 humanity definitely needs to pay attention. There's sort of an apocryphal quote that was attributed to Einstein about if all the bees are gone, then, well, all the humans die off. And Einstein never really said that. But about a third of the world's food, fiber, and beverage are either helped or created from that intimate pollination, that mutualistic dance between flowers and bees that has been going on for about 130 million years since the Cretaceous. So as dinosaurs, big sauropods would have been lumbering along, there were bees visiting flowers during those times. So for the about 1400 agricultural crops grown around the world, at least 80% or so of them require pollination by not just honeybees, but native bees, flies, wasps, beetles, butterflies and moths, and then some vertebrates too, you know, hummingbirds and nectar bats, that sort of thing. So we do need to pay attention. Welcome to Inside Ideas with me, Mark Buckley. We will be speaking to regenerative futurists, gain changers, on systemic change, out desirable futures with those who want to see us on the right side of history, brought to you by 1.5 Media, Innovators Magazine, and sponsored by the Alohas Regenerative Foundation. Stephen Buchman is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas. Stephen is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees and an adjunct professor with the Department of Entomology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, a fellow of the Linien Society of London. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers and 11 books, including the Forgotten Pollinators with Gary Nabhan, also by Island Press, and most recently, The Reason for Flowers, Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives by Scribner. Buchman is a frequent guest on many public media venues, including MPR, All Things Considered, and Science Friday. Reviews of his books have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time and Discover magazine, and other national publications. He is an engaging public speaker on the topics of flowers, pollinators, and the natural world. His many awards include the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award and an NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book. For many of us, the buzzing of a bee elicits panic, but the next time you hear that low sound, that low droning sound, look closer. The bee has navigated to this particular spot for a reason using a fascinating set of tools. She may be using her sensitive old factory organs, which provide a 3D scent map of her surroundings. She may be following visual landmarks or instructions relayed by a hive mate. She may be tracking electrostatic traces left on flowers by other bees. What a bee knows, the book that we will be discussing here today, exploring thoughts, memories, and personalities of bees and vices to follow bees, mysterious path, and experience their alien world. Stephen, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here and to talk about my, say, favorite subjects, you know, bees and flowers. I loved your book. I read it cover to cover. I normally would read it a few times, especially with such a fascinating topic. We were shortly pressed from the launch of your book, March 7 worldwide, was when Island Press released it, and Julie Green from Island Press was nice enough to send over your information and was immediately interested because on Inside Ideas and the Alohas Regenerative Foundation, we do a lot around agriculture, around farming, around pollination, and around the things that go on in the world with insects and also those destructive things about chemicals and fertilizers and pesticides that kind of disrupt those beautiful workers who help us pollinate and help us in farming and ag and in our world. And so I wanted to read it because I wanted to really get to know more about bees and pollinators and that they have a language. As you open the book up, not only do you kind of say, we're going to talk about something that could feel like, you know, this alien world or this alien species and how they view and see the world, but you tickle the fact that if we're not careful on how we read it, it could be a pornographic novel because there's quite a lot of talk about mating of bees and insects, pollination, and the things that they do that is how they see the world, how they interact, and what their life consists of, which really just immediately drew me in, not because I'm a sex maniac around porno, but it was just really fascinating that, you know, the majority of their lives is reproduction. And another wonderful fact is that not all the bees are honeybees, you know, that the majority are others. And so the book just on and on goes out through one discovery after the other of these ah-ha, wow, inspiring moments that I thank you for, that I hope we can not read the book for everybody or rehash the entire things, but tickle and tease it enough for those people who've heard us or heard the mention of bees and pollinators in the past, but what's the buzz about? What is all this science and entomology about that I have no clue that's going on around me every day? And so my first question is why this fear factor around insects and bees and this initial like we've got to get bug spray, we've got to get something to kill them or we were going to get stung, something that's going on. Why do we have that? Yeah, it's I've wondered about that myself and it definitely seems to be a East-West cultural factor. So I'm actually heading on a short vacation at the end of the month to go to Japan and in Japan and China there's great reverence in their art and culture for insects and many myths and stories about them, but and for example in Japan or China you might have people keeping crickets as little songsters, you know, in little bamboo cages in their homes where whereas in the United States, in Arizona where I live, the cricket on the hearth probably most likely elicits a shoe thrown at the little songster, you know, or like you said reaching out for a can of raid or insecticide which we use to not just poison them, but happily ignorantly poisoning ourselves as well. But the stinging factor anytime something small and buzzing, making a buzzing noise flies past us, we instantly sort of jerk away and yeah at least in the West there's this fear of oh my god there's a bee, it's gonna come after me people say he's gonna sting me, first of all that's wrong, the boys don't sting, the females are using a stinger that through their evolution is a modified ovipositor but now it's this defensive weapon that has venom so we can be envenomated, but you know that be the flies by your ear is not you know hell bent on stinging you and one sting is not going to kill you the only about 1% or perhaps less than 1% of the human population is actually allergic to to be venom, I mean that's not to make little of those people that need to carry around epinephrine in the form of a prescription epi-pan or that sort of thing but yeah we just we just have this as I said in the West I think kind of an innate fear of small insects and we want to stomp them or or reach for a kind of insecticide or maybe to have some peace of mind I guess if you will by the some some people have these electric bug zappers um I just kind of cringe when I go to a party and somebody's got one of these things and you know I hear these zap of a lot of fried insects and generally they're trying to get rid of mosquitoes but mostly what's hitting those electric grids or moths or flies or other totally harmless insects so um total it's crazy do you think there's an aspect of it that has to do with just the buzz the sound that they make not necessarily that somehow that's like a larger siren or something that triggers humanity or at least the work western world I mean I've seen it before and really when you do nothing or or go about your business it's not like they're going to chase you down you've kind of invaded their space yeah I mean even for the so-called killer bees the Africanized honey bees which we've had in in my state of Arizona for the last 20 or so years um if if one of those Africanized bees is on a flower she's just collecting nectar or pollen and you can literally flicker off the flower with your finger and she's not going to come back and you know zap you between the eyes the dangerous thing is to go near one of their colonies where you can experience the guard bees and then they can be reacting to the co2 in our breath dark colors fast movement so that's why beekeepers like to look like the Pillsbury doboy so you you need to be in white overalls and move slowly and carefully so if the bees interpret you as a bear something or a skunk that's trying to come in and steal their honey they're going to act appropriately which is to defend their food and their home and I also like how you talk about that in the book as well there's