Jan. 31, 2025
"What Do Bees Think About," Bee Beds, and Bee QR Codes
The player is loading ...
Our guest on this episode is Dr. Mathieu Lihoreau, an Animal Cognition Researcher from France. We discuss how bees play, what they think about, learned behavior vs. instinct, yellow legged hornets, and much more!
Beekeeping News features U.S. research which includes attaching QR codes to 32,000 honey bees. There is an island in Ireland where you can spend time on a "bee bed," which has 5 full beehives under it.
Beekeeping and the beekeepers, it's all about he love of honey bees!
Special thanks to our presenting sponsor, Mann Lake! https://www.mannlakeltd.com/
Mann Lake discount code: MLBEELOVE10 for $10 off a $100 order.
Transcript
1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,000
May I have your attention please?
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:07,000
The following is not the real Jeff Vox really.
3
00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:17,000
If your beehives have a fresh coat of paint, but your house doesn't,
4
00:00:17,000 --> 00:00:22,000
you might be a beekeeper.
5
00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:35,000
If you didn't know that fondant was for wedding cake decorating, you might be a beekeeper.
6
00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:47,000
If when somebody asks you about your bees and your mouth doesn't stop flapping for 20 minutes, you might love bees.
7
00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:56,000
Welcome welcome to Bee Love Beekeeping Podcast presented by our good friends over at Mann Lake.
8
00:00:56,000 --> 00:01:01,000
At Bee Love we're all about the honeybees and of course the beekeepers.
9
00:01:01,000 --> 00:01:09,000
Today we'll be going all the way over to France for a discussion with a PhD entomologist to learn what honeybees think about.
10
00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:18,000
But first there have been some intriguing honeybee stories in the news the last few days. Have you heard about putting QR codes on bees?
11
00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:30,000
Yeah it's a real thing. Researchers in the eastern US have actually glued individual QR codes to the backs of 32,000 honeybees.
12
00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:37,000
So this is a study, it's a collaboration between electrical engineers and entomologists at Penn State University.
13
00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:45,000
What they're doing is analyzing the time that bees spend outside the hive for foraging and other things that they're doing.
14
00:01:45,000 --> 00:01:48,000
Here's a quote from one of the researchers.
15
00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:58,000
In field biology we usually just look at things with our eyes, but the number of observations we can make as humans will never scale up to what a machine can do.
16
00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:07,000
So here's what they're doing. They've made a special entrance with a sensor camera on it that tracks the tagged bees movements 24-7.
17
00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:13,000
So the QR codes that are attached to the back of the bees are called fiduciary markers.
18
00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:23,000
And the greatest advantage of these tags is that they allow scientists to quietly and non-invasively observe the bees without disturbing their natural habitats.
19
00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:28,000
So kind of cool. They have some preliminary results on things that they're finding.
20
00:02:28,000 --> 00:02:35,000
For example, the majority of the flights are actually quite short, one to four minutes.
21
00:02:35,000 --> 00:02:40,000
But of course when bees are out foraging they can be gone for a lot longer than that.
22
00:02:40,000 --> 00:02:50,000
And the team has begun collaborating with Virginia Tech to analyze the relationship between foraging duration and waggle dance information.
23
00:02:50,000 --> 00:02:57,000
The researchers also plan to tag queen and drone bees to venture deeper into bee colony dynamics.
24
00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:00,000
So it'll be interesting to see what they learn.
25
00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:09,000
The other story I wanted to mention today comes to us from Valencia Island in Ireland where bee beds are all the rage.
26
00:03:09,000 --> 00:03:11,000
So what is a bee bed you ask?
27
00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:20,000
Well, Paul O'Neill, who lives on this island, has built a wooden house with two beds, each with five bee hives underneath.
28
00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:26,000
The idea is that you lie down and just experience the micro vibrations of the bees.
29
00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:30,000
They say it feels like you're in the heart of a bee hive.
30
00:03:30,000 --> 00:03:36,000
In addition to the vibrations, you get the smell of pheromones and a soft humming sound.
31
00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:43,000
There's even heat that comes off of the bees, which naturally warms the house several degrees higher than the outside temperature.
32
00:03:43,000 --> 00:03:47,000
The hives are said to purify and ionize the air.
33
00:03:47,000 --> 00:03:52,000
Paul says that bee beds have been used in Eastern Europe for centuries.
34
00:03:52,000 --> 00:04:00,000
They claim that it helps reduce stress, sleep disorders, respiratory issues, fatigue, tinnitus, and other ailments.
35
00:04:00,000 --> 00:04:05,000
And guess what? Tourists are flocking in for the experience.
36
00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:08,000
I gotta tell you, it sounds kind of wonderful.
37
00:04:08,000 --> 00:04:11,000
All right, let's get to today's guest.
38
00:04:13,000 --> 00:04:19,000
We are going all the way across the pond again to Toulouse, France to talk with Dr....
39
00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:22,000
I'm just going to call you Dr. Matthew if that's okay.
40
00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:26,000
That's perfect. My name is Matthew Yorou.
41
00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:31,000
Yes, it is. And thank you for that, for getting me off the hook on that one.
42
00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:36,000
I tried to pronounce it earlier and failed miserably and I don't want to pronounce your name wrong.
43
00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:38,000
So we'll just go from there.
44
00:04:38,000 --> 00:04:46,000
You're in France and you are an animal cognition researcher and a beekeeper
45
00:04:46,000 --> 00:04:51,000
and do a lot of research and study with honeybees and bumblebees and other bees.
46
00:04:51,000 --> 00:04:55,000
Can you give us just a little idea of your background?
47
00:04:55,000 --> 00:05:04,000
So I am what we call an ethologist. I study animal behavior and I have a master in biology, ecology, basically.
48
00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:10,000
I did a PhD, not on bees, but already in insects. I worked on cockroaches.
49
00:05:10,000 --> 00:05:12,000
I studied their social life.
50
00:05:12,000 --> 00:05:18,000
I'm not reading that research, by the way. Cockroach behavior, sorry.
51
00:05:18,000 --> 00:05:23,000
But it's fascinating. Maybe we can discuss another time.
52
00:05:23,000 --> 00:05:31,000
After these three to four years studying cockroaches, I wanted something more exotic or outside, let's say.
53
00:05:31,000 --> 00:05:35,000
I wanted to see the animals in their natural environments.
54
00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:42,000
So you have a book out that this is what caught my attention and made me reach out to you from thousands of miles away.
55
00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:48,000
You have a book out called What a Bees Think About. Where did you come up with this whole concept?
56
00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:59,000
Well, that book just tells my life as a scientist working in insect intelligence and specifically bee cognition.
57
00:05:59,000 --> 00:06:07,000
So I'm not the only one in the world. We are a couple. There are some guys in the US, of course.
58
00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:16,000
But in France, I am a bit isolated and I've been asked to write a book for the general public.
59
00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:24,000
And in that book, I discuss my life, my experiments, but also the experiments of my colleagues all over the world
60
00:06:24,000 --> 00:06:30,000
and the state of the art of what we know about bee behavior, bee cognition, and bee ecology.
61
00:06:30,000 --> 00:06:34,000
Well, I'm going to be putting you on the spot today. I hope you don't mind.
62
00:06:34,000 --> 00:06:41,000
But before we do, you know, I haven't read your book yet. I have read one called The Honey Bee Democracy.
63
00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:42,000
Are you familiar with that?
64
00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:44,000
Yes, of course. Tom Sealy.
65
00:06:44,000 --> 00:06:46,000
The colleague, yeah.
66
00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:50,000
Yeah, Tom Sealy. And I learned a lot about honey bee behavior from that.
67
00:06:50,000 --> 00:06:55,000
But what it didn't tell me was what are bees actually thinking?
68
00:06:55,000 --> 00:07:01,000
Now, do you claim to really know what they're thinking or just have some ideas from their behavior?
69
00:07:01,000 --> 00:07:05,000
Well, we try to understand what they're thinking about.
70
00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:10,000
So that's the whole question in the book. What are they thinking about?
71
00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:17,000
And in fact, people have asked this question with professional research since a century ago.
72
00:07:17,000 --> 00:07:31,000
So famous people have started to design experiments and test first what did bees see, what did bees hear, what did bees smell, etc.
73
00:07:31,000 --> 00:07:42,000
And then as we progressed in this research, we started to understand what bees learn, what bees remember, what bees understand of a problem, etc., etc.
74
00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:49,000
And today, really, the discussion in my community is do bees have a consciousness?
75
00:07:49,000 --> 00:07:54,000
And can bees feel emotions? Can bees play?
76
00:07:54,000 --> 00:07:58,000
Can bees play? Well, I want to hear the answer to that. Do bees play?
77
00:07:58,000 --> 00:08:07,000
Well, this is not a definitive answer, but some experiments suggest that they play, that they have positive emotions.
78
00:08:07,000 --> 00:08:17,000
Of course, these are pioneer studies, very recent. The study I have in mind went out last year.
79
00:08:17,000 --> 00:08:33,000
Basically, this study demonstrated that bumblebees in a lab can be trained to choose color stimuli, not based on a sugar reward, but based on the ability to play, to roll balls.
80
00:08:33,000 --> 00:08:42,000
What this experiment shows is that you can condition bees to associate a color to ball rolling.
81
00:08:42,000 --> 00:08:52,000
And this is completely new in insect science, of course, but if you do this experiment with a mammal, then you have no problem to conclude that this is play behavior.
82
00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:59,000
That's fascinating. You mentioned their memory. What kinds of things do they remember?
83
00:08:59,000 --> 00:09:16,000
Many things. Of course, they learn to recognize each other with odors. So there is a common odor in a colony. And so the bees since very early development learn to recognize the odor of their own colony.
84
00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:21,000
And then when they start going out to forage, at that moment they have to learn many things.
85
00:09:21,000 --> 00:09:27,000
And the first thing they have to learn is the position of their nests in the environments. They have to relocate the nests.
86
00:09:27,000 --> 00:09:41,000
So at that moment, we think that they take mental pictures of the environments, the surrounding of the nests, the panorama, the small landmarks, the trees, the houses, bushes, etc.
87
00:09:41,000 --> 00:09:47,000
So that when they come back from a long foraging trip, they can pinpoint the nest very efficiently.
