There are millions of different insect species on planet Earth. All of them fill some niche in the ecosystem in which they live. However, some species are more important than others. In particular, insect species that are members of the family Apody, or what you probably know as bees. Bees are some of the most important pollinators in the world, and they're responsible for a large amount of plant reproduction worldwide. Learn more about bees, what they are and their importance on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Hey, everyone. This is Gary. If you're listening to this podcast, you clearly are someone who likes to learn every day. And if you want to add a little more learning into your everyday routine, check out Ted Talks Daily, the podcast that brings you a new Ted Talk every weekday. In less than 15 minutes a day, you'll hear about some of the big ideas shaping our world. This includes everything from artificial intelligence to the search for dark matter and more. Listen to Ted Talks Daily wherever you get your podcast. I'm sure all of us would recognize a bee if we saw one. But what exactly is a bee?

Bees are insects from the family Apody. Apody is the basis of many of the words surrounding bees and beekeeping. Apiculture is the word for beekeeping, and an apiculturalist is a beekeeper, and an apierry is a collection of bee hives. There are about 20,000 different species of bees in the world. Wherever you can find pollinating flowers, you will find bees. Bees can be found on every continent except Antarctica, and in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Not all bees have stingers, and not all bees live in colonies such as hives. A bee is not the same thing as a wasp. Both insects are in the order hymenoptera, but there are significant differences between them. Bees tend to be fuzzy-looking, and wasps are smooth. Bees feed on pollen and nectar, whereas wasps tend to feed on other insects. Bees tend to be less aggressive and can only sting something once before dying. Wasps, on the other hand, are much more aggressive and can sting multiple times. A hornet is just a type of wasp. What What makes bees so interesting and so important is the outsize role that they play in plant pollination. About 75% of all flowering plants in the world and 35% of global food crops rely on some animal for pollination.

Of the animals and insects that pollinate plants, bees are by far the world's best pollinators. Bees have evolved to effectively carry pollen. They have hair-like fibers on their bodies where pollen can attach and be carried to another plant. They also have pollen baskets known as corbicula on their hind legs. Bees are so important as pollinators that some species of plant have evolved to only be pollinated by certain species of bees. As there are 20,000 species of bees with a wide variety of behaviors, most of the rest of this episode is going to focus on the various types of honey bees. Honey bees are of special importance because they're the bees that are most commonly used in the production of honey and have been the most widely domesticated. The human relationship with bees dates back well before recorded history. Early humans discovered honey in bee hives and found that it tasted pretty good. Honey was probably the most pure and concentrated form of sugar that early humans would have had access to. These early humans engaged in what is known as honey hunting. Honey hunting is the gathering of honey from wild bee hives. Honey hunting still takes place today by Aboriginal people in Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America.

The most famous of the modern honey hunters is probably the Hadza people in Tanzania. They're modern hunter-gatherers for whom honey is still a staple of their diet. Here, I should briefly explain exactly what honey is and how it's produced. Honey bees are a variant of bees that live in colonies. Each colony consists of three types of bees with a clear division of labor between them: queens, worker bees, and drones. Queens are females with active reproductive There is only one queen in a vive whose primary role is to lay eggs. The queen produces pheromones that regulate the high's behavior and maintain social harmony. These pheromones help control the activities of worker bees and suppress the development of new queens. Worker bees are female bees with underdeveloped reproductive organs. They perform all of the non-reproductive tasks in a vive. Drones are male bees whose main function is to mate with a virgin queen from another They do not perform any other function in the vive and are just fed by worker bees. Honey is a sweet substance produced by honey bees from the nectar of flowers. Worker bees, called foragers, visit flowers to collect nectar. They use their long, tub-like tongues, called probiscuses, to extract the nectar and store it in their honey stomachs, a special part of their digestive system.

While in the honey stomach, enzymes in the bee's saliva begin breaking down the complex sugars in the nectar do simple sugars such as glucose and fructose. Upon returning to the vive, the foraging bees regurgitate the nectar and pass it to house bees through a process called trophlaxis. This mouth-to-mouth transfer allows further enzymatic activity. The house bees then deposit the nectar into hex wax cells in the honeycomb. They fan the nectar with their wings to evaporate excess water, reducing the moisture content from around 70 to 80% to about 18%. The evaporation process, combined with the enzymatic breakdown of sugars, transforms the watery nectar into a thick, concentrated honey. Honey is deposited into a substance known as beeswax, which is also produced by worker bees. Bee's wax is also highly valued for use in candles along with honey. The earliest evidence of humans interacting with bees dates back to around 10,000 years ago. Cave paintings in the Cuevas de la Oranía in Spain, depict people gathering honey from wild bee colonies. It's believed that humans used clay pots or hollow logs to house bees and make hives, which made it easy for them to collect honey. The first culture that we have evidence of that practiced an organized form of beekeeping was ancient Egypt.