different roles for different bees in areas and like you say that the ones collecting the pollen or doing the pollinating as well are different than the guard bees that are closer to the hive and so there's you know there's some different ways of looking at that world and for us um whether it's them who see our world as this alien species or we see them as this alien species it's interesting the more knowledge you get and and that's what I got through through the book as well it's just on how they think and how they act and how they mate and and what the populations another big factor um that that was really interesting to me and you know a big dummy as I am I would say I I didn't know that the the majority of the honey bees are actually not majority at all they're kind of the smaller portion and that um they're uh and then the difference between social bees and and non-social bees that that are so the numbers I thought were totally backwards but you know to find out that it's so interesting how that works and I'd love it if you to kind of explain that and and how that works and tell us a little bit more about that sure um when I go around and give talks and I ask people to name various bees they know well obviously the honey bee is number one and then some of them will know the charismatic black and yellow bumblebees and and maybe if they're really enlightened they might know carpenter bees or sweat bees but that's that's three or four right out of we have 21 000 described species of bees around the world and and the vast majority of them are ground nesting and people look at me like I'm crazy what bees are in the ground um solitary bees that are non-social I like to think of them as single moms with a family to feed uh after they've mated dad's gone and the female has to go out and find an appropriate place of bear soil that's close to the flowering plants that provide her food and she digs a tunnel and then at the end of the tunnel can be one up to a dozen or more brood cells and she basically uh provisions these with a mixture of pollen and nectar and they they usually make a little pea sized ball of it and then lay an egg on it and basically seal the cell up and then she may go on to make other cells within the nest and she may make several nests during her lifetime but she basically seals that up and so for those solitary bee females there's no contact between the the mother and the the progeny her her larvae so it's basically like you you put your baby in a room and put all the food and toys in there and basically lock the door and said good luck see you when you grow up so that that's the lifestyle and in the most cases these solitary bees uh remain underground for a whole year so the males and females that mated to produce this next generation developing underground usually takes a year so if you see them the spring then they're gone the only thing keeping the species going alive are those larvae and then pupae and then adults below ground but generally it's a one year one year life cycle that's uh that's uh those are the solitary bees would you I think in the book you said it was over 80 percent of the bees are solitary is that correct or is it more than that um it's it's actually about um well yeah about 80 percent and then we have a mix of about 10 percent that are social and then there are some other bees that that don't make an honest living at all and they're eclipto parasites they uh hang out near the entrances of nests that other honest hardworking bees uh make and they sneak in and so it's as if to give a vertebrate example it's like a cowbird that would sneak an egg into a host bird nest and then the mother rears those foster chicks and so these clupta parasitic bees do that as well um although the one genus that is kind of my favorite clupta parasite genus has a strange name triapelus and the adults look sort of like zebras they're black and white striped but they're when they come out of the egg their egg hatches before the host egg and there are these long skinny evil looking larvae that have big ice tong like mandibles and so their first job is to seek out the host egg and kill it and eat it and then they'll go ahead and eat the provisions within that nest so about 10 percent of the world's bees are like that and the average person in fact the average entomologist would never even encounter or experience that kind of be lifestyle at all so around the world there are just incredible amazing life histories for bees that do different things they're bees that we call the polyester bees uh and they don't wear little retro leisure suits but they do turn chemicals called macrocyclic lactones into little wrappers that protect their developing larvae from pathogens and keep them from drying out um I mentioned the clupta parasitic bees uh then we get into bees that are highly social so you have like a bumblebee colony where a bumblebee queen could be mated in the fall and then she will go hang out in kind of a little hibernation chamber over the winter but then in the spring she will go and find an area for a nest and she'll produce a few tiny workers which are her first brood and then those gradually take over gorging for nectar and pollen outside the nest and she stays at home just as basically an egg layer um and so the bumblebees have an annual cycle where once the colony is really big in the fall they produce males and virgin females that go out on mating flights and then the colony pretty much crashes and dies and then you have the mated queens which disperse into the field and they'll often go use abandoned mouse burrows or something maybe with some grass or other insulation as their nest um then you have the very familiar western honeybee apis molyphora which is known to most people around the world and is our Jill our heroine of pollination and they're easily trucked around different countries to pollinate agricultural crops and and those colonies are essentially immortal they're they're perennial uh you have bees foraging every day of the year as long as weather permits down to about 50 or 55 degrees Fahrenheit and uh they're bringing in a huge huge amount of nectar processing it ripening it into honey getting rid of the water to get it down to about 20 water 80 sugar storing it in those beautiful hexagonal capped combs and then being able to use that as sort of fossil fuel uh fossil energy in the form of sugars that came from the nectar and and those those colonies are quite quite interesting as i said they can the queen can live for two or three years uh they can reclaim themselves or a beekeeper can do it uh i've i've worked on feral honeybee colonies here in the sonoran desert of arizona where they're occupying rock cavities and below the colony uh is this sort of black gunk that i've analyzed and it contains pollen and other things that are dropping out of the colony so you can actually do a bit of forensic palaeonology and identify those pollen grains from these what i call debris middens from below the colony and know what they were eating so for example in arizona africanized honeybees are eating slightly different things than the regular western honeybee so just just amazing fun things that you can do by uh sort of looking into bee pantries and that's something i've done my whole career by trying to identify pollen grains and figure out hey what are the bees going to for food in in the beginning of the book you said you you have been stung before and you know that was one of the first things we tried to address is kind of the fear of being stung or the fear of insects and bees and and why we have that um you're still alive and kicking doing well thank goodness um and it brought you probably not running around with epipen but this is your your choice of study to to do this and to teach and to to research this why why did you choose this and and why has it become so important and beyond your own personal passions and reasons for for diving into this is there a reason why humanity should take a little bit better notice of pollinators and of bees and and of all the many species that that we have in our world and maybe are losing yeah definitely um would get back to my personal aspect i think by about the third grade uh when i was raising caterpillars and uh chasing butterflies and doing all that sort of stuff i was taking note of bees and other insects and certainly by high school i was keeping honey bee colonies and pretty much at that time as a junior in high school actually started working with a local college professor who later became my mentor my entree into the world of pollination and eventually did a master's degree with with him before i left to go to another university for my doctoral research um so i've been bitten by the bee bug for for a long time and i've never lost my passion or fascination for figuring out their hidden lives and their sensory modalities and all