88
00:09:47,000 --> 00:09:55,000
And all these visual and spatial memories, they develop them from different areas that they explore.
89
00:09:55,000 --> 00:10:04,000
So they build kind of a mental map of the environment. And that's for their whole life. So we know that.
90
00:10:04,000 --> 00:10:12,000
Now speaking of that memory of the nest, why if we have ten beehives on stands all right next to each other?
91
00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:20,000
Do they really remember which one is theirs? Would it help if we had our hives different colors, something like that?
92
00:10:20,000 --> 00:10:27,000
Yes, exactly. It would help. When you put them in this situation, it's a natural situation.
93
00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:34,000
In nature, this will not happen because there's competition between the colonies and they don't found their nests at the same place.
94
00:10:34,000 --> 00:10:43,000
When you put them all together in the quotation, then of course you see that many get confused and there is drift.
95
00:10:43,000 --> 00:10:52,000
So I think it's about 20% of the workers in a colony when they are next to each other that do not pertain to that colony.
96
00:10:52,000 --> 00:11:01,000
So there is an exchange of workers between colonies, probably because the bees get lost and confused. They go in the wrong nest.
97
00:11:01,000 --> 00:11:15,000
So it helps if you mark the colonies with different colors or different shapes to identify them clearly and it helps the bees to remember where they come from.
98
00:11:15,000 --> 00:11:25,000
Well, I appreciate that because I want to take some of the things that you've learned and figure out how we can put those into practical something for us to be better beekeepers.
99
00:11:25,000 --> 00:11:35,000
And if that means we have 10 hives in a row and it would help if they were different colors or a red X or a... oh, they don't see red, do they?
100
00:11:35,000 --> 00:11:40,000
Oh, red is not for them. It's great.
101
00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:53,000
Yeah. So that was a bad example. But a purple X or a blue, I don't know, something to help them really find their way to their exact home versus drifting to others.
102
00:11:53,000 --> 00:11:57,000
That completely makes sense to do some things like that.
103
00:11:57,000 --> 00:12:07,000
Now, I think one thing as beekeepers that we tend to do, especially hobbyists, those of us that just have a few hives, we love our bees so much, right?
104
00:12:07,000 --> 00:12:10,000
We tend to humanize them.
105
00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:18,000
Meaning when I open up a hive, I put assumptions on what they are thinking.
106
00:12:18,000 --> 00:12:28,000
And there are some days where I think they think I'm a bear and I'm coming to tear them to shreds and they're going to tear me to shreds first.
107
00:12:28,000 --> 00:12:38,000
And there's other days where I assume that they are thinking, oh, look at this nice guy. He's whistling. He feeds us sometimes.
108
00:12:38,000 --> 00:12:42,000
He's such a... we love him, right?
109
00:12:42,000 --> 00:12:48,000
Okay. What are they actually thinking? What do they make of us when we get into their homes?
110
00:12:48,000 --> 00:12:55,000
Well, this we don't really know. I do exactly like you. I mean, that's called anthropomorphism.
111
00:12:55,000 --> 00:13:08,000
And that's something we should be aware of when you do research. You project yourselves into the animal and think for them as you would think in that situation.
112
00:13:08,000 --> 00:13:16,000
This anthropomorphism can help to give you some ideas of things to look at when you're a researcher.
113
00:13:16,000 --> 00:13:23,000
But of course, you need to stop very quickly to be anthropomorphic if you want to be scientifically correct.
114
00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:29,000
So what exactly do you bees think about you when you come on different days? I have no idea.
115
00:13:29,000 --> 00:13:41,000
I just can give you some insights of things that we understand from their behavior in particular situations. For instance, I told you they learn many things when they go outside.
116
00:13:41,000 --> 00:13:52,000
We know that they communicate very accurately with others. So if you perturbate the others in the hive, then you perturbate their communication, for instance.
117
00:13:52,000 --> 00:14:06,000
I'm wondering what things they teach each other versus what things are just very instinctual. For example, even though I live in the mountains, we don't have any bears close by very often.
118
00:14:06,000 --> 00:14:22,000
And so generations, many generations may pass between the time that my bees have seen a bear. Yet they know, don't they, that instinctually that bears are bad.
119
00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:27,000
And this is a problem if we see a bear. So can you talk about that a little bit?
120
00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:37,000
Yes, sure. As we understand it, it's very instinctive. So any animals have their part of instinctive behavior and learned behavior.
121
00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:43,000
We are also instinctive organisms. Our emotions are instinctive, for instance.
122
00:14:43,000 --> 00:14:53,000
So we know that bees tend to attack dark shapes. And if there is fur, it's even more attractive to them.
123
00:14:53,000 --> 00:14:57,000
So that's the description of a bear, roughly speaking.
124
00:14:57,000 --> 00:15:02,000
So we think that there has been a co-evolution between bears and bees.
125
00:15:02,000 --> 00:15:11,000
And so the bees are imprinted in their DNA that this type of signal, visual signal, is dangerous.
126
00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:17,000
And they will tend to sting everything that is dark and hairy, basically.
127
00:15:17,000 --> 00:15:32,000
So very instinctive. And generally in the animal kingdom, instinctive behaviors are linked to reproduction and survival, which are the two main important traits.
128
00:15:32,000 --> 00:15:39,000
So that's instinctive. Then, of course, they teach each other a lot of things.
129
00:15:39,000 --> 00:15:54,000
You are probably aware of the honey bee, Waggle Dance, so this communication system by which the bees indicate to the other bees from the same colony where to find food or where to find new nesting sites.
130
00:15:54,000 --> 00:16:08,000
So this is a complex communication that happens in the nest, whereby a bee that's as far in the spot, food or nesting sites, come back in the nest and do a hate-shaped walk
131
00:16:08,000 --> 00:16:11,000
in the middle of which there is a Waggle phase.
132
00:16:11,000 --> 00:16:23,000
And in this hate-shaped walk with the Waggle phase is encoded, the location of a target site, food or nesting sites.
133
00:16:23,000 --> 00:16:27,000
And this communication is made in the dark of the hive.
134
00:16:27,000 --> 00:16:31,000
The bee cannot point directly to the other bees where is the place.
135
00:16:31,000 --> 00:16:37,000
They communicate this in the dark of the hive, and this is called a symbolic communication.
136
00:16:37,000 --> 00:16:42,000
And symbolic communication is something that is not that common in the animal kingdom.
137
00:16:42,000 --> 00:16:44,000
So this is quite exceptional.
138
00:16:44,000 --> 00:16:51,000
So what can we learn from that? Knowing that they do that, is there anything that we can take away that we can help them with?
139
00:16:51,000 --> 00:16:55,000
Yes, so this communication happens in two contexts, as I said.
140
00:16:55,000 --> 00:17:02,000
And we could use this communication to attract the bee population, for instance, in particular places.
141
00:17:02,000 --> 00:17:10,000
Places where, for instance, we know it is safe for them to come and forage, places far from pesticides, for instance.
142
00:17:10,000 --> 00:17:17,000
Or places that we would like the bees to visit to pollinate a crop, for instance.
143
00:17:17,000 --> 00:17:27,000
So as beekeepers, as farmers, you could very well think that you may be able to attract bees in certain areas with a feeder,
144
00:17:27,000 --> 00:17:34,000
with a sugar solution, a high percentage of sugar solution, train the bees to go in this area.
145
00:17:34,000 --> 00:17:42,000
They will communicate and recruit other bees to go in this area, and you will have a population of bees visiting your area of interest.
146
00:17:42,000 --> 00:17:45,000
And then at some point, you could just remove the feeder.
147
00:17:45,000 --> 00:17:53,000
The bees will continue to come back in this area, and they will accidentally happen to forage on the flowers that are nearby.
148
00:17:53,000 --> 00:18:04,000
So either because you want them to be pollinated, or because you want the bees not to go in other areas that have been treated with armed food pesticides, for instance.
149
00:18:04,000 --> 00:18:06,000
So let me make sure that I get that.
150
00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:18,000
So, for example, around me, within a mile around me, I have some neighbors that are organic farmers and grow things like sandfoil and stuff, which is great for the bees.
151
00:18:18,000 --> 00:18:25,000
I have other neighbors that are growing this, what they call Roundup Ready alfalfa, and they bomb it with Roundup all the time.
152
00:18:25,000 --> 00:18:30,000
So, and they're pretty much equal distances away.
153
00:18:30,000 --> 00:18:45,000
So you're saying if I were to take some kind of open feeder with syrup, put it in the good field I want them to go to, they are much more likely to go there than where all the Roundup is being sprayed.
154
00:18:45,000 --> 00:18:57,000
Exactly, because of communication. So the bees that you're trying to go there will recruit more bees, and your population of bees will more likely go to the field that you decided.
155
00:18:57,000 --> 00:19:07,000
Of course, it's not 100%. You may have bees that have found other sites, but still, it increases the probability that your bees don't get contaminated.
156
00:19:07,000 --> 00:19:12,000
That could make a huge difference. How could we apply that to catching swarms?
157
00:19:12,000 --> 00:19:18,000
So the bees also communicate nesting sites when it comes time to swarming.
158
00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:31,000
And so we have exploratory bees that scouts, that goes, explore the environments, finds potential nesting sites, evaluates the parameters of these nesting sites,
159
00:19:31,000 --> 00:19:47,000
come back to the nest or the swarm and do the dance. And through a system of voting, we have the bee population that will, at some points, go away, swarm and install in one of the sites that have been decided by the collectivity.
160
00:19:47,000 --> 00:20:01,000
So if you want to catch swarms, one solution would be to provide the bee population empty hives or attractive, empty nesting sites.
161
00:20:01,000 --> 00:20:13,000
Sure. We have what we call swarm traps. Again, based on Tom Seeley's book, you can get dimensions and things that he found actually worked best on what the bees are looking for.
162
00:20:13,000 --> 00:20:27,000
But would you think that it would make more sense to put, say, five of those within a quarter mile area or to spread them out a mile apart between each other?
163
00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:33,000
So if you put them closer to the swarm, then you have a higher probability that they get visited.
164
00:20:33,000 --> 00:20:34,000
Sure.
165
00:20:34,000 --> 00:20:54,000
No, this is what I would say. Now, there is, of course, a distance at which I guess it will fail because these new swarm boxes should be far enough from the mother colony, because I guess the colonies will not establish if they are too close from each other.
