title. I feel like we're pretty aggressive as humans about taking stuff from bees.

So the royal jelly, you said it's for sale at the store? Yeah. It's just something we can, we also steal from them.

Jessica Wynn: It is, you can buy it. Humans are very thorough when stealing from the hive. You know, we take honey wax pollen and that royal jelly.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Yeah. I was mentioning before you could pretty much use everything I forgot about the royal jelly.

So bee pollen, that's also crunchy health food stuff. You can get it in your bougie smoothie, granola bowl or whatever at er one.

Jessica Wynn: Right, exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: By the way, how is bee pollen different from just pollen? Is it not just pollen?

Jessica Wynn: Well, it's different after the bees bring it back to the hive and

Jordan Harbinger: I

Jessica Wynn: see, okay. It's basically they're protein storage.

It's super nutrient dense and bees collect pollen from flowers, but then they mix it with a little nectar and their bee saliva. Then they store it in the comb. So it's packed with protein, amino acids, vitamins, and humans eat it [00:38:00] as a supplement. So as we're saying, like we can eat the entire honeycomb, the wax, everything, which I've done too with a beekeeper friend of mine, and it's hot and sweet and delicious.

And then when you chew on that wax, after the flavor's gone, it's like the best gum, right?

Jordan Harbinger: I have eaten many a hive. We used to keep bees before we had kids. As I mentioned, we got rid of them. But there's so much in there that at some point you're taking it and it's actually for their own good, right?

Because they can. Right. And you can take so much of this stuff out. And the pollen's actually really cool. It's beautiful. It's like this sort of multicolor, light pastel mix of stuff, and you can put it on ice cream and it looks gorgeous. It's really

Jessica Wynn: interesting. It's the, yeah, the colors are beautiful.

Jordan Harbinger: Agree. Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: It's kind of like eating their architecture. But yeah, sometimes it's necessary. I recently met a honey sommelier, which I did not know existed. That's a thing, huh? So there's definitely a lot of flavors and notes to pay attention to. And the royal jelly, that's also protein rich [00:39:00] substance that worker bees make to feed the queen.

And then people harvest that and eat it too.

Jordan Harbinger: What does it taste like? I've never stolen my bees Royal jelly.

Jessica Wynn: It's kind of tart, it's slightly bitter. It's like a weird greenish color, but some people think it has health benefits, anti-aging properties, but the science doesn't really back that up. It does have antioxidants.

So the wellness community makes the leap that it has these anti-aging benefits, but I'm not actually convinced on that.

Jordan Harbinger: There's a lot of honey scams and stuff like that. Yeah. Nonsense out there. In fact, this is not super related, but I went to, I think it was in Australia, went to a farmer's market and this guy had all these different buckets of honey air quotes, honey.

I went with Jen and she was a beekeeper at the time, right? And this guy's like, yeah, I have honey. We, the bees have only fed on raspberries and honey were the bees have only fed on coconuts or pineapple. And it just tasted like each one tasted like candy. Jen told me in Chinese, she's like, this guy's cheating people.

This is just corn syrup. This flavor. I was

Jessica Wynn: going to say, it's [00:40:00] just all high fructose. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. First of all, the consistency was off, but all, and it was like too clean. Right. Honey's kind of dirty, looking like real honey. It's not clean. They, especially when it's not filtered and it's like you can't just get bright red, raspberry flavored honey.

You can't tell bees until we get those bee drone robots that tell them where to go. You can't just tell bees, Hey, only feed on raspberries. That's not, that's

Jessica Wynn: impossible.

Jordan Harbinger: You can't do that. No, they're, they're not just going to go get pineapple. That's not possible. They're going to go get a bunch of different stuff from thousands of different flowers, millions.

All over the place. And so it's just totally ridiculous. What

JHS Trailer: a jerk.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I know. I know. It's like it's not that hard to get real honey. Just get real honey. But I guess if you're just a scammer, who cares? Right? Order some corn syrup and put flavor in there. So we're eating hives, thinking it'll make us immortal.

What else are we stealing?