these cool behaviors that they do and humanity definitely needs to pay attention there's sort of an apocryphal quote that was attributed to einstein about if all the bees are gone then well all the humans die off and einstein never really said that but about a third of the world's food and not just food but food fiber and beverage crops uh are either helped or created from that intimate pollination that mutualistic dance between flowers and bees that has been going on for about 130 million years since the cretaceous so as dinosaurs big sauropods would have been lumbering along uh there were bees visiting flowers during those times so for the about 1400 agricultural crops grown around the world at least 80 percent or so of them require pollination by not just honeybees but native bees um flies wasps beetles butterflies and moths and then some vertebrates too you know hummingbirds and nectar bats that sort of thing so we do need to pay attention and i like to point out that it's not just pollination that is the ecosystem service that bees bring us but i talked about those ground nesting bees those females tunneling in the ground are acting like earthworms so that's what we call uh as bioturbation and that's bringing air and water into the soil and then at the end of the life cycle for those larval bees since they're eating all that nitrogen rich pollen well and they poop it out so the larval bee feces are acting as fertilizer for those soils as well so really some amazing things that that bees are doing but you also talk about vertebrates i want to just before you move on too much uh are about worms um and it's really funny because that story you just tell is kind of a bee acting as an aerator which is also kind of what what some of these earthworms do but they earthworms also leave these castings behind which are also great for soils as well and so um i'm i'm positive a lot of people are probably shocked or have never heard that this is a beard bees an aerator and it's also leaving these form of castings and waste behind that's a fabulous fertilizer that kind of nourishes the wood wide web and and the soils that we have as as a positive for that as well as all the other pollination factors that come into that as well so um it's amazing the deeper that we go the more we uncover on on this this journey how these aha moment these moments are like wow i didn't know that it just you know uh is so interesting yeah yeah the hidden lives of bees that most people don't have a clue about because we're afraid of being stung or something but of those well we have probably about 100 or 110 crops in the US and i think i mentioned about 1400 around the world and we have been losing our pollinators um research in Germany and Sweden have shown really drastic uh very frightening losses of bees uh surfid flies other pollinators uh sometimes 20% losses or so over just several decades and here in the United States we have about 50 species of those fuzzy black and yellow bumblebees and about five of them are really in trouble the rusty patched bumblebee bombas of a finnace and then one that my late phd advisor Robin Thorpe from UC Davis had worked on uh Franklin's bumblebee bombas franklin eye which of the 250 species of bumblebees around the world most of them living in China that had the smallest range of any bumblebee and um in the 90s Robin went out and looked for it and was seeing drastically uh smaller and smaller populations every year until i think about the year 2006 he didn't see them anymore so in that case we think what's happening is what scientists have called uh pathogen spillover so to make a long story short there were companies in europe in israel and belgium and a few other countries that were breeding bumblebees to pollinate crops like tomatoes uh in greenhouses and so they came to the united states and collected bumblebee queens in florida and some other southeastern states and brought them back to europe and bred them alongside the uh one of the european bumblebees bombas terrestris and they swapped pathogens so these microbial pathogens got into the us stocks of bumblebees and when they brought them back uh they were using them in greenhouses to pollinate tomatoes and other crops and those greenhouses are not bee proof right all the louvers and things to adjust for temperature well tomatoes have pollen but they don't have nectar and so they're feeding the bees with some artificial nectar in the colony but the bees like to get outside and visit real flowers so they were leaving little trails of these microbial pathogens on the flowers which got transferred to our local bumblebee so that really is why we have four or five species that are highly threatened and one that is presumably extinct in the us and the same thing is happening around the world maybe not due to pathogen spillover but what we're doing to our landscapes in terms of converting natural ecosystems into uh urban areas for housing and and shopping malls and parking lots and all the stuff that we're doing that is destroying or altering habitat for bees i mean that the tide of food is probably the best opportune moment for me to ask you the next question and i told you we're going to talk about it and it's really not your focus area or your specialty but i know you you have some knowledge you've heard about it you've you've been in that area probably once knew the numbers and they're always changing so we hear how the um ives and honey bees are kind of going down in population the pollinators are going down in population but yet even regardless of the china united states issue that we had with uh some honey issues uh i believe it was about 2018 there was a big time that there there was a lot going on and then 2019 as well um that we were we were having more honey produced than there were actually colonies out there of of bee lives to collect honey from and i'm just the regardless of what numbers you pull out of the air i just i'm not sure how that how that jives and so there's got to be some form of man-made intervention or manipulation in that but um when you when you speak about how vital it is for agriculture for pollination to to help with our food crops and what we what we see see out of that and that these hives are moved around or are bred and and you know kind of crossed and then moved around so that we can keep the the the food system going or keep keep things moving along that not a not necessarily all our interventions are really good can you kind of give us more insight into that world or what your thoughts or ideas are and how how we've gotten to that point and if you see it maybe improving or what we need to do to get to back to stance to maybe support those hives to to get more hives to to produce honey naturally to get more pollinators so that we're not you know running into to the problems that we're running into sure yeah well the first thing you mentioned um has happened several times during the past decade or the past couple decades but uh around the world there have been some some bad actors whether they're in the us or europe or china and it's it's pretty easy to adulterate honey to sort of produce man-made instead of natural be made honey and usually uh what's happening is that people are take buying uh railroad car loads literally tankers full of high fructose corn syrup which tastes very sweet and it's in tons of products and especially a lot of processed foods not the healthiest thing for us but it's cheap to buy and then you can either sell that as honey or you can cut honey and as you say you can end up having a lot more honey than the bees could ever have um have produced that's that's really true um i'll just before we leave the honey subject i'll mention my my vote for the world's tastiest honey so i've done work with the indigenous Mayans in southern mexico in the state of quintana oro uh south of cancun and north of belize and they have a bee that they've tended for millennia actually back three or four thousand years and it's called shunan cob and it's the sacred lady bee or royal bee and it's it's not our western honey bee apis malephora but it is among a group of like 400 species around the world of stingless bees they have no stinger uh but that doesn't mean they're defenseless but they do make an incredible incredible honey uh that is used not just for food but it's used uh medicinally i know they use it in um eye preparations to help prevent cataracts and i think it's also used in childbirth but it's an amazing amazing intensely floral honey so whenever i'm in that area i always try and buy some from the mayan beekeepers and attend their bee ceremonies because we can't legally get that honey into the united states um back to pollination the thing i like to say is that well we have one of 11 species of true honeybees in the genus apis apis malephora and it gets used around the world well in china they have another