166
00:20:54,000 --> 00:20:58,000
Remind me about how far away do they like to be? What is too close?
167
00:20:58,000 --> 00:21:04,000
So maybe I will say stupid things. So I prefer not saying.
168
00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:06,000
That's okay.
169
00:21:06,000 --> 00:21:10,000
But I guess I guess it's more than 50 meters from what I recall.
170
00:21:10,000 --> 00:21:22,000
Sure. I think it's even further than that, but I don't remember the exact number. Some listener, please email us, remind us what that number is, or Dr. Seeley, you can do the same thing here.
171
00:21:22,000 --> 00:21:28,000
Tell me some of the other things that you've learned that we can put into practical day-to-day beekeeping that will help us out.
172
00:21:28,000 --> 00:21:51,000
Beekeeping. I mean, I don't know if in the US you do a lot of pollination using your bee hives, but at the moment we are working on many projects that try to better understand how we can increase the pollination rate with our domestic hives by putting them in the crop yards.
173
00:21:51,000 --> 00:21:56,000
I guess in Europe there is no real regulation and there are only recommendations.
174
00:21:56,000 --> 00:22:07,000
And these recommendations about the number of hives per crop that you have to put vary from one country to the other from one to 20 hives.
175
00:22:07,000 --> 00:22:17,000
So this is very vague and empirical practices. So we are far from mastering pollination with domestic honey bees.
176
00:22:17,000 --> 00:22:22,000
Just a quick break here to thank our presenting sponsor, Man Lake.
177
00:22:22,000 --> 00:22:35,000
Hey, if your weather is anything like mine, it is freezing out. So let's put our creative brains together and visualize spring. Birds chirping, flowers blooming, and bees buzzing.
178
00:22:35,000 --> 00:22:40,000
Now let's visualize you enjoying beekeeping so much more with some new gear.
179
00:22:40,000 --> 00:22:49,000
Or if you're new to beekeeping and not sure what you need, give Man Lake a call and their experienced beekeepers will help every step of the way.
180
00:22:49,000 --> 00:22:56,000
Protective gear, hives, and tools, even packaged bees, nukes, and queens, Man Lake has it all.
181
00:22:56,000 --> 00:23:12,000
And don't forget your discount code MLBLOV10, it's in the show notes, for $10 off your first $100 purchase. I'm feeling better already. Now back to the guest.
182
00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:30,000
So what I'm trying to do at the moment is to understand how bees move in the landscape. How bees fly away and how do they choose flowers, flower patches, trees, and how do they move between different flower patches and trees.
183
00:23:30,000 --> 00:23:43,000
And in my lab we've developed radars, big machines that scans the environment at high frequency and these radars can identify individual bees flying around.
184
00:23:43,000 --> 00:23:49,000
So we can reconstruct the flight trajectory of the bee in the field.
185
00:23:49,000 --> 00:24:07,000
And with this we've started to understand how bees predictably move between one point to another point to another point to another point and how through experience, through trial and error, the bees develop routes between different points that are more and more efficient.
186
00:24:07,000 --> 00:24:27,000
At the end of the day, if you give a bee an opportunity to forage ad libitum without limit in an environment where there is always resources, that bee will develop a route that maximizes nectar collection rate or pollen collection rate by minimizing travel distances.
187
00:24:27,000 --> 00:24:35,000
So they solve routing problems. They can solve a physical spatial network.
188
00:24:35,000 --> 00:24:45,000
So it's all about efficiency, it sounds like. How can we go out, gather what we're trying to gather as efficiently as possible and bring it back to the hive?
189
00:24:45,000 --> 00:24:57,000
Exactly. But they do this with some rules. And just to finish on this, now we are starting to understand how a bee predictably will move between different points.
190
00:24:57,000 --> 00:25:10,000
That helps us understand how pollen will be transported between different points. So how plants will be pollinated and cross fertilized in the landscape.
191
00:25:10,000 --> 00:25:16,000
So this is much more precise than just putting bees and enclosing the eyes and waiting for things to happen.
192
00:25:16,000 --> 00:25:34,000
The aim is to be able to predict these complex dynamics and one day maybe give very practical advice to farmers so that they can really envisage stopping agrochemicals and increase their properties with the bees.
193
00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:48,000
Okay, my mind just kind of blew for a second. Let me make sure I understand this. The eventual goal would be to be able to say, okay, here's a farm or an orchard. Here's where the bees are going to go.
194
00:25:48,000 --> 00:26:01,000
And you want to plant this and then this and then this in this kind of order or diameter out from the hive because it's going to most efficiently be pollinated that way.
195
00:26:01,000 --> 00:26:23,000
Am I getting that right? That's an example of what we might be able to do. Either this or the opposite, put the hives at strategic places so that the bees will visit the plants that are already planted in a particular geometrical disposition at the right place.
196
00:26:23,000 --> 00:26:32,000
And we do have a lot of pollination services in this country and mostly commercial beekeepers. The biggest one is the almonds out in California.
197
00:26:32,000 --> 00:26:48,000
So what we may be able to learn eventually from this research is instead of just putting a pallet of hives every whatever, you know, half mile or whatever, we might want to have one here, two here, three here.
198
00:26:48,000 --> 00:26:54,000
We're going to learn what will more efficiently work for them and for the pollination.
199
00:26:54,000 --> 00:27:07,000
Yes, for instance, and maybe not put all the hives at the same time. Maybe after just a few days, reinforce the pool of hives in certain areas, etc., etc., to maximize pollination.
200
00:27:07,000 --> 00:27:16,000
That's the idea. Better use the bees to provide this pollination service and perhaps ultimately reduce our impact on the environment.
201
00:27:16,000 --> 00:27:25,000
So I know you're also a beekeeper yourself. In addition to a researcher and a scientist, tell me some of the things that you love about beekeeping.
202
00:27:25,000 --> 00:27:32,000
Oh, I love it. I must admit I am a poor beekeeper. I get stung a lot.
203
00:27:32,000 --> 00:27:34,000
That doesn't make you a poor beekeeper.
204
00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:49,000
But I love it. No, I am a poor beekeeper because I just don't produce any honey. I'm there. I watch the bees. I'm happy just watching the bees. So I spend hours watching the bees. That's it.
205
00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:55,000
What I love in this is that each time I watch a bee colony, it's different.
206
00:27:55,000 --> 00:28:05,000
Each time I see new behavior that I don't know how to interpret and I give me ideas on the next research question I may ask.
207
00:28:05,000 --> 00:28:13,000
And of course, the smell, the smell and the being outside in the countryside is lovely.
208
00:28:13,000 --> 00:28:27,000
That's one thing that really surprised me in one time when I had someone who's not a beekeeper that really wanted to meet my bees and I put a bee suit on her and open the lid.
209
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:35,000
She looked in and she took a breath and she said, that smells so good. And I guess I had gotten used to it.
210
00:28:35,000 --> 00:28:48,000
And she was just blown away by the smell. It's interesting that you mentioned that. What kinds of things do you observe? Just when you're just out there for fun, you mentioned that you just watched them a lot.
211
00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:56,000
Yes. Well, sadly at the moment, at this time of the year in France, we have a huge predation by hornets.
212
00:28:56,000 --> 00:29:07,000
Here we have the yellow-legged hornets that came from Asia 20 years ago. And these hornets have been introduced by mistake.
213
00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:14,000
But now they are all over Europe and especially in France. We have huge populations.
214
00:29:14,000 --> 00:29:25,000
So, hornets are important predators of bees. They have evolved hunting strategies that are fascinating.
215
00:29:25,000 --> 00:29:35,000
I'm also fascinated by hornets, I should say. But the bees, the bees of course need to defend themselves and they have a variety of behavior.
216
00:29:35,000 --> 00:29:45,000
And we see there is no standard defense behaviors in our honeybees because this predation by the hornets is new.
217
00:29:45,000 --> 00:29:55,000
And in the last 20 years, there has not been co-evolution between these hornets and our bees. So, you can see the bees are trying different things.
218
00:29:55,000 --> 00:30:07,000
And it varies depending on colonies. So, in some colonies, the bees just aggregate outside and they make, you know, the ground is just bees, bodies of bees,
219
00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:17,000
and the hornets will not land on the hive plates. In some colonies, you can see that some brave honeybees try to attack the hornets.
220
00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:32,000
But this is, of course, always a failure. And you can see many, many, many behaviors like this that emerge and that probably will not be selected by natural selection.
221
00:30:32,000 --> 00:30:37,000
But it's fun and very intriguing to see all these attempts.
222
00:30:37,000 --> 00:30:46,000
What kinds of things have you seen that either the bees developed or people have developed to help the bees out to fight the hornets?
223
00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:55,000
This is a big thing in Europe. Some big keepers are very ingenious and it's also a very diverse pool of people.
224
00:30:55,000 --> 00:31:09,000
So, some have opted for more traditional ways to isolate the hives from the hornets with a system of grid, metallic grid that you can put in front of the hive.
225
00:31:09,000 --> 00:31:19,000
The mesh size is calculated so that only the bees can go through. And the hornets, which are larger, cannot go through.
226
00:31:19,000 --> 00:31:32,000
And the more ingenious people have started to develop electric apse. So these are, again, a grid of iron mesh that you can plug.
227
00:31:32,000 --> 00:31:41,000
So there is an electric field in it. And the distance between the wires is calculated so that a bee can go through.
228
00:31:41,000 --> 00:31:48,000
But the hornets, which is larger, cannot. And then they get burned if they go through.
229
00:31:48,000 --> 00:31:50,000
And they are not exept.
230
00:31:50,000 --> 00:31:59,000
This is very popular at the moment. This is probably the most efficient way to control the populations locally.
231
00:31:59,000 --> 00:32:07,000
But of course, very ingenious people. And now I started to develop a tracking system, a radio telemetry, for instance.
232
00:32:07,000 --> 00:32:25,000
So you put a transponder on the hornets with a big antenna. And then with your receptors, you can follow the hornets at the moment where it goes back to the nest with a honey bee in the middle of his legs.
233
00:32:25,000 --> 00:32:38,000
So the hornet will go straight towards the nest. And you can follow it, identify where the nest is. Because these nests are up in the trees. And often you don't see them. You cannot notice them with your eyes.