Jessica Wynn: So the propolis, which is the sticky resonance mixture that bees make from tree sap and bees wax. So that's what they use to seal cracks in the hive and they disinfect [00:41:00] everything. It has these antimicrobial properties like honey does too, but the propolis is like hive cock meats medicine.

Jordan Harbinger: Why are we eating that?

Jessica Wynn: So we mostly use it in tinctures and health supplements. It's very sticky, so you wouldn't just eat it straight.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. We're at least we're not eating the bees themselves. Although I do feel like I've also seen that on those documentaries about like wild China where some guy goes and gets a hornet the size of your hand Right.

From a tree and grills it.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Yeah. I mean, actually in some cultures, particularly Southeast Asia, people do eat B larvae and ppe. They're high in protein.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So we're eating their children savage.

Jessica Wynn: I know. But they're considered a delicacy and they're often grilled or boiled.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So we take their honey, their honey comb, their pollen, their royal jelly, their medicine, and their offspring.

Is there anything we don't take from them?

Jessica Wynn: Nothing comes to mind, especially when we force their migration. So every year, between [00:42:00] January and February, California experiences one of the largest animal migrations in the world, about 2.7 million beehives. Which contains about 54 billion bees. They're trucked into California's Central Valley.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So 54 billion bees. But imagine you don't want to drive those trucks. Imagine, oh my gosh. What do you do? You just pull over to get gas and you have bees everywhere. I mean, are they sealed? I, I guess they must be.

Jessica Wynn: They're contained in the boxes. Yeah. They're not just flying around, but it's essential agriculture.

So California produces about 80% of the world's almonds, and almonds are entirely dependent on bee pollination. So there's about one and a half million acres of almond trees in the state of California. So we transport about 90% of commercial hives in.

Jordan Harbinger: That can't be sustainable. I, I know we've done whole shows on almonds and how they're supposedly horrendous for the [00:43:00] environment here in California, or water use and droughts, and now we're throwing billions of bees into the mix.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Well, it's a little more complicated than just almonds bad. So I would like to fact check those episodes because.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Jessica Wynn: There's actually a lot of misinformation out there around almonds, and most of it is pushed by the dairy industry running this anti almond propaganda.

Jordan Harbinger: Huh. Okay.

Jessica Wynn: So almonds use a lot of water.

Sure. But so does every crop. And dairy uses more water per calorie and way more water per gram of protein. But all agriculture in California is really water intensive.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So it's not, Hey, don't farm almonds here. It's, Hey, don't farm anywhere in this area of California. Nobody's arguing that. Right. It's just farmers arguing over what should be grown where.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, you know, when you drive up the five, you see all those signs on farms about the water and everything.

Yeah. You know, it's a big political topic.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The dust bowl don't vote for the dust bowl. [00:44:00] And then you're like, I've got to roll up my windows. 'Cause it smells like cow crap for the next 50 miles.

Jessica Wynn: And that's not what the dairy industry cares about. What they care about is how popular alternative milks have come.

So.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's what it's about. Almond milk that, yes. Look at that. That's interesting. Okay. So almonds just have bad PR, basically.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Right. And the bigger issue for bees is an almond, specifically, it's the monoculture. So a million acres of one crop blooming at the exact same time. That's what forces us to truck in millions of hives all at once.

Like that's the stressor.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So the problem is not almonds, it's that we've turned nature into one giant Amazon warehouse for whatever product, whatever crop.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, kind of. I mean, almond season is the biggest payday of the year for beekeepers because they can charge up to $225 per hive just for almond pollination.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Jessica Wynn: So they bring their bees from [00:45:00] all over the country. Mostly they come from Montana, North Dakota, Florida, and Texas.

Jordan Harbinger: So bee Coachella basically.

Jessica Wynn: Right? If Coachella involved loading billions of insects onto 18 wheelers and driving them across state lines, then yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So what could go wrong, man? Snakes on a plane.

No, it's bees at a truck stop now.

Jessica Wynn: I would watch that movie.