apis apis sarana which is used agriculturally but we need to have a just like the stock market if you play the stock market we need to have a balanced portfolio of pollinators not just one so many of my colleagues um formally i worked for the u.s department of agriculture and there's a lab in logon utah where they have developed uh leaf cutter bees which actually were came from eurasia originally but now they're managed in canada and the us and i mentioned the bumble bees so there are um the leaf cutter bees there are bees called mason bees in the genus osmia which for example will pollinate do a great job of pollinating sweet cherries and other tree fruit crops alfalfa leaf cutter bees which pollinate alfalfa and the bumble bees so fortunately there are some scientists and some growers in the u.s and in europe who are developing these as alternative pollinators so they put some redundancy back into mother nature so if you look at almost any of the whatever's the right number uh perhaps 350 000 species of flowering plants in the world in very rare cases is that plant pollinated by just one kind of insect i mean yeah maybe for a uh a fig wasp or yucca moth there's a one-to-one correspondence but generally there can be half a dozen or a dozen or more pollinators that visit that crop plant or wild plant so fortunately there is redundancy um worst worst case scenario if every honey bee on the planet were to drop dead right now all these other players all these other pollinators would step up to the plate and we wouldn't totally lose our crops we'd have some lowering of the pollination efficiency and some lessened crop yields but we wouldn't totally lose our food supply well that's good to know and it's nice to to know that you know i think they play a role that diversity of just not just one pollinator that we have that biodiversity in in our practices and all over in the way we farm the way we grow food the way we make sure we have healthy soils we also need to make sure we have a healthy insect population that are pollinating and doing their other jobs there's some natural pests reductions through certain insects and bugs and things that are kind of helpful and different types of weeds that can act as good nutrients of brown matter and that for the soils as well i'll bring all sorts of good things dandelions for grass and stuff are great for bees and is it pollinators or just bees but yeah there's a lot of good things out there that are really vital to to have that diversity we've left the topic of honey but in in the process of being able to discover is it corn syrup rice syrup is it some kind of a alterated honey out there the reason why it's not always uncovered is from what i understood there's only like four or five really good places to do the the check to see is that 100 pure honey and i know two very reputable places are in germany and i don't know they also do a lot for the united states but it's a lot of work and and and requirement to say hey is this pure 100 pure honey or has there been has it been mixed with something else and i don't know exactly the tools they use but the reason i bring it bring that up is that and your work with the with bees you guys are doing amazing experiments to see the size of their brain and to do these scans and and and to down to this microscopic detail on on what bees are and and all sorts of things as far as putting color dots on them and kind of trying to put plants upside down and tilt them to see how they can align and guide in and i mean it's it's definitely alien sci-fi to me the way um you know the you you guys have worked and tunneled into that so i mean just on the flip side as it's it's just as hard to kind of adulterate and fake and to discover that fake but the discovery of what you're finding out about a bee's brain and their behavior and and and all these things there's a lot of science and technology and things that you guys are using that i read that was just amazing um that there at one point in the book you're you mentioned that there's like a uh mic mic is it a microscopic recording that you can do of of a bee to kind of see that whole film process that is normally hidden it's it's not seen you can't see on the honeycomb structure um that was kind of uh uh debated or controversial that they say well we can't always see that there's not always a way to see on how that works and there was a process there he says well do it but it's it's not not very normal um can you tell us about that or do you do you know that section that i'm talking about there yeah um just do a really quick comment about the adulterated honey so there are labs in germany and the us that use pollen grains to tell if it is let's say orange blossom honey or tupelo honey or alfalfa or buckwheat honey whatever you want so they'll take the honey they'll dilute it one to one with water they'll spin it in a centrifuge make a pellet to that and then there's some other chemicals um it's a process called acetalysis and then they'll examine that sediment under the microscope at you know 400 magnification or so and you know if you see citrus pollen grains there's pretty good chance that hey yeah that's orange blossom honey if you don't see any pollen or you see the wrong kind of pollen then it's then it's mislabeled yeah um but i i lead from exploring this alien wacky sensory world of how bees see and smell and taste and hear their world which can be very very different than ours um to experiments that colleagues of mine around the world have used to explore i mean you think of um bees let's take a honey bee brain which is the most studied bee brain so far um it's about the size of a poppy seed and it has 1 million neurons nerve cells it might have up to a billion synaptic connection so there's a lot packed in that little space uh the brain is not well it is bilaterally symmetric but they're not left and right hemispheres like ours but there are giant optic lobes that process all of this visual information that come in from about 5 000 different omatidia the little eye facets sensory cells and their compound eyes and then the the antennae the feelers that is where they're getting information on floral scents and other smells along with sensing water molecules in the air so there are these places where the nerve endings wind up and this is not my field but there are beautiful photographs of tracings so that the nerves can be injected with fluorescent dyes and then you can see let's say where in the eye to where in the brain these nerves are going and we can figure out kind of map the neural connections of the brain uh since since i am a wild mushroom hunter uh there are things inside the bee brain giant things that are called mushroom bodies that are kind of central processing areas for higher functions uh and perhaps areas where uh memories are consolidated i mean bees can remember things for hours or several days or perhaps in some cases throughout their entire lives but yeah i do make make various comparisons to our giant 80 to 100 billion uh nerve cell human brains but down to what that little tiny poppy seed brain can do in the bee which is really a lot and we're just finding that out oh in the last i would say 10 or 20 years well and even the last several years um my colleague lauras chitka in london has done he and his students have done amazing things with bee learning and figuring out what bees are doing that's amazing indeed do you um there's you know last probably 15 or more 20 years more gene benes and her biomimicry the biomimicry institute and things and how they look at everything from birds to to sharks and things to kind of how to use biomimicry in the world do you ever see this complexity of a bee brain or their their vision or how they see the world that we ever try to replicate that or use that in in our current technology or is that already going on um i think a bit of that is going on i guess i think more in terms of um biomimicry in terms of the physical structures on the bees that are just we're just barely looking at so just like some plant seeds you know sort of we're like velcro millions of years before we thought of velcro there are hairs on the bee bodies that grab on to pollen grains just due to the physical structure or perhaps aided by electrostatic charges um that's something that could be investigated bees are chemists par excellence so for example some bee larvae uh their their skins their integument have glands that end up coating them with kind of an acrid secretion it's almost a harsh phenolic smell and as far as i know these have not been identified but seems to me that these are natural products that the bee larvae are producing to combat soil-borne fungi and other pathogens so these are things that are uh in their chemical arsenal to keep them healthy and safe and so we could perhaps do some bioprospecting for important chemicals from bees that could