234
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:43,000
And once the nest is located, then you can destroy it or remove it.
235
00:32:43,000 --> 00:33:02,000
Some people are also working on drones that would automatically follow the hornets and locate the nests. I know that some colleagues are working on a laser system that would be on back on the drone to destroy the nest with the drone.
236
00:33:02,000 --> 00:33:07,000
So you just emit the laser signal in the nest and destroy the nest.
237
00:33:07,000 --> 00:33:18,000
Wow. It's got a lot of ingenious stuff going on. It's almost like you're getting ready to plant a bomb on that hornet. It goes back and just blows up the nest.
238
00:33:18,000 --> 00:33:34,000
Exactly, yes. And so, as I said, these hornets are occupying the mind of many beekeepers. And we have many here in Europe that have different specialties and many are engineers. So they come up with very interesting and clever solutions.
239
00:33:34,000 --> 00:33:43,000
I want to see some of those. You did mention earlier about tracking bees. Do you put some kind of a transponder on them too? Is that how you do it?
240
00:33:43,000 --> 00:33:55,000
Yes. So I use what we call harmonic radars. So this is technology from the army, from the marine. This is a very, very robust technology.
241
00:33:55,000 --> 00:34:08,000
And indeed, you need to put a small antenna, a small transponder on the bee. Very light. This is a dipole. So this is a passive transponder. It doesn't emit anything. There is no battery.
242
00:34:08,000 --> 00:34:19,000
And then the radar will scan the environment, emitting a radar wave. And part of this radar wave would be remitted by the transponder.
243
00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:28,000
So you don't get all the signal of all the things in the environment. It will be too noisy. You're just looking for your target, which is the transponder.
244
00:34:28,000 --> 00:34:37,000
And with this system, with our systems, we can track a bee up to one kilometer. And now we have a system where we have many of these radars.
245
00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:44,000
So we have a network of radars so that we can track the bees for their whole home range.
246
00:34:44,000 --> 00:34:50,000
You make science sound interesting. I'd love to come and participate in some of it sometime.
247
00:34:50,000 --> 00:35:00,000
Hey, on a more personal note, we were going to meet last week. You had to cancel at the very last minute because of a fire. Tell us what happened.
248
00:35:00,000 --> 00:35:05,000
Yeah, I'm sorry. It was a disaster last week.
249
00:35:05,000 --> 00:35:17,000
Just before our interview, I learned that part of my lab has burnt. So in Toulouse at the university, we have two different types of labs.
250
00:35:17,000 --> 00:35:22,000
The wet labs in which we do behavioral experiments in very controlled conditions.
251
00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:32,000
And of course, we have an experimental app here in which we have our honey beehives. We have 50 of them, maybe. And different labs in cabins.
252
00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:40,000
And one of these cabins was on fire. We don't know what caused this.
253
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:50,000
Very, very, very thankfully, we had the firefighters that came after just five minutes because they are nearby the university.
254
00:35:50,000 --> 00:35:58,000
So they stopped everything. But yeah, the building burns and we lost almost all the equipment for the beekeepers.
255
00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:06,000
That's very sad, but the good news is that the bees are nothing. So no bee has been harmed.
256
00:36:06,000 --> 00:36:08,000
And no people.
257
00:36:08,000 --> 00:36:10,000
And no people, of course, yeah.
258
00:36:10,000 --> 00:36:17,000
Good. Good. Well, I'm sorry that happened. Have you ever had anything just really surprise you about honey bees?
259
00:36:17,000 --> 00:36:29,000
The dance already is something extremely surprising. As I said earlier, this kind of symbolic communication is something we know in humans and some other primates.
260
00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:39,000
And that's about it. So either it's only evolved in a few animals and only bees are one of them.
261
00:36:39,000 --> 00:36:45,000
Either this is something that exists in the whole animal kingdom, but we haven't been able to discover it.
262
00:36:45,000 --> 00:36:53,000
So that's crazy. More recently, because the only bee dance has been discovered in the 1950s.
263
00:36:53,000 --> 00:37:07,000
So it's already an old discovery. But more recently, we've started to understand that bees also learn from each other, not by communicating directly, but by observing each other.
264
00:37:07,000 --> 00:37:15,000
So bees can observe other bees and learn from them. So the most striking experiments have been done on bumblebees.
265
00:37:15,000 --> 00:37:21,000
Bumblebees are organized more or less like honey bees, although the colonies are much smaller.
266
00:37:21,000 --> 00:37:29,000
But there is a queen, there are workers, there is a division of labor with foragers, cleaners, wards, etc.
267
00:37:29,000 --> 00:37:39,000
And these bumblebees are very, very great models because you can test them in the lab. They accommodate very well with artificial lights.
268
00:37:39,000 --> 00:37:47,000
They can solve plastic Y-Mays, they can roll balls. Anyway, they can do lots of stupid things in a lab.
269
00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:58,000
Especially using these animals, we were able to demonstrate that bumblebees can learn new behavior from observing other bumblebees.
270
00:37:58,000 --> 00:38:10,000
How it works? For instance, we recently trained bumblebees to pull a rope to access a platform with a sugar solution.
271
00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:22,000
So this platform is below a plexiglass plate. And the bees have to pull a rope to train the platform beyond the plexiglass plate and access to a sugar solution.
272
00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:29,000
So already this, you can teach bees to do this if you have time and patience.
273
00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:35,000
What is interesting is that once you've taught one bee to do this, this bee becomes a demonstrator.
274
00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:40,000
And then you can put other bees from the same species behind a window.
275
00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:49,000
And so these bees can see the demonstrator pulling ropes, which is a non-natural task. Bees don't do that in the nature.
276
00:38:49,000 --> 00:38:57,000
And then, these observing bees, you can put them in the arena and let them do what they have to do.
277
00:38:57,000 --> 00:39:05,000
And in most of the cases, these naive bees that just observed one bee pulling a rope start pulling a rope and so on.
278
00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:14,000
So bees can learn to pull ropes through observation and they can also learn to ameliorate this behavior with experience.
279
00:39:14,000 --> 00:39:24,000
So we have the emergence within a bee colony of the emergence of a new behavior that is transmitted within the population through observation.
280
00:39:24,000 --> 00:39:28,000
That is crazy. How many other animals can do that?
281
00:39:28,000 --> 00:39:37,000
Well, animal cultures is something that scientists have discovered since the 70s.
282
00:39:37,000 --> 00:39:49,000
Of course, firstly, in the primates, maybe you are aware of these monkeys, these macaques in Japan that wash their potatoes in the sea
283
00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:56,000
so that the potatoes are salty and it's better. And we have some population of macaques that do that. They are very particular.
284
00:39:56,000 --> 00:39:59,000
Then there have been examples in birds.
285
00:39:59,000 --> 00:40:07,000
In England, you have these blue teats that have learned to open the milk bottles.
286
00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:11,000
And through observation, these behaviors are spread in the city.
287
00:40:11,000 --> 00:40:17,000
And this is not true for populations from nearby cities, so really, it's cultural transmission.
288
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:25,000
But in vertebrates, in insects, this is the first and only example so far.
289
00:40:25,000 --> 00:40:35,000
That's really cool. I just saw a video recently, online, a short video of two bees opening up a bottle of some kind of fruity juice.
290
00:40:35,000 --> 00:40:38,000
Have you seen that? Or sugary juice?
291
00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:41,000
I haven't seen that. What do they do exactly?
292
00:40:41,000 --> 00:40:51,000
Well, the lid is already loose, but the two of them figure out how to actually turn it until it comes off and then they can get into the sugary drink.
293
00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:59,000
And I'm just wondering, now they probably didn't observe that someplace else. They somehow had to learn that on their own.
294
00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:04,000
I don't know, maybe that's your next experiment to study with or something.
295
00:41:04,000 --> 00:41:13,000
Exactly. And we are at the moment trying to see if we could observe cooperative behavior like this in bees.
296
00:41:13,000 --> 00:41:22,000
So collective problem solving in artificial conditions in bees, this is something we are looking at at the moment.
297
00:41:22,000 --> 00:41:29,000
So it's both cooperative and they either are smart enough to figure it out, or you're talking about observation.
298
00:41:29,000 --> 00:41:34,000
Is it possible they observed people doing it and then figured out how to do it together?
299
00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:39,000
Wow. This is an open question. This is a good question.
300
00:41:39,000 --> 00:41:52,000
But at the moment, it's a difficult question to answer. I think we have more to understand about their behavior and how they copy each other first before the human-been relationship.
301
00:41:52,000 --> 00:41:58,000
I'm just coming up with more experiments for you. If I happen to see that video, I'll send it over to you.
302
00:41:58,000 --> 00:42:03,000
Okay. Any last words of wisdom you can leave with us before we sign off today?
303
00:42:03,000 --> 00:42:09,000
I know beekeepers are already aware that bees are smart animals.
304
00:42:09,000 --> 00:42:15,000
And this is something we are studying with patients here and in other labs in the world.
305
00:42:15,000 --> 00:42:22,000
As I mentioned at the very beginning of this discussion, nowadays the question is not whether the bees are smart or not.
306
00:42:22,000 --> 00:42:31,000
But the lively debated questions at the moment is whether they have some sort of consciousness, emotions.
307
00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:35,000
So what is the complexity of their inner lives?
308
00:42:35,000 --> 00:42:39,000
And that's something that we didn't dare asking ten years ago.
309
00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:51,000
So this is very new, very ongoing research with complex concepts that every day reduces the distance between us and the bees.
310
00:42:51,000 --> 00:42:53,000
So are you finding answers to that yet?
311
00:42:53,000 --> 00:43:02,000
Well, there are elements of answers. Of course there are no answers, but we have bees that behave like if they were happy.
312
00:43:02,000 --> 00:43:08,000
Bees that behave like if they played. Bees that behave like if they understand a problem.
313
00:43:08,000 --> 00:43:13,000
Bees that know very well how to navigate. Bees that can copy each other.
314
00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:17,000
And all of this is a signature of consciousness.
315
00:43:17,000 --> 00:43:19,000
That is super interesting.
316
00:43:19,000 --> 00:43:23,000
I appreciate it. Dr. Matiu.
317
00:43:23,000 --> 00:43:24,000
Liro.
318
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:25,000
Is that pretty close?