Jordan Harbinger: You. Yeah, you would for sure.

Jessica Wynn: But the bees are trucked long distances, which stresses them out so the vibrations and the fumes can harm them. And they arrive in January and February when they're at the weakest point in their life cycle. So they're supposed to be dormant, but instead they're being forced to wake up and work.

You know, it's crazy. Beekeepers have to feed them supplements and stimulants to get them active enough to pollinate. I mean, many beekeepers feed their bee supplements regardless of travel. It's absolutely necessary for the bees that are being moved around.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. I'm doubling down on bees at a truck stop now.

Because if we're giving [00:46:00] bees stimulants, cocaine bees sounds like a solid Netflix runner. Wow.

Jessica Wynn: Oh, maybe it could be a mashup with like the next shark NATO movie or something. It's.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Cocaine bear. No. Cocaine bees.

Jessica Wynn: It's mostly sugar water and pollen supplements. But yeah, little bee cocaine. And then there's the issue that almonds bloom all at once, so you have billions of bees in one concentrated area feeding on one type of food for weeks, which is just nutritionally terrible for them.

It's like if you ate nothing but rice for a month.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's how, yeah. Sounds like my trip to Laos, but, okay, so this happens every year, every single year.

Jessica Wynn: Every year. After almond season, many beekeepers truck their bees to pollinate other crops. So blueberries in Maine, cucumbers in North Carolina, cherries in Washington state.

You know these bees spend half the year on trucks.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh man. So it's like hives full of [00:47:00] slave labor. And beekeepers are okay with this? 'cause they need the money, right?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, they don't have much choice. One beekeeper told researchers he loses about 10% of his bees every time he sends them to California.

But the money is too good to refuse. And here's where it gets worse.

Jordan Harbinger: Uh, of course it does. Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: The security around these hives is almost non-existent. So they're dropped off in orchards or holding lots that aren't fenced or guarded. They're visible from the road a lot of times, and a hive renting for $225 is worth a lot to thieves.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah. Are you going to talk about bee heists?

Jessica Wynn: Absolutely. So in 2024, nearly 2000 hives were stolen in just California's Central Valley. The year before it was over 2300 hives.

Jordan Harbinger: So 2000 hives. How do you steal 2000 beehives? I You just take the whole truck right At that point,

Jessica Wynn: I mean, with forklifts, trucks, and usually under the cover of [00:48:00] darkness.

Right. So sometimes hundreds of hives at once. In January, 2024, almost 500 hives were stolen in a single night from a beekeeper from Montana.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Jessica Wynn: That's worth over $400,000.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

Jessica Wynn: For bees.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: And that's just the rental value, the replacement cost. It's even higher because you lose the established colonies.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Jessica Wynn: And beekeepers do often invest their whole lives into these bees. You know, they're livestock. So there is this emotional professional toll.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I would imagine. So. What do the thieves do with them? Just rent them out?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, they spray paint over the owner's markings and sell them to almond growers who either don't know they're stolen or just don't care enough to ask questions.

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Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. So there's a black market for bees in, at least in California.

Jessica Wynn: Oh yeah. And here's the other thing. There's basically one law enforcement officer in California working these cases full-time.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Okay. One guy is going to stop this.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And I love him. His name is Deputy Rowdy Freeman of Butte County.

Jordan Harbinger: His name is Rowdy Freeman.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. He rules

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Jessica Wynn: And he's completely overwhelmed. California has state task forces for horse theft and cattle rusting, but nothing for bees. And Rowdy Freeman has documented clear evidence that stolen hives are being [00:52:00] transported across state lines, but the federal government won't get involved.

The FBI won't comment on if they're even investigating.

Jordan Harbinger: Probably not that high of a priority for them, but my God, interstate B trafficking and nobody cares other than Pew, pew, prowdy Freeman. Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Which is why beekeepers are now installing GPS trackers in the hives, setting up hidden cameras, and even then thieves are a step ahead.

In 2018, Freeman found what he calls a chop shop for bees.

Jordan Harbinger: A chop shop. What do you, what does that mean?