could help us in our human lives in in writing this book and you've written numerous books what what was the most important message that you wanted to deliver to the readers i mean at the end you kind of talk about the things that you you couldn't fit into the book or into the chapter that you wanted to portray and there wasn't a good fit but what what made you start out on this this journey it was really to communicate um the bees have a memory that they their their sex that they speak that they see the world different that they are extremely smart and have a even though it's a a small brain it's pretty amazing what was it specifically that led you to to go in this direction yeah a good question and a number of those reasons um i think for the most part i wanted to sort of jump outside of my comfort zone a little bit and get um outside of the normal pollination research that i do although i did want to make sure that i was up to date on the latest sensory findings you know for example we've known for years that honey bees and other bees can see ultraviolet light that we can't see so that even though we and bees share what is called a trichromatic vision so that humans see red green blue as primary colors bees see green blue and ultraviolet as their colors so unless we use a special filter over a camera lens we don't really see what they do but we can through technology see as if we had bee vision but i i really wanted to dive into some breaking news sort of about bees and things that are definitely a little more controversial for example some of these topics um pain uh i'm still amazed that probably at least half of the scientists that i talk to don't believe that bees feel pain and i think this is a little bit wrong headed basically uh we know that bees have no susceptors no deception so this means that they can move away from noxious stimuli also just personal observations if i have a bee in my lab or outside and let's say i catch the bee in a net and then pinch its leg with a forceps it turns around and tries to sting me and produces an alarm buzz well well to me that hasn't proved that the bee can absolutely feel pain as far as we do but certainly indicates that it's in some discomfort it doesn't like it and let me go so um those topics i mean i i brought in um work of barret kline on sleep we know that bees sleep for six to ten hours per day uh they go into these rigid sleep postures uh early in the sleep phase they're actually moving the the antennae the feelers rhythmically and later there's no movement but you might even think of that um rhythmic antenna movement almost as rapid eye movement rapid eye movement right rem sleep uh so we don't actually know all of the things that are happening when bees sleep in fact we don't actually know most of what people are doing and more we're sleeping but we think that memories are consolidated during the sleep and they need to have it just like we need to have sleep and and suffer when we're sleep deprived um other topics you know i talk about i suppose the the the the strangest one to get at is sentience um there are many different definitions of sentience the simplest one yeah the simplest one would just be awareness of of pain but then you would get into you know other emotions and i don't my colleague lauras chitka in england who wrote an excellent book last year the mind of a bee um thinks that bees may have certain uh emotions and i'm i'm i'm i'm not sure that i'm willing to go quite that far uh don't know that we'll we'll ever really know um but um there they're like let let me bring up one other thing so i i do think that bees have a primitive form of consciousness i do think that they feel pain uh i do think that they have some level of sentience and they're self aware i'll give an example of one experiment that was done with bumblebee so insects don't grow as adults once you've eaten all that food is a larva when you come out as an adult that's your size you don't grow as an adult but basically bumblebees come in small medium and large size as the workers because of eating different amounts of food during their larval development so you could have skinny normal and fat bees well bees were trained to fly through a slit to get to a food reward on the other side and the fat bees knew they were fat so they had to turn sort of sideways and move their legs in a different position to get through that opening to get to the food so to me that experiment uh is not difficult to understand the bees knew their size so they they had a level of of self-awareness that's amazing yeah i mean the other my my favorite experiments are the type that are done by other colleagues peter kevin at guelph university in canada or lars chitka and these folks have trained bees to find hidden rewards and to use sort of a tool to extract them so for example they took little circular plastic discs and drill shallow holes in them and then put sugar water in there because the bees are sugar junkies they want the sugar reward and they attached a tool a string to that but everything was hidden under a plexiglass shield so they could see it and they were trained that okay that's where the food is but to get it they had to bite and tug and tug and tug and pull at that string to pull that whole little sugar sled out from under the cover and there are great videos on youtube that you can go to see this um to go even as amazing as that is they took little groups of bees in a cage that were held nearby so they could see what the trained bees had figured out to get the reward but they had no experience with the tool or the apparatus but when the bees that had just watched the trained bees work that system were released they instantly went and pulled the string so and got the reward and this is something that we call social learning so that they were learning something something simply by watching other bees that knew what to do figure it out that's just that's absolutely amazing there there's a couple of things I want to touch upon and I don't know if you've seen them so they're obviously in that you're in the United States and Arizona there's been this big controversy lately around tick talk actually ever since it came out them in China but there's been some fabulous things around bees on on this tick talk not only people grow kind of being that being their own beekeepers and keeping hives and and making their own honey but then going out and rescuing hives that have kind of gotten trapped under a barn or hidden somewhere and so that you know weird places that they're going to get them out clear to what I assume and I hope I'm assuming right are these these beekeepers I think and one of them is even one of the Mayan beekeepers say you talked about your favorite honey where they're in these huge what seemed to me like these huge Amazon trees way up just big old you know like the redwood forest huge trees where they have these really wild bee cones of of honey is just sticking out there and they're climbing up this amazing tree and then hacking it off and the bees are you know seemed pretty big and that but it's just incredible to see this not only because it's there's this interesting it's like watching national geographic the nature channel but on tick talk but that there's this huge awareness rising of people like there's a diversity of bees and movement and people saying that I've never seen that before I thought bees was a honey bee and it was you know that was it and we've obviously talked about that what are you seeing in the movement are you seeing a lot of positive movements in that direction have you heard or seen anything and what what are the trends that you're seeing moving forward and and new awareness of these environmentalists the climate activists that are moving in the future those who are talking about let's let's make homes for the bees let's do things positive in that direction what what are you seeing and how do you feel about that yeah well first I'll go back very briefly to the I'm not a tick talk user so I haven't seen that but I I have made eight trips to Peninsular Malaysia and worked with a gentleman an indigenous Malay grandfather Pakte in the Kada region of Malaysia right up against the border of Thailand and I wrote a children's book with my co-author Diana Cohn from Sausalito California and it's called the bee tree and we detail how in this case a grandfather and two teenagers related to him and climb these trees 240 feet tall you know 60 meter tall tropical rainforest trees the tallest ones in Asia to basically be honey robbers to take the honey on these giant parabolic combs that can be one to two meters across and these bees are are ferocious you know they are the world's largest honey bee and you don't want them coming down to sting you because it's not a pleasant situation but they they take torches up into the tree and they bang the torches and it creates