319
00:43:25,000 --> 00:43:27,000
Yes.
320
00:43:27,000 --> 00:43:30,000
Thanks a ton for being on with me today.
321
00:43:30,000 --> 00:43:51,000
Thanks a lot for the invitation.
322
00:44:00,000 --> 00:44:10,000
And remember, if you're not just in it for the honey or the money, you're in it for the love. See you next week.
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,000
May I have your attention please?
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:07,000
The following is not the real Jeff Vox really.
3
00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:17,000
If your beehives have a fresh coat of paint, but your house doesn't,
4
00:00:17,000 --> 00:00:22,000
you might be a beekeeper.
5
00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:35,000
If you didn't know that fondant was for wedding cake decorating, you might be a beekeeper.
6
00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:47,000
If when somebody asks you about your bees and your mouth doesn't stop flapping for 20 minutes, you might love bees.
7
00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:56,000
Welcome welcome to Bee Love Beekeeping Podcast presented by our good friends over at Mann Lake.
8
00:00:56,000 --> 00:01:01,000
At Bee Love we're all about the honeybees and of course the beekeepers.
9
00:01:01,000 --> 00:01:09,000
Today we'll be going all the way over to France for a discussion with a PhD entomologist to learn what honeybees think about.
10
00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:18,000
But first there have been some intriguing honeybee stories in the news the last few days. Have you heard about putting QR codes on bees?
11
00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:30,000
Yeah it's a real thing. Researchers in the eastern US have actually glued individual QR codes to the backs of 32,000 honeybees.
12
00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:37,000
So this is a study, it's a collaboration between electrical engineers and entomologists at Penn State University.
13
00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:45,000
What they're doing is analyzing the time that bees spend outside the hive for foraging and other things that they're doing.
14
00:01:45,000 --> 00:01:48,000
Here's a quote from one of the researchers.
15
00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:58,000
In field biology we usually just look at things with our eyes, but the number of observations we can make as humans will never scale up to what a machine can do.
16
00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:07,000
So here's what they're doing. They've made a special entrance with a sensor camera on it that tracks the tagged bees movements 24-7.
17
00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:13,000
So the QR codes that are attached to the back of the bees are called fiduciary markers.
18
00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:23,000
And the greatest advantage of these tags is that they allow scientists to quietly and non-invasively observe the bees without disturbing their natural habitats.
19
00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:28,000
So kind of cool. They have some preliminary results on things that they're finding.
20
00:02:28,000 --> 00:02:35,000
For example, the majority of the flights are actually quite short, one to four minutes.
21
00:02:35,000 --> 00:02:40,000
But of course when bees are out foraging they can be gone for a lot longer than that.
22
00:02:40,000 --> 00:02:50,000
And the team has begun collaborating with Virginia Tech to analyze the relationship between foraging duration and waggle dance information.
23
00:02:50,000 --> 00:02:57,000
The researchers also plan to tag queen and drone bees to venture deeper into bee colony dynamics.
24
00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:00,000
So it'll be interesting to see what they learn.
25
00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:09,000
The other story I wanted to mention today comes to us from Valencia Island in Ireland where bee beds are all the rage.
26
00:03:09,000 --> 00:03:11,000
So what is a bee bed you ask?
27
00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:20,000
Well, Paul O'Neill, who lives on this island, has built a wooden house with two beds, each with five bee hives underneath.
28
00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:26,000
The idea is that you lie down and just experience the micro vibrations of the bees.
29
00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:30,000
They say it feels like you're in the heart of a bee hive.
30
00:03:30,000 --> 00:03:36,000
In addition to the vibrations, you get the smell of pheromones and a soft humming sound.
31
00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:43,000
There's even heat that comes off of the bees, which naturally warms the house several degrees higher than the outside temperature.
32
00:03:43,000 --> 00:03:47,000
The hives are said to purify and ionize the air.
33
00:03:47,000 --> 00:03:52,000
Paul says that bee beds have been used in Eastern Europe for centuries.
34
00:03:52,000 --> 00:04:00,000
They claim that it helps reduce stress, sleep disorders, respiratory issues, fatigue, tinnitus, and other ailments.
35
00:04:00,000 --> 00:04:05,000
And guess what? Tourists are flocking in for the experience.
36
00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:08,000
I gotta tell you, it sounds kind of wonderful.
37
00:04:08,000 --> 00:04:11,000
All right, let's get to today's guest.
38
00:04:13,000 --> 00:04:19,000
We are going all the way across the pond again to Toulouse, France to talk with Dr....
39
00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:22,000
I'm just going to call you Dr. Matthew if that's okay.
40
00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:26,000
That's perfect. My name is Matthew Yorou.
41
00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:31,000
Yes, it is. And thank you for that, for getting me off the hook on that one.
42
00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:36,000
I tried to pronounce it earlier and failed miserably and I don't want to pronounce your name wrong.
43
00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:38,000
So we'll just go from there.
44
00:04:38,000 --> 00:04:46,000
You're in France and you are an animal cognition researcher and a beekeeper
45
00:04:46,000 --> 00:04:51,000
and do a lot of research and study with honeybees and bumblebees and other bees.
46
00:04:51,000 --> 00:04:55,000
Can you give us just a little idea of your background?
47
00:04:55,000 --> 00:05:04,000
So I am what we call an ethologist. I study animal behavior and I have a master in biology, ecology, basically.
48
00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:10,000
I did a PhD, not on bees, but already in insects. I worked on cockroaches.
49
00:05:10,000 --> 00:05:12,000
I studied their social life.
50
00:05:12,000 --> 00:05:18,000
I'm not reading that research, by the way. Cockroach behavior, sorry.
51
00:05:18,000 --> 00:05:23,000
But it's fascinating. Maybe we can discuss another time.
52
00:05:23,000 --> 00:05:31,000
After these three to four years studying cockroaches, I wanted something more exotic or outside, let's say.
53
00:05:31,000 --> 00:05:35,000
I wanted to see the animals in their natural environments.
54
00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:42,000
So you have a book out that this is what caught my attention and made me reach out to you from thousands of miles away.
55
00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:48,000
You have a book out called What a Bees Think About. Where did you come up with this whole concept?
56
00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:59,000
Well, that book just tells my life as a scientist working in insect intelligence and specifically bee cognition.
57
00:05:59,000 --> 00:06:07,000
So I'm not the only one in the world. We are a couple. There are some guys in the US, of course.
58
00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:16,000
But in France, I am a bit isolated and I've been asked to write a book for the general public.
59
00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:24,000
And in that book, I discuss my life, my experiments, but also the experiments of my colleagues all over the world
60
00:06:24,000 --> 00:06:30,000
and the state of the art of what we know about bee behavior, bee cognition, and bee ecology.
61
00:06:30,000 --> 00:06:34,000
Well, I'm going to be putting you on the spot today. I hope you don't mind.
62
00:06:34,000 --> 00:06:41,000
But before we do, you know, I haven't read your book yet. I have read one called The Honey Bee Democracy.
63
00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:42,000
Are you familiar with that?
64
00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:44,000
Yes, of course. Tom Sealy.
65
00:06:44,000 --> 00:06:46,000
The colleague, yeah.
66
00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:50,000
Yeah, Tom Sealy. And I learned a lot about honey bee behavior from that.
67
00:06:50,000 --> 00:06:55,000
But what it didn't tell me was what are bees actually thinking?
68
00:06:55,000 --> 00:07:01,000
Now, do you claim to really know what they're thinking or just have some ideas from their behavior?
69
00:07:01,000 --> 00:07:05,000
Well, we try to understand what they're thinking about.
70
00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:10,000
So that's the whole question in the book. What are they thinking about?
71
00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:17,000
And in fact, people have asked this question with professional research since a century ago.
72
00:07:17,000 --> 00:07:31,000
So famous people have started to design experiments and test first what did bees see, what did bees hear, what did bees smell, etc.
73
00:07:31,000 --> 00:07:42,000
And then as we progressed in this research, we started to understand what bees learn, what bees remember, what bees understand of a problem, etc., etc.
74
00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:49,000
And today, really, the discussion in my community is do bees have a consciousness?
75
00:07:49,000 --> 00:07:54,000
And can bees feel emotions? Can bees play?
76
00:07:54,000 --> 00:07:58,000
Can bees play? Well, I want to hear the answer to that. Do bees play?
77
00:07:58,000 --> 00:08:07,000
Well, this is not a definitive answer, but some experiments suggest that they play, that they have positive emotions.
78
00:08:07,000 --> 00:08:17,000
Of course, these are pioneer studies, very recent. The study I have in mind went out last year.
79
00:08:17,000 --> 00:08:33,000
Basically, this study demonstrated that bumblebees in a lab can be trained to choose color stimuli, not based on a sugar reward, but based on the ability to play, to roll balls.
80
00:08:33,000 --> 00:08:42,000
What this experiment shows is that you can condition bees to associate a color to ball rolling.
81
00:08:42,000 --> 00:08:52,000
And this is completely new in insect science, of course, but if you do this experiment with a mammal, then you have no problem to conclude that this is play behavior.
82
00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:59,000
That's fascinating. You mentioned their memory. What kinds of things do they remember?
83
00:08:59,000 --> 00:09:16,000
Many things. Of course, they learn to recognize each other with odors. So there is a common odor in a colony. And so the bees since very early development learn to recognize the odor of their own colony.
84
00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:21,000
And then when they start going out to forage, at that moment they have to learn many things.
85
00:09:21,000 --> 00:09:27,000
And the first thing they have to learn is the position of their nests in the environments. They have to relocate the nests.
86
00:09:27,000 --> 00:09:41,000
So at that moment, we think that they take mental pictures of the environments, the surrounding of the nests, the panorama, the small landmarks, the trees, the houses, bushes, etc.
87
00:09:41,000 --> 00:09:47,000
So that when they come back from a long foraging trip, they can pinpoint the nest very efficiently.
88
00:09:47,000 --> 00:09:55,000
And all these visual and spatial memories, they develop them from different areas that they explore.
89
00:09:55,000 --> 00:10:04,000
So they build kind of a mental map of the environment. And that's for their whole life. So we know that.
90
00:10:04,000 --> 00:10:12,000
Now speaking of that memory of the nest, why if we have ten beehives on stands all right next to each other?