Jessica Wynn: Over 2,500 stolen hives worth nearly a million dollars were found, and the thieves were breaking apart hives. They were mixing equipment from different beekeepers and reselling them. It was. Organized.

Jordan Harbinger: So Rowdy Freeman is out there alone fighting bee crime, and all of this is happening because we need billions of bees to pollinate the almonds in California for like two weeks a year.

Jessica Wynn: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: That is [00:53:00] insane. This entire system is crazy

Jessica Wynn: and it gets worse because this all leads to colony collapse disorder.

Jordan Harbinger: I feel like I've heard about this.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's when worker bees, they just mysteriously disappear from a hive like just vanish. So I don't know if anybody saw that movie Weapons, but all the kids, yeah, there you go. Disappear. That's what happened to the bees.

Jordan Harbinger: Right?

Jessica Wynn: And the queen is still there. There's food, there are some nurse bees taking care of larvae, but all the foragers just abandon ship and never come back.

And they don't just leave, they disappear without a trace. There's no bodies, there's no corpses piled up outside the hive. They fly away and never return.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's the B rapture. This is straight outta some m Knight shyman flick.

Jessica Wynn: I know. Kind of. Nobody knows where they go, they just don't come back to the hive.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's horrifying. And this is a, a result from moving the hives all over the place.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, it's inconclusive, but that is one theory. So it peaked in [00:54:00] 2006 and 2007. Some beekeepers lost up to 90% of their hives. They just walked out to their Aries and found them almost empty. Queens sitting there with a handful of bees surrounded by full stores of honey, but no workers.

It was devastating. They did actually call it the be apocalypse, and here's what made it even more mysterious. It was clearly different from pesticide kills.

Jordan Harbinger: So bee unsolved mysteries. So how can you, I hate that I'm doing this. How can you be sure it's not from pesticides?

Jessica Wynn: Can you hear that?

Jordan Harbinger: What? The unsolved mystery soundtrack?

Yes, I can.

Jessica Wynn: I'm sorry I didn't, that was just went on for a long time.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I couldn't find the fade out button.

Jessica Wynn: When pesticides kill a hive though, you find piles of dead bees in the hive outside the entrance. They're are all scattered around like it's obvious. But with colony collapse disorder, there are no bodies.

The bees [00:55:00] just weren't there anymore. So scientists scrambled to figure out why. Was it pesticides, parasites, disease, stress, malnutrition? Nobody knows,

Jordan Harbinger: but it's a mystery. How have they not figured this out yet?

Jessica Wynn: I mean, the leading theory is that it's a combination of factors. So varroa mites weaken the bees, pesticides, especially neo OIDs, affecting their navigation and cognition.

Poor nutrition for monoculture diets, diseases, and the stress of being trucked around the country and the mites alone are a nightmare. You know, they're huge parasites that feed on B larva causing deformities, and they spread viruses. They can wipe out entire colonies if left untreated. They transformed beekeeping so much that people talk about pre varroa times,

Jordan Harbinger: but pesticides can't be good for them either, right?

Jessica Wynn: No. And these neo OIDs are particularly bad. There [00:56:00] are these neurotoxins that affect bee's ability to navigate, learn, and remember, including learning that waggle dance. So bees exposed to these pesticides, they might fly out to forage and then literally forget how to get home.

Jordan Harbinger: Oof. Okay. So we're giving bees dementia with pesticides.

That's sad.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: So is colony collapse disorder, is that still going on? Is that still happening?

Jessica Wynn: I mean, cases declined after 2015, but Belo overall have continued at about 30 to 40% every winter. So the mysterious vanishing isn't happening as much, but bees are still dying at alarming rates. Beekeepers have to constantly rebuild their colonies just to stay in business.

It's become normalized though, but it's definitely not sustainable.

Jordan Harbinger: So what are we doing about this? How can they fix that?

Jessica Wynn: There are efforts to breed disease resistant bees develop better treatments for varroa mites, restrict certain pesticides, you know, plant more wildflower [00:57:00] habitat. But the fundamental problem is that we've built an agricultural system that's completely dependent on mass producing and transporting billions of bees to pollinate monoculture crops and that system is killing them.