There is written evidence that beekeeping was practiced in ancient Egypt around 4,500 years ago. Hieroglyphics and tomb paintings show beekeepers using cylindrical hives made of clay or woven materials. Honey was highly widely valued in ancient Egypt. It was used as a sweetener, medicine, and in religious rituals. It was also offered to the gods and used in embalming practices. There are depictions dating back 4,200 years ago of beekeepers in Egypt blowing smoke into bee hives to get access to honeycombs. There's also evidence of beekeeping in ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, and China. In the Old Testament, a land of milk and honey was a metaphor for a bountiful land. Bee Beekeeping appears to have risen independently around the world. The Maya in Central America domesticated a type of stingless bee. The Romans appeared to have practiced migratory beekeeping, moving hides to follow flowering plants. During the Middle Ages, beekeeping was often practiced in monasteries. Monks used beeswax for candles and honey for medicinal purposes. The Islamic world also made significant advances in beekeeping. The 10th century Persian scholar Al-Masoudi wrote about the importance of bees in their role in agriculture. What all ancient beekeeping practices had in common is that collecting honey and beeswax usually resulted in the destruction of the vive.

Whether it was a woven basket, a ceramic pot, or a hollow log, these artificial vive locations were only designed to be used once. These are known as scep hives. Considering the thousands of years that humans kept bees, it took a surprisingly long time to truly understand how honey bees worked and lived. It wasn't until the 17th century that beekeepers such as Charles Butler of England and biologists like Jan Swammerdam of the Netherlands began to understand the social order of hives and the importance of Queens. In the 18th century, English beekeeper Thomas Wildman developed multiple advances in beekeeping. He developed a multi-skep system where honey could be harvested from one vive and bees could then move to another vive without killing them. The big innovation in honey production occurred in the 19th century. An American preacher and beekeeper named Lorenzo Lorraine Langstrath developed the Langstrath Hive. The Langstrath Hive has vertically hanging frames where bees can create beeswax homes and deposit their honey. The spacing between the frames is always between 6 and 9 centimeters, which is known as the bee space. If the frames were any closer together, the bees could connect them with beeswax.

By keeping the frames just far enough apart, the bees have room to move between them without connecting them together. The langstrathhive is the basic design of commercial bee hives that are still used today. The 20th century saw a dramatic rise in beekeeping around the world. Increased bee keeping was necessary not just to meet the demand for increased honey, but also the need for pollination services as agriculture expanded. The number of active bee hives in the world has expanded steadily throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. As of 2021, there are estimated to be 101.6 million active bee hives in the world. The largest honey-producing countries in the world are China, Turkey, Argentina, and the United States. While there have been some innovations in beekeeping, by and large, it's still the same process that has been practiced for thousands of years. Bees have to pollinate flowering plants, and then they have to make the honey. Today, many urban beekeeping operations have mobile hives. They will transport hives from place to place to provide pollination services at different times of the year before moving on to a new farm field to provide pollination services for yet a different crop.

Urban beekeeping has also grown in popularity as the need for bees as pollinators has been recognized even in cities. However, all is not well in the world of beekeeping and honey production. There are two major problems that are currently affecting the industry worldwide. The first is Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. Ccd is a phenomenon that affects honey bee colonies, characterized by the sudden and unexplained disappearance of the majority of worker bees in a vive, leaving behind the queen, immature bees, and ample food stores. Ccd was identified in 2007 when a large number of honey bee hives suddenly collapsed. Subsequently, research has found that similar episodes of colony collapse have occurred in the past, in particular in 1918 and 1919. And there were also recorded cases occurring as far back as the mid-19th century. Despite the problem being well-documented, there's no known cause for CCD, Or are we even sure that there is a single cause? Proposed causes include pesticides, mites, viruses, nutrition, habitat loss, and stress from transportation. Bee populations have bounced back from the problems of 2007, but a cause for CCD has been elusive. The other major problem facing the beekeeping and honey industry is better understood, but is probably more economically damaging.

Fraud. The truth is that honey is one of the most faked food products in the world, perhaps only behind olive oil. There is a good chance that the cheap honey at your local supermarket is not, in fact, honey at all. Much of the commercial honey available in stores today is either a small amount of honey cut with cheap sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup or not honey at all. If you purchase honey, you have to make sure to check the label and research where the honey was produced. Real honey from an actual honey bee five might cost a bit more than the cheap stuff you can find on your shelf at your nearest grocery store. Bies have an incredibly important role in both the Earth's ecosystem and in the world of modern agriculture. Despite all of the advances in farming and food production, there is still a large part of our agricultural system that is dependent on the humble bee. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producer are Ben Long and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review comes from listener Velard Serraptor over on Apple Podcasts in the United States.

They write, The One I've Been Looking For. I just discovered this, and I love it. It's everything I want in a podcast in that it informs so well and does so on such an extensive breadth of topics in a manner that is light and entertaining. The episodes are short but so full of information that they don't feel it. It is like you distilled other podcasts down, so all you're left with are the pure interesting tidbits and factoids, the actual what and how. That is what this is, which is all I'm really looking for anyways. Sweet, concentrated, juicy factoids about the stuff. Thank you, Velard Serraptor. Many other dealers, I mean, podcasters, will dilute their product and fill it with meaningless banter between the hosts. Here, I guarantee that you will always get the pure unadulterated good stuff. Remember that if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.

I suggest you leave immediately. Or what? You'll release the dogs or the bees or the dogs with bees in their mouth, and when they park, they shoot bees at you? Well, go ahead. Do your worst.