91
00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:20,000
Do they really remember which one is theirs? Would it help if we had our hives different colors, something like that?
92
00:10:20,000 --> 00:10:27,000
Yes, exactly. It would help. When you put them in this situation, it's a natural situation.
93
00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:34,000
In nature, this will not happen because there's competition between the colonies and they don't found their nests at the same place.
94
00:10:34,000 --> 00:10:43,000
When you put them all together in the quotation, then of course you see that many get confused and there is drift.
95
00:10:43,000 --> 00:10:52,000
So I think it's about 20% of the workers in a colony when they are next to each other that do not pertain to that colony.
96
00:10:52,000 --> 00:11:01,000
So there is an exchange of workers between colonies, probably because the bees get lost and confused. They go in the wrong nest.
97
00:11:01,000 --> 00:11:15,000
So it helps if you mark the colonies with different colors or different shapes to identify them clearly and it helps the bees to remember where they come from.
98
00:11:15,000 --> 00:11:25,000
Well, I appreciate that because I want to take some of the things that you've learned and figure out how we can put those into practical something for us to be better beekeepers.
99
00:11:25,000 --> 00:11:35,000
And if that means we have 10 hives in a row and it would help if they were different colors or a red X or a... oh, they don't see red, do they?
100
00:11:35,000 --> 00:11:40,000
Oh, red is not for them. It's great.
101
00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:53,000
Yeah. So that was a bad example. But a purple X or a blue, I don't know, something to help them really find their way to their exact home versus drifting to others.
102
00:11:53,000 --> 00:11:57,000
That completely makes sense to do some things like that.
103
00:11:57,000 --> 00:12:07,000
Now, I think one thing as beekeepers that we tend to do, especially hobbyists, those of us that just have a few hives, we love our bees so much, right?
104
00:12:07,000 --> 00:12:10,000
We tend to humanize them.
105
00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:18,000
Meaning when I open up a hive, I put assumptions on what they are thinking.
106
00:12:18,000 --> 00:12:28,000
And there are some days where I think they think I'm a bear and I'm coming to tear them to shreds and they're going to tear me to shreds first.
107
00:12:28,000 --> 00:12:38,000
And there's other days where I assume that they are thinking, oh, look at this nice guy. He's whistling. He feeds us sometimes.
108
00:12:38,000 --> 00:12:42,000
He's such a... we love him, right?
109
00:12:42,000 --> 00:12:48,000
Okay. What are they actually thinking? What do they make of us when we get into their homes?
110
00:12:48,000 --> 00:12:55,000
Well, this we don't really know. I do exactly like you. I mean, that's called anthropomorphism.
111
00:12:55,000 --> 00:13:08,000
And that's something we should be aware of when you do research. You project yourselves into the animal and think for them as you would think in that situation.
112
00:13:08,000 --> 00:13:16,000
This anthropomorphism can help to give you some ideas of things to look at when you're a researcher.
113
00:13:16,000 --> 00:13:23,000
But of course, you need to stop very quickly to be anthropomorphic if you want to be scientifically correct.
114
00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:29,000
So what exactly do you bees think about you when you come on different days? I have no idea.
115
00:13:29,000 --> 00:13:41,000
I just can give you some insights of things that we understand from their behavior in particular situations. For instance, I told you they learn many things when they go outside.
116
00:13:41,000 --> 00:13:52,000
We know that they communicate very accurately with others. So if you perturbate the others in the hive, then you perturbate their communication, for instance.
117
00:13:52,000 --> 00:14:06,000
I'm wondering what things they teach each other versus what things are just very instinctual. For example, even though I live in the mountains, we don't have any bears close by very often.
118
00:14:06,000 --> 00:14:22,000
And so generations, many generations may pass between the time that my bees have seen a bear. Yet they know, don't they, that instinctually that bears are bad.
119
00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:27,000
And this is a problem if we see a bear. So can you talk about that a little bit?
120
00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:37,000
Yes, sure. As we understand it, it's very instinctive. So any animals have their part of instinctive behavior and learned behavior.
121
00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:43,000
We are also instinctive organisms. Our emotions are instinctive, for instance.
122
00:14:43,000 --> 00:14:53,000
So we know that bees tend to attack dark shapes. And if there is fur, it's even more attractive to them.
123
00:14:53,000 --> 00:14:57,000
So that's the description of a bear, roughly speaking.
124
00:14:57,000 --> 00:15:02,000
So we think that there has been a co-evolution between bears and bees.
125
00:15:02,000 --> 00:15:11,000
And so the bees are imprinted in their DNA that this type of signal, visual signal, is dangerous.
126
00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:17,000
And they will tend to sting everything that is dark and hairy, basically.
127
00:15:17,000 --> 00:15:32,000
So very instinctive. And generally in the animal kingdom, instinctive behaviors are linked to reproduction and survival, which are the two main important traits.
128
00:15:32,000 --> 00:15:39,000
So that's instinctive. Then, of course, they teach each other a lot of things.
129
00:15:39,000 --> 00:15:54,000
You are probably aware of the honey bee, Waggle Dance, so this communication system by which the bees indicate to the other bees from the same colony where to find food or where to find new nesting sites.
130
00:15:54,000 --> 00:16:08,000
So this is a complex communication that happens in the nest, whereby a bee that's as far in the spot, food or nesting sites, come back in the nest and do a hate-shaped walk
131
00:16:08,000 --> 00:16:11,000
in the middle of which there is a Waggle phase.
132
00:16:11,000 --> 00:16:23,000
And in this hate-shaped walk with the Waggle phase is encoded, the location of a target site, food or nesting sites.
133
00:16:23,000 --> 00:16:27,000
And this communication is made in the dark of the hive.
134
00:16:27,000 --> 00:16:31,000
The bee cannot point directly to the other bees where is the place.
135
00:16:31,000 --> 00:16:37,000
They communicate this in the dark of the hive, and this is called a symbolic communication.
136
00:16:37,000 --> 00:16:42,000
And symbolic communication is something that is not that common in the animal kingdom.
137
00:16:42,000 --> 00:16:44,000
So this is quite exceptional.
138
00:16:44,000 --> 00:16:51,000
So what can we learn from that? Knowing that they do that, is there anything that we can take away that we can help them with?
139
00:16:51,000 --> 00:16:55,000
Yes, so this communication happens in two contexts, as I said.
140
00:16:55,000 --> 00:17:02,000
And we could use this communication to attract the bee population, for instance, in particular places.
141
00:17:02,000 --> 00:17:10,000
Places where, for instance, we know it is safe for them to come and forage, places far from pesticides, for instance.
142
00:17:10,000 --> 00:17:17,000
Or places that we would like the bees to visit to pollinate a crop, for instance.
143
00:17:17,000 --> 00:17:27,000
So as beekeepers, as farmers, you could very well think that you may be able to attract bees in certain areas with a feeder,
144
00:17:27,000 --> 00:17:34,000
with a sugar solution, a high percentage of sugar solution, train the bees to go in this area.
145
00:17:34,000 --> 00:17:42,000
They will communicate and recruit other bees to go in this area, and you will have a population of bees visiting your area of interest.
146
00:17:42,000 --> 00:17:45,000
And then at some point, you could just remove the feeder.
147
00:17:45,000 --> 00:17:53,000
The bees will continue to come back in this area, and they will accidentally happen to forage on the flowers that are nearby.
148
00:17:53,000 --> 00:18:04,000
So either because you want them to be pollinated, or because you want the bees not to go in other areas that have been treated with armed food pesticides, for instance.
149
00:18:04,000 --> 00:18:06,000
So let me make sure that I get that.
150
00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:18,000
So, for example, around me, within a mile around me, I have some neighbors that are organic farmers and grow things like sandfoil and stuff, which is great for the bees.
151
00:18:18,000 --> 00:18:25,000
I have other neighbors that are growing this, what they call Roundup Ready alfalfa, and they bomb it with Roundup all the time.
152
00:18:25,000 --> 00:18:30,000
So, and they're pretty much equal distances away.
153
00:18:30,000 --> 00:18:45,000
So you're saying if I were to take some kind of open feeder with syrup, put it in the good field I want them to go to, they are much more likely to go there than where all the Roundup is being sprayed.
154
00:18:45,000 --> 00:18:57,000
Exactly, because of communication. So the bees that you're trying to go there will recruit more bees, and your population of bees will more likely go to the field that you decided.
155
00:18:57,000 --> 00:19:07,000
Of course, it's not 100%. You may have bees that have found other sites, but still, it increases the probability that your bees don't get contaminated.
156
00:19:07,000 --> 00:19:12,000
That could make a huge difference. How could we apply that to catching swarms?
157
00:19:12,000 --> 00:19:18,000
So the bees also communicate nesting sites when it comes time to swarming.
158
00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:31,000
And so we have exploratory bees that scouts, that goes, explore the environments, finds potential nesting sites, evaluates the parameters of these nesting sites,
159
00:19:31,000 --> 00:19:47,000
come back to the nest or the swarm and do the dance. And through a system of voting, we have the bee population that will, at some points, go away, swarm and install in one of the sites that have been decided by the collectivity.
160
00:19:47,000 --> 00:20:01,000
So if you want to catch swarms, one solution would be to provide the bee population empty hives or attractive, empty nesting sites.
161
00:20:01,000 --> 00:20:13,000
Sure. We have what we call swarm traps. Again, based on Tom Seeley's book, you can get dimensions and things that he found actually worked best on what the bees are looking for.
162
00:20:13,000 --> 00:20:27,000
But would you think that it would make more sense to put, say, five of those within a quarter mile area or to spread them out a mile apart between each other?
163
00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:33,000
So if you put them closer to the swarm, then you have a higher probability that they get visited.
164
00:20:33,000 --> 00:20:34,000
Sure.
165
00:20:34,000 --> 00:20:54,000
No, this is what I would say. Now, there is, of course, a distance at which I guess it will fail because these new swarm boxes should be far enough from the mother colony, because I guess the colonies will not establish if they are too close from each other.
166
00:20:54,000 --> 00:20:58,000
Remind me about how far away do they like to be? What is too close?
167
00:20:58,000 --> 00:21:04,000
So maybe I will say stupid things. So I prefer not saying.
168
00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:06,000
That's okay.
169
00:21:06,000 --> 00:21:10,000
But I guess I guess it's more than 50 meters from what I recall.