this cascade of sparks that go fall to the ground and bees are often said to be red blind where their vision is shifted into the UV and away from the red unlike ours but somehow they're seeing infrared wavelengths because they can see these incandescent sparks and basically it moves all of the bees off the comb and then they're pretty much unprotected so they can cut off the comb and then send it down in leather pails and in the meantime they're chanting to hitim manas which was this legend from thousands of years ago and the rig vita just fascinating fascinating stuff that we talk about in this children's book illustrated children's book the bee tree but through through all of this is the honey at least worth it is it honey is it very good okay I have tried it but I you know I've climbed up the primitive ladders on the side of the the trees up about 20 feet to pose for photos you know selfies but that was it I'm not going up to the branches that are way way up there but I imagine it's pretty I bet I mean that's you talk about adventures climbing Everest that's like the the Everest of honey honey adventure so I don't know it sounds pretty amazing so the hope the honey tastes really good right with that there's one there's one more thing I wanted to kind of say with that that tie and then I want you to finish that story in this whole movement there's also been a lot of a couple startups one is the flow hive around honey that they've created this new hive that they just kind of flip a switch and it's supposed to be better for is that the case are are these new type of hives that are coming out to make it easier for people or to easier to get honey and to kind of be a beekeeper yourself without you know a lot of the the thing a lot of the the knowledge the the bee suits and all the other things around it is that a smart decision is that a good positive direction to see us going in and how do you feel about that yeah I I think it's a good idea I've seen the advertisements for the flow hive I've wanted to buy one and try it out myself I haven't done that but certainly anything that gets hobbyists into appreciating and keeping bees who knows my hope is that if they get turned on by honey bees then they'll want to find out about leaf cutter bees and mason bees and orchid bees and even vulture bees all these other crazy bees out there ground nesting bees you know you can be a beekeeper and you can be very gentle and not kill bees I know there are people who are devout vegans who don't want to eat honey because they they believe that the bees are killed or somehow tortured to get the honey and I mean it is possible to take honey from a honey bee colony without harming any bees but when it's done on a commercial scale there are bees that are are killed just because they're doing it so so fast and processing so many hives you mentioned I think earlier we talked about moving bees around but I did my doctoral research at UC Davis near Sacramento in the central valley of California and that's home to about 800,000 acres of almonds and most of the world's almond nut crop is grown there so they bring in a million colonies to pollinate those almonds and because the colonies are crowded and there's sort of zero tolerance for weedy flowering plants because they need to have the ground below the almond trees either on plastic or bare earth so they literally shake the trees to fly the nuts off and then vacuum them up the bees can't experience a lot of problems with diseases and then pesticides and then when those colonies are moved around the beeswax acts like a sick building syndrome so all those agrochemicals get caught up in the wax and then it's like you know that new car smell not so great for you because like formaldehyde and other things are outgassing well that honey bee colony is is outgassing as well yeah so just just touching on some of these things I'm so I am a fan of hobbyist honey beekeeping or people putting up drilled boards or straws to invite safe and sane leaf cutter and mason bees in that won't sting at all they don't produce any honey but now you have pollinator pests that you and your family can derive a lot of enjoyment from watching them bringing in cut leaves or different color pollen that sort of thing um what what I am uh a little upset about is that in some cases for example in the United States the US Forest Service has been allowing commercial beekeepers to come into national lands and to put hundreds or thousands of honey bee colonies in one spot and since those honey bees are super organisms and so good at doing the waggle dance and the scouts go out and find food and then they can take down the standing crop of nectar and pollen to the detriment of native ground nesting bees or other pollinators you can have too much of a good thing so you can saturate an area with honey bees that really isn't good for the ecosystem and and other pollinators so I say let's be mindful of stocking rates for honey bees just like people are mindful about stocking rates for cattle on various lands so that's that's one thing I wanted to to mention that's fabulous advice and I appreciate those are these are all great little insights that kind of not only raise our awareness as you go throughout your book and I recommend it highly that everybody reads it and we're only tickling and teasing it a little bit we're not really reading it for everyone but it there is so much to learn and to get out of it I personally have adult children and I remember when my kids were younger my youngest daughter she really wanted always to be an entomologist matter of fact I just bought her the book from E.L. Wilson Ender Wilson the naturalist and yeah that's a great book it's a great book and he just passed away and sadly but I always have had this respect but I always also had the thought and and you you touch about it and you you you talked about it in the book and you touch about do bees feel do do pollinators feel does there you know they are self aware things like that but in entomology there's a lot of you know insects and bugs and bees kind of dissected and put up on these beautiful pictures and then sold and and you know put a pinprick in and and things and labeled and kind of put on display and and that and I understand for science or for knowledge and things like that and it's a I'm sure that's much different than chemicals pesticides raid bug spray you know kind of just on this war path to get rid of bees and insects because you just don't know or you think they're bugging you how do you feel about that entomology process where you see I know just in my region here there's probably 15 different stores that just sell bees and insects and butterflies and and these things and and is that a good thing is that a good thing to raise awareness and I mean that's why I asked you the question before about the tick tock and the raising of the awareness and kind of the trends that we're seeing on these things when disney came out with the the the movie finding Nemo there was all of a sudden a problem in our and our oceans with with the the fish of Nemo you know a little little clown fish yeah the little clown fish and it really created a whole market space especially in the asian things and and you know we want to be wary of that but we also want to be wary if it's if how do we keep that in a positive movement and also be aware not only are they aware but how can we be aware that we're kind of cautious moving in that direction that's kind of where I'm going with my question yeah no exactly um throughout my career I mean I started studying bees at probably about age 15 or so and I I just turned 70 so I've been studying bees a long time um you know as a as a card-carrying entomologist I have collected and killed thousands of bees during my career mostly earlier in my career and those wound up labeled and on pins and in various museums in the united states and those specimens are very valuable in terms of we can get historical DNA from them or figure out what plants uh the bees were visiting so those historical specimens are used now by scientists studying global warming and climate change um so I don't regret that and I think it was necessary but in terms of where I've been in the last 10 years or so of my studies I will still collect a very limited number of vouchers that get stored in a museum and I'll excuse me let your listeners know that it's because of the fact that we've got those 21 000 species of bees out there and most of them look alike so unfortunately unless you have either a dead insect on a pin or a captive bee that you can look at under a microscope and compare with other museum specimens uh or some scientists are now using DNA barcoding uh to identify their specimens and and to publish papers you can't really say you know it was the quarter inch long green bee from Tucson you know you have to say it was uh agaklora pomoniella