Jordan Harbinger: So we need the bees to pollinate the crops. But pollinating the crops is killing the bees.

Jessica Wynn: Correct. It's a nightmare.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So we talked all about honeybees. You mentioned there's 20,000 other species, or 19,999 other species. What about the other kinds of bees?

Jessica Wynn: Well, honeybees get all the attention because they're economically valuable.

They make the honey, they're managed by humans. They pollinate our crops, but while bees are in much worse shape. So the American Bumblebee has declined 89% in the past two decades and completely disappeared from eight states.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Declined 89%.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And it's not just bumblebees. Nearly 35% of all invertebrate pollinators worldwide face extinction and wild bees are often [00:58:00] better pollinators than honeybees for certain crops.

You know, bumblebees for example, they're better at pollinating tomatoes, blueberries, cranberries, anything that needs that buzz pollination.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? The twerking.

Jessica Wynn: Right. The twerking. But we've poured all our resources into honeybees because they're the ones we can truck around and rent out. Meanwhile, wild bee populations are crashing and barely anyone's paying attention.

Jordan Harbinger: I see memes that say if bees die, the world's over. Uh, what's going to happen if honeybees disappear?

Jessica Wynn: Well, wild bees could pick up some of the slack, but not nearly enough. We'd see massive crop failures. Food prices would skyrocket, some crops would basically disappear. Almonds, for example, would be gone.

Apples, cherries, blueberries, they would all massively be reduced. So B pollination adds about $18 billion annually. To US agriculture globally, it's in the hundreds of [00:59:00] billions. I mean, losing that would be catastrophic.

Jordan Harbinger: So what's the solution? Are scientists working on alternatives? Like where, where do we go from here?

Jessica Wynn: I mean, they're trying, there's research into self pollinating almond trees, genetically engineered bees that are more disease resistant. Even those robotic bees. But they're nowhere near efficient enough. So a real bee can visit hundreds of flowers in a day. The best those robot bees we have can do is maybe a dozen, and they're expensive, and they break constantly.

So the real solutions are pretty straightforward. I mean, stop using harmful pesticides. Plant diverse native flowers to provide better nutrition. Stop plowing up every bit of wild habitat, reduce our carbon emissions to slow climate change, and stop forcing bees to work in these massive monoculture systems.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, who's the communist now, Jessica? So basically stop doing all the things that make industrial agriculture profitable slash [01:00:00] possible. That is very unlikely to happen. So we're just going to keep doing this until the whole system collapses.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, unless we change course. But there are things individuals can do, like planting native flowers and stop using pesticides at your home.

You can support local beekeepers who aren't trucking their bees across the country. Buy organic when possible. Vote for politicians who support environmental protections. You know, create bee friendly habitats if you can.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's the classic systemic problem that requires systemic solutions, but here are some individual actions that might help marginally a tiny bit maybe.

So it's like recycling all over again.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, unfortunately.

Jordan Harbinger: Is there any good news about bees that you can share?

Jessica Wynn: Well, in Australia, when it gets too hot nectar and some flowers ferments into alcohol, which is cool. That

Jordan Harbinger: is cool.

Jessica Wynn: And bees drink it. They get drunk and they stumble around. Then there are bouncer bees at the hive entrance who won't let the [01:01:00] drunk bees back in until they sober up.

Jordan Harbinger: Bees have bouncers. Why? Why can't you go home drunk? I thought this was a free country, man.

Jessica Wynn: No, remember, this is communism.

Jordan Harbinger: All right.

Jessica Wynn: They're very strict about it. No drunk bees allowed in the hive, and bees are extremely clean, so they leave the hive specifically to poop on these cleansing flights because they refuse to mess up their home.

I mean, they'll hold it in for months during winter rather than poop inside.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, I could never be a bee. How's that? They have a lot more self-control than I do. I've been known, I, I've been known to go home from the mall just to come back and, uh, relax on the old home throne. Sorry, Jen. TMI, everyone. All right.