170
00:21:10,000 --> 00:21:22,000
Sure. I think it's even further than that, but I don't remember the exact number. Some listener, please email us, remind us what that number is, or Dr. Seeley, you can do the same thing here.
171
00:21:22,000 --> 00:21:28,000
Tell me some of the other things that you've learned that we can put into practical day-to-day beekeeping that will help us out.
172
00:21:28,000 --> 00:21:51,000
Beekeeping. I mean, I don't know if in the US you do a lot of pollination using your bee hives, but at the moment we are working on many projects that try to better understand how we can increase the pollination rate with our domestic hives by putting them in the crop yards.
173
00:21:51,000 --> 00:21:56,000
I guess in Europe there is no real regulation and there are only recommendations.
174
00:21:56,000 --> 00:22:07,000
And these recommendations about the number of hives per crop that you have to put vary from one country to the other from one to 20 hives.
175
00:22:07,000 --> 00:22:17,000
So this is very vague and empirical practices. So we are far from mastering pollination with domestic honey bees.
176
00:22:17,000 --> 00:22:22,000
Just a quick break here to thank our presenting sponsor, Man Lake.
177
00:22:22,000 --> 00:22:35,000
Hey, if your weather is anything like mine, it is freezing out. So let's put our creative brains together and visualize spring. Birds chirping, flowers blooming, and bees buzzing.
178
00:22:35,000 --> 00:22:40,000
Now let's visualize you enjoying beekeeping so much more with some new gear.
179
00:22:40,000 --> 00:22:49,000
Or if you're new to beekeeping and not sure what you need, give Man Lake a call and their experienced beekeepers will help every step of the way.
180
00:22:49,000 --> 00:22:56,000
Protective gear, hives, and tools, even packaged bees, nukes, and queens, Man Lake has it all.
181
00:22:56,000 --> 00:23:12,000
And don't forget your discount code MLBLOV10, it's in the show notes, for $10 off your first $100 purchase. I'm feeling better already. Now back to the guest.
182
00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:30,000
So what I'm trying to do at the moment is to understand how bees move in the landscape. How bees fly away and how do they choose flowers, flower patches, trees, and how do they move between different flower patches and trees.
183
00:23:30,000 --> 00:23:43,000
And in my lab we've developed radars, big machines that scans the environment at high frequency and these radars can identify individual bees flying around.
184
00:23:43,000 --> 00:23:49,000
So we can reconstruct the flight trajectory of the bee in the field.
185
00:23:49,000 --> 00:24:07,000
And with this we've started to understand how bees predictably move between one point to another point to another point to another point and how through experience, through trial and error, the bees develop routes between different points that are more and more efficient.
186
00:24:07,000 --> 00:24:27,000
At the end of the day, if you give a bee an opportunity to forage ad libitum without limit in an environment where there is always resources, that bee will develop a route that maximizes nectar collection rate or pollen collection rate by minimizing travel distances.
187
00:24:27,000 --> 00:24:35,000
So they solve routing problems. They can solve a physical spatial network.
188
00:24:35,000 --> 00:24:45,000
So it's all about efficiency, it sounds like. How can we go out, gather what we're trying to gather as efficiently as possible and bring it back to the hive?
189
00:24:45,000 --> 00:24:57,000
Exactly. But they do this with some rules. And just to finish on this, now we are starting to understand how a bee predictably will move between different points.
190
00:24:57,000 --> 00:25:10,000
That helps us understand how pollen will be transported between different points. So how plants will be pollinated and cross fertilized in the landscape.
191
00:25:10,000 --> 00:25:16,000
So this is much more precise than just putting bees and enclosing the eyes and waiting for things to happen.
192
00:25:16,000 --> 00:25:34,000
The aim is to be able to predict these complex dynamics and one day maybe give very practical advice to farmers so that they can really envisage stopping agrochemicals and increase their properties with the bees.
193
00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:48,000
Okay, my mind just kind of blew for a second. Let me make sure I understand this. The eventual goal would be to be able to say, okay, here's a farm or an orchard. Here's where the bees are going to go.
194
00:25:48,000 --> 00:26:01,000
And you want to plant this and then this and then this in this kind of order or diameter out from the hive because it's going to most efficiently be pollinated that way.
195
00:26:01,000 --> 00:26:23,000
Am I getting that right? That's an example of what we might be able to do. Either this or the opposite, put the hives at strategic places so that the bees will visit the plants that are already planted in a particular geometrical disposition at the right place.
196
00:26:23,000 --> 00:26:32,000
And we do have a lot of pollination services in this country and mostly commercial beekeepers. The biggest one is the almonds out in California.
197
00:26:32,000 --> 00:26:48,000
So what we may be able to learn eventually from this research is instead of just putting a pallet of hives every whatever, you know, half mile or whatever, we might want to have one here, two here, three here.
198
00:26:48,000 --> 00:26:54,000
We're going to learn what will more efficiently work for them and for the pollination.
199
00:26:54,000 --> 00:27:07,000
Yes, for instance, and maybe not put all the hives at the same time. Maybe after just a few days, reinforce the pool of hives in certain areas, etc., etc., to maximize pollination.
200
00:27:07,000 --> 00:27:16,000
That's the idea. Better use the bees to provide this pollination service and perhaps ultimately reduce our impact on the environment.
201
00:27:16,000 --> 00:27:25,000
So I know you're also a beekeeper yourself. In addition to a researcher and a scientist, tell me some of the things that you love about beekeeping.
202
00:27:25,000 --> 00:27:32,000
Oh, I love it. I must admit I am a poor beekeeper. I get stung a lot.
203
00:27:32,000 --> 00:27:34,000
That doesn't make you a poor beekeeper.
204
00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:49,000
But I love it. No, I am a poor beekeeper because I just don't produce any honey. I'm there. I watch the bees. I'm happy just watching the bees. So I spend hours watching the bees. That's it.
205
00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:55,000
What I love in this is that each time I watch a bee colony, it's different.
206
00:27:55,000 --> 00:28:05,000
Each time I see new behavior that I don't know how to interpret and I give me ideas on the next research question I may ask.
207
00:28:05,000 --> 00:28:13,000
And of course, the smell, the smell and the being outside in the countryside is lovely.
208
00:28:13,000 --> 00:28:27,000
That's one thing that really surprised me in one time when I had someone who's not a beekeeper that really wanted to meet my bees and I put a bee suit on her and open the lid.
209
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:35,000
She looked in and she took a breath and she said, that smells so good. And I guess I had gotten used to it.
210
00:28:35,000 --> 00:28:48,000
And she was just blown away by the smell. It's interesting that you mentioned that. What kinds of things do you observe? Just when you're just out there for fun, you mentioned that you just watched them a lot.
211
00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:56,000
Yes. Well, sadly at the moment, at this time of the year in France, we have a huge predation by hornets.
212
00:28:56,000 --> 00:29:07,000
Here we have the yellow-legged hornets that came from Asia 20 years ago. And these hornets have been introduced by mistake.
213
00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:14,000
But now they are all over Europe and especially in France. We have huge populations.
214
00:29:14,000 --> 00:29:25,000
So, hornets are important predators of bees. They have evolved hunting strategies that are fascinating.
215
00:29:25,000 --> 00:29:35,000
I'm also fascinated by hornets, I should say. But the bees, the bees of course need to defend themselves and they have a variety of behavior.
216
00:29:35,000 --> 00:29:45,000
And we see there is no standard defense behaviors in our honeybees because this predation by the hornets is new.
217
00:29:45,000 --> 00:29:55,000
And in the last 20 years, there has not been co-evolution between these hornets and our bees. So, you can see the bees are trying different things.
218
00:29:55,000 --> 00:30:07,000
And it varies depending on colonies. So, in some colonies, the bees just aggregate outside and they make, you know, the ground is just bees, bodies of bees,
219
00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:17,000
and the hornets will not land on the hive plates. In some colonies, you can see that some brave honeybees try to attack the hornets.
220
00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:32,000
But this is, of course, always a failure. And you can see many, many, many behaviors like this that emerge and that probably will not be selected by natural selection.
221
00:30:32,000 --> 00:30:37,000
But it's fun and very intriguing to see all these attempts.
222
00:30:37,000 --> 00:30:46,000
What kinds of things have you seen that either the bees developed or people have developed to help the bees out to fight the hornets?
223
00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:55,000
This is a big thing in Europe. Some big keepers are very ingenious and it's also a very diverse pool of people.
224
00:30:55,000 --> 00:31:09,000
So, some have opted for more traditional ways to isolate the hives from the hornets with a system of grid, metallic grid that you can put in front of the hive.
225
00:31:09,000 --> 00:31:19,000
The mesh size is calculated so that only the bees can go through. And the hornets, which are larger, cannot go through.
226
00:31:19,000 --> 00:31:32,000
And the more ingenious people have started to develop electric apse. So these are, again, a grid of iron mesh that you can plug.
227
00:31:32,000 --> 00:31:41,000
So there is an electric field in it. And the distance between the wires is calculated so that a bee can go through.
228
00:31:41,000 --> 00:31:48,000
But the hornets, which is larger, cannot. And then they get burned if they go through.
229
00:31:48,000 --> 00:31:50,000
And they are not exept.
230
00:31:50,000 --> 00:31:59,000
This is very popular at the moment. This is probably the most efficient way to control the populations locally.
231
00:31:59,000 --> 00:32:07,000
But of course, very ingenious people. And now I started to develop a tracking system, a radio telemetry, for instance.
232
00:32:07,000 --> 00:32:25,000
So you put a transponder on the hornets with a big antenna. And then with your receptors, you can follow the hornets at the moment where it goes back to the nest with a honey bee in the middle of his legs.
233
00:32:25,000 --> 00:32:38,000
So the hornet will go straight towards the nest. And you can follow it, identify where the nest is. Because these nests are up in the trees. And often you don't see them. You cannot notice them with your eyes.
234
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:43,000
And once the nest is located, then you can destroy it or remove it.
235
00:32:43,000 --> 00:33:02,000
Some people are also working on drones that would automatically follow the hornets and locate the nests. I know that some colleagues are working on a laser system that would be on back on the drone to destroy the nest with the drone.
236
00:33:02,000 --> 00:33:07,000
So you just emit the laser signal in the nest and destroy the nest.