to be able to have your research have any validity so this is really different from somebody who's a birder who can go out with binoculars and a field guide and identify all of the birds by sight or sound um and people get good at that and it's possible also there are guidebooks for butterflies and it's possible to identify the vast majority of butterflies there's a big um group naba in the united states the north american butterfly association that advocates watching butterflies through close focusing binoculars and now there are even some guides coming out on odonates you know dragonflies so so i i do think that well certainly my my views have changed so that now 99 of the time i observe and capture bees through my camera lens and you know take photographs of them um i don't like the idea of massive amounts of butterflies or other insects being simply processed as wall art or displays or being embedded in resin as jewelry and that sort of thing i you know i don't think that's necessarily the right right thing to do although certainly insects have insect collections have inspired many bullkid to go on and and become a naturalist or a trained professional biologist but there are certainly um companies that are going into areas in the wild and collecting beetles and butterflies at a uh unsustainable rate um and then even though some may be farmed we still have the ethical thing of well hey they're sentient they can feel pain you know what are we what are we doing to them so we do need to i think reconsider our interactions and relationships with insects uh from an insect welfare standpoint this gets really really complicated because i know even colleagues of mine are considering um you know what is the best way to raise insects as human food i mean around the world insects are eaten in great quantities by different cultures but again what are the ethics of raising them by the by the millions and then how do you you know if you're going to use them as a food product how do you euthanize them you know and have that be a i don't know quite what to say but a caring thoughtful way of doing it just as we would consider if we're a meat eater how how do you go about treating food animals with with respect as we kind of close up you you are currently working on some pretty interesting things around um ground nesting bees that are oil harvesting bees i'd love to hear a little bit about that kind of what you're doing currently some things you're optimistic and and hopeful on even though you've been doing this your whole life that's almost like it's it's never going to the discovery is never going to stop i i just and i think that's a fabulous i mean what a better world to dive into um when one thing i never mentioned but when you started out the the book as well there's the talk of how a bee was preserved in amber one of this one of these things that you know and you says what we at the end but that we've got some pretty because luckily because that's some pretty old records of how long bees have been around and been here way before us and doing amazing things so now keep going full circle there's still new things you're discovering that are interesting yeah that bee in amber is fascinating people have been looking for the world's oldest bee in a Cretaceous amber from uh Myanmar what was formerly Burma and we have a Tucson gem and mineral show one of the biggest fossil shows in the world every February in Tucson so i'm always going to the amber dealers and with my hand lens looking and to see that i can maybe find a new bee or an old bee but yeah just in the last few days um right now the sonoran desert where i live is just a blaze with yellow flowering trees the genus parkinsonia which the locals know as palavertis so they're smoothbark trees that have green bark and now they're just exploding in yellow blossoms and we have many native bees that go to those and one of my favorites is this oil collecting bee which goes to a different plant it's actually a parasitic flowering plant that needs to derive nutrition through its roots being connected to other plants it's called chromaria or ratony but it smells exactly like raspberries and so you go out near these plants and go wow who's got the raspberries they smell great and these bees female bees have little oil scrapers on their front legs and they'll go to these flowers and they do this little four-legged unless you you videotape them on high speed like i've done you don't see the motion and appreciate what's happening but they're using their legs to scrape the oil out of these glands they pack it on the hind legs and they take it home and home is a little nest about that deep underground and the females of this bee centrus coccarelli will carve out these little amphora shaped cells and polish them smooth and then they'll go collect nectar and pollen from those yellow flowered palaverti trees bring it back and the very very last thing they do is go to those chromaria blossoms and bring back this raspberry scented oil and they put a thick layer of oil on the top of the pollen and then they'll lay an egg on it and they'll seal it up and they'll go and do it again and what chemist friends of mine are thinking now we're working on a paper together uh robert ragusso at cornell and dan pappage here at the university of arizona we think that the b larvi are becoming imprinted on this raspberry smell and so that a year from now when they emerge as adults next year they're already thinking raspberry it's in their little b brains and they'll they'll go out and follow their antennae their noses and find the find the goodies find those chromaria plants so that that's one thing that's occupying my days right now in the that's really interesting beautiful spring of the sonoran desert yeah beautiful beautiful area beautiful things and time of the year and then also what a microbial beautiful beautiful story you know the small alien world of things that are going on is so beautiful to hear there's other parts in the book as well where you you did experience experiments and you also are others did experiments where you kind of observed some of the some of the bees were never trained on how to mate or were to go for certain things it was just like it was there it was already built in they didn't need to first watch or mimic or be trained or or or see something done to do it they just it was it I don't know if you call it instinctively they just did it and and you know it's it's amazing how many things have gone in that direction I have three last questions for you as as we wrap up and this first one is the absolute hardest one that I'll give you today because it ties to to your book and to your work your life's work but it also kind of doesn't and it is it is it is the burning question the big big question what does a world that works for everyone look like for you and does an insect or an entomologist and someone who cares about bees and about insects and pollinators look at the world different with that that small lens of the small brain of a of a bee yeah um I was fortunate enough to know the late great Ed Wilson and to be with him on several field trips in Panama and Arizona and he was quite quite the entomologist and far more than that he had this saying that he wrote about in some of his books that the insects were the little things that run the world and they truly are um insects can get along just fine without us but we really can't get along without them not just pollination we're about a third of the food that we eat globally the things that keep us healthy and happy I mean we could have a whole diet of the cereal crops right the rice wheat barley sorghum that's when pollinated and you know no bees need apply but that would be pretty boring just to eat to eat rice and corn all day and um so these provide us with the fun things to eat and things that have a lot of nutraceuticals so you think of the colorful fruits and vegetables blueberries cranberries things that provide us with dense nutrients and antioxidants so we we need to live a kindler gentler life with bees and other insects on this small blue orb um there's a place for all of us but we need to we need to make sure that that that there's a place for all the other animals and plants because they are our life support system and without them we're in deep trouble I mean we've already passed some tipping points some milestones according to climate change with the more than 400 parts per million of co2 in the atmosphere as well as you know over a degree centigrade temperature rises so um we need we need to be aware even if nothing else or our own selfish interests I mean even without considering that bees and insects and other organisms have a definite right to exist and live out their lives in peace and harmony even if it's it's just a horrible self-centered thing that like we want to continue and we want to be healthy and