Please say something. Jessica, anything?

Jessica Wynn: Well, well, something. No, I want, keep going. Jordan. Something to think about when you're eating honey, is that a single worker bee only produces about one 12 of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime. So every time you pour [01:02:00] honey on your toast, you're consuming the life's work of hundreds of bees.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Well, I'm fine with it. I mean, we're monsters, but I'm fine with it.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, it's delicious. Mm-hmm. But we need to realize just how fascinating bees are. You know, honey es are hexagons because it's mathematically the most efficient shape to hold the most honey, while using the least amount of wax. A Roman scholar proposed this in 36 BCE, but it wasn't mathematically proven until 1999.

Jordan Harbinger: So bees were doing advanced geometry for millions of years before humans could even prove why it worked. That's crazy. Meanwhile, I can barely do my taxes. That's really incredible that they sort of evolved to figure this out.

Jessica Wynn: They're so cool. Another wild thing is that honey never goes bad. So archeologists found 3000 year old honey in Egyptian tombs.

One of them was in King Tuts tomb, and it was still good. So presumably if we wanted to, we could eat [01:03:00] 3000 year old King Tut honey.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Jessica Wynn: Archeologists apparently tasted it. They said it tasted just like honey.

Jordan Harbinger: There you go.

Jessica Wynn: So if your honey has an expiration date, there's a lot of stuff that's not honey in there.

Jordan Harbinger: The bees will inherit the earth, but at least they'll have honey.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, definitely. B venom contains something called melanin, which scientists think might help prevent HIV and treat rheumatoid arthritis.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Jessica Wynn: It's early research, but melanin can destroy the protective envelope around HIV, potentially preventing infection.

Jordan Harbinger: What we need to get the funding for this research, I do remember people getting bee stings or voluntarily trying to get bee stings on knees and elbows for pain relief. Is that the same thing?

Jessica Wynn: Right? Yeah. It's getting intentionally stung is called APO therapy, and the idea is that the bee venoms anti-inflammatory properties might reduce arthritis pain.

So the science is promising, but the whole just sting [01:04:00] yourself thing. That's not exactly FDA approved.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Doesn't feel like great healthcare, I suppose. But bees do seem to have a lot of power we can unlock. That's amazing.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, yeah, they're overachievers for sure. And we don't think of them this way, but bees, they can and do sleep.

So forager bees need rest, and when they do their antenna droop, their body temperature drops and they become unresponsive. Photos of it are actually kind of adorable. They look dead, but they're just napping. And if you need to wake them up. You can use the shaking signal, which is basically just vibrating near them.

Jordan Harbinger: That's really funny. So bees have a snooze button. That's why we can steal from them so easily. They just sleep it on the job. How long have humans been stealing parts of the hive? Do we know how long humans have been interacting with bees? Besides getting stung?

Jessica Wynn: People have been gathering honey from wild bees for eight to 10,000 years at least based on cave paintings and beekeeping, like actively managing colonies, [01:05:00] has been around for at least 4,000 years.

We have Egyptian tomb paintings showing people pouring honey into jars and removing it from hives.

Jordan Harbinger: So the Egyptians were also beekeepers,

Jessica Wynn: very advanced beekeepers. They had pottery hives arranged in orderly rows, which is amazing. Beekeeping was considered a highly skilled profession. Now it's a dying profession, unfortunately, between the losses, the costs, the theft, the stress, a lot of beekeepers are getting out of the business.

Although backyard beekeeping, I guess what you and Jen were doing for personal use, that does seem to be growing.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. A lost craft and it's definitely kind of one of those hipster things. We went to some beekeeping classes and it was all like guys who make their own kombucha and bread and infuse their own alcohol.

And I was the only guy that didn't have a mustache that had wax in it. But uh, like I said, we stopped beekeeping when we had kids because no time and toddler, well, toddlers plus beehives on [01:06:00] a 10,000 square foot lot is a bit tight. And Jen was getting stung here and there, even though she, she decided she didn't need the bee suit anymore.