237
00:33:07,000 --> 00:33:18,000
Wow. It's got a lot of ingenious stuff going on. It's almost like you're getting ready to plant a bomb on that hornet. It goes back and just blows up the nest.
238
00:33:18,000 --> 00:33:34,000
Exactly, yes. And so, as I said, these hornets are occupying the mind of many beekeepers. And we have many here in Europe that have different specialties and many are engineers. So they come up with very interesting and clever solutions.
239
00:33:34,000 --> 00:33:43,000
I want to see some of those. You did mention earlier about tracking bees. Do you put some kind of a transponder on them too? Is that how you do it?
240
00:33:43,000 --> 00:33:55,000
Yes. So I use what we call harmonic radars. So this is technology from the army, from the marine. This is a very, very robust technology.
241
00:33:55,000 --> 00:34:08,000
And indeed, you need to put a small antenna, a small transponder on the bee. Very light. This is a dipole. So this is a passive transponder. It doesn't emit anything. There is no battery.
242
00:34:08,000 --> 00:34:19,000
And then the radar will scan the environment, emitting a radar wave. And part of this radar wave would be remitted by the transponder.
243
00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:28,000
So you don't get all the signal of all the things in the environment. It will be too noisy. You're just looking for your target, which is the transponder.
244
00:34:28,000 --> 00:34:37,000
And with this system, with our systems, we can track a bee up to one kilometer. And now we have a system where we have many of these radars.
245
00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:44,000
So we have a network of radars so that we can track the bees for their whole home range.
246
00:34:44,000 --> 00:34:50,000
You make science sound interesting. I'd love to come and participate in some of it sometime.
247
00:34:50,000 --> 00:35:00,000
Hey, on a more personal note, we were going to meet last week. You had to cancel at the very last minute because of a fire. Tell us what happened.
248
00:35:00,000 --> 00:35:05,000
Yeah, I'm sorry. It was a disaster last week.
249
00:35:05,000 --> 00:35:17,000
Just before our interview, I learned that part of my lab has burnt. So in Toulouse at the university, we have two different types of labs.
250
00:35:17,000 --> 00:35:22,000
The wet labs in which we do behavioral experiments in very controlled conditions.
251
00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:32,000
And of course, we have an experimental app here in which we have our honey beehives. We have 50 of them, maybe. And different labs in cabins.
252
00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:40,000
And one of these cabins was on fire. We don't know what caused this.
253
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:50,000
Very, very, very thankfully, we had the firefighters that came after just five minutes because they are nearby the university.
254
00:35:50,000 --> 00:35:58,000
So they stopped everything. But yeah, the building burns and we lost almost all the equipment for the beekeepers.
255
00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:06,000
That's very sad, but the good news is that the bees are nothing. So no bee has been harmed.
256
00:36:06,000 --> 00:36:08,000
And no people.
257
00:36:08,000 --> 00:36:10,000
And no people, of course, yeah.
258
00:36:10,000 --> 00:36:17,000
Good. Good. Well, I'm sorry that happened. Have you ever had anything just really surprise you about honey bees?
259
00:36:17,000 --> 00:36:29,000
The dance already is something extremely surprising. As I said earlier, this kind of symbolic communication is something we know in humans and some other primates.
260
00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:39,000
And that's about it. So either it's only evolved in a few animals and only bees are one of them.
261
00:36:39,000 --> 00:36:45,000
Either this is something that exists in the whole animal kingdom, but we haven't been able to discover it.
262
00:36:45,000 --> 00:36:53,000
So that's crazy. More recently, because the only bee dance has been discovered in the 1950s.
263
00:36:53,000 --> 00:37:07,000
So it's already an old discovery. But more recently, we've started to understand that bees also learn from each other, not by communicating directly, but by observing each other.
264
00:37:07,000 --> 00:37:15,000
So bees can observe other bees and learn from them. So the most striking experiments have been done on bumblebees.
265
00:37:15,000 --> 00:37:21,000
Bumblebees are organized more or less like honey bees, although the colonies are much smaller.
266
00:37:21,000 --> 00:37:29,000
But there is a queen, there are workers, there is a division of labor with foragers, cleaners, wards, etc.
267
00:37:29,000 --> 00:37:39,000
And these bumblebees are very, very great models because you can test them in the lab. They accommodate very well with artificial lights.
268
00:37:39,000 --> 00:37:47,000
They can solve plastic Y-Mays, they can roll balls. Anyway, they can do lots of stupid things in a lab.
269
00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:58,000
Especially using these animals, we were able to demonstrate that bumblebees can learn new behavior from observing other bumblebees.
270
00:37:58,000 --> 00:38:10,000
How it works? For instance, we recently trained bumblebees to pull a rope to access a platform with a sugar solution.
271
00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:22,000
So this platform is below a plexiglass plate. And the bees have to pull a rope to train the platform beyond the plexiglass plate and access to a sugar solution.
272
00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:29,000
So already this, you can teach bees to do this if you have time and patience.
273
00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:35,000
What is interesting is that once you've taught one bee to do this, this bee becomes a demonstrator.
274
00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:40,000
And then you can put other bees from the same species behind a window.
275
00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:49,000
And so these bees can see the demonstrator pulling ropes, which is a non-natural task. Bees don't do that in the nature.
276
00:38:49,000 --> 00:38:57,000
And then, these observing bees, you can put them in the arena and let them do what they have to do.
277
00:38:57,000 --> 00:39:05,000
And in most of the cases, these naive bees that just observed one bee pulling a rope start pulling a rope and so on.
278
00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:14,000
So bees can learn to pull ropes through observation and they can also learn to ameliorate this behavior with experience.
279
00:39:14,000 --> 00:39:24,000
So we have the emergence within a bee colony of the emergence of a new behavior that is transmitted within the population through observation.
280
00:39:24,000 --> 00:39:28,000
That is crazy. How many other animals can do that?
281
00:39:28,000 --> 00:39:37,000
Well, animal cultures is something that scientists have discovered since the 70s.
282
00:39:37,000 --> 00:39:49,000
Of course, firstly, in the primates, maybe you are aware of these monkeys, these macaques in Japan that wash their potatoes in the sea
283
00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:56,000
so that the potatoes are salty and it's better. And we have some population of macaques that do that. They are very particular.
284
00:39:56,000 --> 00:39:59,000
Then there have been examples in birds.
285
00:39:59,000 --> 00:40:07,000
In England, you have these blue teats that have learned to open the milk bottles.
286
00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:11,000
And through observation, these behaviors are spread in the city.
287
00:40:11,000 --> 00:40:17,000
And this is not true for populations from nearby cities, so really, it's cultural transmission.
288
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:25,000
But in vertebrates, in insects, this is the first and only example so far.
289
00:40:25,000 --> 00:40:35,000
That's really cool. I just saw a video recently, online, a short video of two bees opening up a bottle of some kind of fruity juice.
290
00:40:35,000 --> 00:40:38,000
Have you seen that? Or sugary juice?
291
00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:41,000
I haven't seen that. What do they do exactly?
292
00:40:41,000 --> 00:40:51,000
Well, the lid is already loose, but the two of them figure out how to actually turn it until it comes off and then they can get into the sugary drink.
293
00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:59,000
And I'm just wondering, now they probably didn't observe that someplace else. They somehow had to learn that on their own.
294
00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:04,000
I don't know, maybe that's your next experiment to study with or something.
295
00:41:04,000 --> 00:41:13,000
Exactly. And we are at the moment trying to see if we could observe cooperative behavior like this in bees.
296
00:41:13,000 --> 00:41:22,000
So collective problem solving in artificial conditions in bees, this is something we are looking at at the moment.
297
00:41:22,000 --> 00:41:29,000
So it's both cooperative and they either are smart enough to figure it out, or you're talking about observation.
298
00:41:29,000 --> 00:41:34,000
Is it possible they observed people doing it and then figured out how to do it together?
299
00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:39,000
Wow. This is an open question. This is a good question.
300
00:41:39,000 --> 00:41:52,000
But at the moment, it's a difficult question to answer. I think we have more to understand about their behavior and how they copy each other first before the human-been relationship.
301
00:41:52,000 --> 00:41:58,000
I'm just coming up with more experiments for you. If I happen to see that video, I'll send it over to you.
302
00:41:58,000 --> 00:42:03,000
Okay. Any last words of wisdom you can leave with us before we sign off today?
303
00:42:03,000 --> 00:42:09,000
I know beekeepers are already aware that bees are smart animals.
304
00:42:09,000 --> 00:42:15,000
And this is something we are studying with patients here and in other labs in the world.
305
00:42:15,000 --> 00:42:22,000
As I mentioned at the very beginning of this discussion, nowadays the question is not whether the bees are smart or not.
306
00:42:22,000 --> 00:42:31,000
But the lively debated questions at the moment is whether they have some sort of consciousness, emotions.
307
00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:35,000
So what is the complexity of their inner lives?
308
00:42:35,000 --> 00:42:39,000
And that's something that we didn't dare asking ten years ago.
309
00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:51,000
So this is very new, very ongoing research with complex concepts that every day reduces the distance between us and the bees.
310
00:42:51,000 --> 00:42:53,000
So are you finding answers to that yet?
311
00:42:53,000 --> 00:43:02,000
Well, there are elements of answers. Of course there are no answers, but we have bees that behave like if they were happy.
312
00:43:02,000 --> 00:43:08,000
Bees that behave like if they played. Bees that behave like if they understand a problem.
313
00:43:08,000 --> 00:43:13,000
Bees that know very well how to navigate. Bees that can copy each other.
314
00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:17,000
And all of this is a signature of consciousness.
315
00:43:17,000 --> 00:43:19,000
That is super interesting.
316
00:43:19,000 --> 00:43:23,000
I appreciate it. Dr. Matiu.
317
00:43:23,000 --> 00:43:24,000
Liro.
318
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:25,000
Is that pretty close?
319
00:43:25,000 --> 00:43:27,000
Yes.
320
00:43:27,000 --> 00:43:30,000
Thanks a ton for being on with me today.
321
00:43:30,000 --> 00:43:51,000
Thanks a lot for the invitation.
322
00:44:00,000 --> 00:44:10,000
And remember, if you're not just in it for the honey or the money, you're in it for the love. See you next week.