happy we need to we need to make room for for all those little things that run the world I love that what should the youth of our world or young innovators the young new entomologists emerging or the even the curious youngsters who are out there interested in the butterflies and the bees and the wasps and the bugs and the spiders um and especially related into your field be thinking about if they're looking for ways to really make a real impact or to fix the legacies us elders have left them in this world to kind of make their imprint or have the biggest impact yeah that's a great point because the the young people of our world are the future our future hope for our species and what happens to our fragile planet I would hope that students would get interested in uh not just entomology but biology and botany and get out get get away from the screens less screen time and get out and experience and be inspired by nature um watch things listen maybe use some of those close focusing binoculars maybe even if you're a little afraid of you have a little bit of entomophobia right you can still watch them from a safe distance and appreciate all these incredible behaviors and beautiful shapes and colors um you know people are doing amazing things uh one one thing I'm doing a little bit is scanning things with structured white light or lasers and I know a lot of young people are interested in this I'm going to grab a prop and see if it works so this this weird looking thing is an exact replica of a sex pheromone gland getting back to the bees sex in the carpenter bees and so this is something that I've studied and published on and so this this is a gland that in certain carpenter bees and the males occupies about a fourth or even a third of their thorax so during their evolutionary history they've forfeited space for the powerful flight muscles and put this sex pheromone gland in here so that every day I was just doing this last week I have a log nest of some of these bees and every day between 430 and 6th well no between 430 and 530 the bees leave their natal log nest and they fly out to nearby hilltops and just like certain birds that birders may know like uh sage grouse um there are birds where the males display in lex leks to females so the females have a chance to uh check out these males as potential mates and within this gland they're producing a blend of chemicals that smells like roses and so they'll go out into these areas hover and release this rose be aftershave basically and the females will come in and and select a mate so 3d printing right wow is kind of cool I also think that students that are interested in a kinder gentler footprint for insecticides you know we need to get away from insecticides um I'll give one one example I'm working with a group of scientists on the brood cell microbiome so the the helpful essential bacteria and fungi that live in adult be guts and are also living in the pollen and nectar mixture and those underground cells and just like we need healthy bacteria mutualist beneficial bacteria and our guts to keep ourselves healthy and happy uh the bees need that too one one thing our group just just recently discovered is that um people have been talking about herbicides for a long time well herbicides kill plants from a bee perspective they're also killing weeds but some of these weeds are flowering weeds like dandelions and things you mentioned dandelions earlier and these are helpful to uh nurture and feed bees but what we've just found out is that even though you can test chemical herbicides on adult bees and they basically have little or no effect the herbicides get into the pollen and nectar and into that brood food provision underground and it's killing off the helpful microbes so basically the herbicides are having an unseen effect on the larvae the baby bees that we didn't didn't know before um other things that I think could be really fascinating are for students and new researchers to get into like that biomimicry stuff that we talked about or perhaps bioprospecting looking at the chemical ecology of bees to figure out hey the bees have been around for 130 million years they're really smart they're chemists par excellence and let's find out what chemicals they're using in their daily life that might be able to help us I love that thank you so much for those words of wisdom and the last one is really in your life what have you experienced or learned in this professional journey of yours so far that you would have loved to know from the start you say wow I wish I would have known that a lot sooner most people tend to say the journey in and of itself was amazing and I'm still learning it's still not done um and I personally say oh I wish I would have known this decades ago because I would have started sooner or I would have done much I would have acted different I would have began the journey sooner with that knowledge there are things like in your book that I just didn't know it wasn't taught in school and I wish I would have loved to know that before so I would like to know in in your what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey that you would have loved to know from the start yeah well certainly the as you said the journey itself has been an incredible reward and has taken me to many different countries around the world and to experience the flowers and bees and those regions but for me I'm kind of a high-tech guy so I like to use technology so for me I've always been into optical microscopes and electron microscopes and that sort of thing in the 90s I worked with a company and we produced the world's smallest barcodes and we actually glued those little tiny barcodes between the wings on honey bees and so then we had an automatic punch the time clock sort of thing as the honey bees went in and out of their glasswalled observation hive we knew hey b54 where are you now we have there were issues with that because we could only label up to 99 bees and if they were twisted you know we got a false reading or no reading at all but there are systems right now and actually I have one and it's a RFID a radio frequency ID tag system so now we can take these little tiny tags and glue them onto the back of a bee and it goes through a little tunnel under a reader and then you know when the bee left to the nearest second and when she came back and so we can build up little dossiers basically from birth to death on a bee and know how many times she was out foraging per day yeah yesterday today and tomorrow those are cool things my my and then you know we can look at bees with infrared cameras and get their temperature you can even get little tiny cameras that will plug into your iphone and let you look at plants and animals in the infrared which we can't see so again these are techno things that allow us to extend our senses i'm a photographer so i like to photograph insects and flowers well now instead of being frustrated that only part of your tiny insect or flowers and focus we have things like programs like helicon focus and others where you can do multi focal stacking photographs and you can maybe take a 100 photographs of an insect's head or something and then in these programs put them together so it's absolutely all in focus and these are beautiful and these appear now in books and coffee table books and are inspiring people to appreciate the hidden beauty of insects because they're too small you know so they're they're outside of our realm of sensibility so that we need these photographic or other techno devices to be able to appreciate their small but vitally important lives i guess i'll end with for this thing my fantasy gadget would be a little b backpack that i can put on a b and i release the b and in real time on my laptop i'm seeing in three dimensions exactly where she's going so we don't have that yet mainly because we can't make the battery small enough but hey maybe some clever person will figure out that oh hey if i put a isoelectric crystal on the b and as the wings are vibrating and flapping it deforms the crystal ah makes electricity so maybe we can someday hopefully in my lifetime have one of these little b backpacks so we can really figure out where the bees are going and what they're doing that's that would be amazing why that's a so beautiful to hear and the passion and and how you bring this beautiful life of of bees um to to all of us and thank you for bringing it to me thank you for letting us all inside of your ideas steven it's been a sheer pleasure your book what a bee knows exploring the thoughts memories and personalities of bees steven buchman thank you so much for your time and i really appreciate having you on the podcast and that's all i have unless you would like to add anything else before i tell you goodbye no i think that's it let's all give bees a chance i agree let's give bees a chance thank you so much steven bye bye bye right now