Guess what? Still needed the bee suit. So I was like, you know what, can we get rid of these things? Wow.

Jessica Wynn: The confidence.

Jordan Harbinger: I know. Well, a lot of, a lot of beekeepers, they're kind of like, nah, I'm just going to go do this with no bee suit. And they either don't get stung or they ignore it. I don't really get it. I didn't get that far.

I kept my bee suit.

Jessica Wynn: Remember, they do recognize you, so if they like you, I guess it's possible.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I don't know if they like the guy who's in there scraping wax off the frame and stuff, but who knows? Yeah, maybe.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, it is a high stakes combo for kids, you know, don't touch the stove as hard enough.

Don't antagonize 40,000 stinging insects out back. That would be like next level parenting. But people have been doing it forever. You know, in ancient Greece, beekeeping was called an agricultural art and was discussed extensively by Aristotle. In China, there are ancient texts describing bee management.

[01:07:00] It's considered the second oldest profession.

Jordan Harbinger: The second oldest after

Jessica Wynn: use your imagination.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So humans have been keeping bees as long as, almost as long as humans have been having sex for money.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, basically.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Wow. Well, um, realizing that bees are running a more sophisticated operation than most governments, they're smarter than I am.

We've built an entire agricultural system that is simultaneously dependent on them while also killing them, and we've been robbing them for 10,000 years and we're potentially also losing them entirely.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's a lot. And remember that it's not just about honeybees, it's about all pollinators. So support policies that protect wild habitats and restrict harmful pesticides.

A great way to help bees just in your community is not buying plants at a big box store. Because that limits the foreign pesticides and things you would introduce. So individual actions do matter, but we also need big policy changes without them. We're looking at a [01:08:00] future with a lot less food, much higher prices, and ecosystems that are fundamentally broken.

Jordan Harbinger: Great. No pressure. Well, thank you for teaching us that bees quack, get wasted, have bouncers, twerk, flowers might cure HIV and are better at math than most of us. This has been enlightening and terrifying in equal measure.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, and remember, don't make enemies with bees. They know what you look like.

Jordan Harbinger: Too late, way too late.

But I'll try to make amends by planting some flowers. Thanks, Jess. This episode is I hate myself. Sure. To create a lot of buzz. And thank you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday directly to me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find Jessica on her Substack Between the Lines and Where Shadows Linger, and we'll link to those in the show notes. Her work is also on Instagram @nevermetjessicas. That's plural. This show is [01:09:00] created an association with PodcastOne.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. Yeah, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, we of course, try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it's fact checked. So consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.

You're about to hear a preview that may completely reframe how you think about nuclear power. What if the energy source we've been taught to fear is actually one of the safest and cleanest tools we have?

JHS Trailer: We're very familiar with electricity. You get home, you turn on the lights, you charge your phone, charge your computer.

Do all the things that we do without thinking twice about electricity, right? But electricity is a [01:10:00] secondary source of energy. The primary source of energy that we use are coal, oil, methane, gas, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Nuclear is actually the largest source of clean energy in the United States.

It's the second largest source of clean energy in the world. And what I mean by that is that whenever we make electricity with nuclear, we're not releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or even particulate matter. So there are no emissions that happen whenever you're creating electricity with nuclear.

So it's just to say, you know, everything that's related to nuclear accidents in Chernobyl is completely overblown. 'cause people tend to think generally like everybody died and it became this wasteland that nobody can go in. And so it's interesting, right, that we have all this weird fears about nuclear when the facts and the reality just point to it being actually extremely safe.

The biggest energy disaster in history was actually a hydropower dam collapse, so entire villages were swept [01:11:00] away. It's estimated that 200,000 people died. He would need like at least 200 chernobyls happening every single year for nuclear to be as dangerous as fossil fuels. What about the 4 million premature deaths from burning fossil fuels?

Why are people so afraid of nuclear?

Jordan Harbinger: Hear the science behind the stigma with Isabelle Boemeke on episode 1277 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.