Transcript: Bee-ing in a Swarm

Graphic: Web Card: Believe it or not, wild honey bees are endangered. Find out why at PBS.org.

Wali (VO): Bees. Now, I don’t know much about them, except I know I’m always afraid of being stung. I think most people misunderstand bees, so I asked my buddy, Mace Vaughan, to help me out.

Wali: Mace is an entomologist – an expert on insects. He even showed up with his own honeybee swarm. Now, we’re all wearing white because bees are attracted to bright colors. Don’t wear anything dark – you’ll just look like a bear to a bee, trying to steal honey. Whoa – see Mace in that bee beard? How did he do that? We’ll get back to this later.

Title Card: The Swarm

Mace: We gotta go to the beginning. So, when a colony, when a hive, when it reproduces, when it gets too big for its cavity that it’s inside – it’s gotta get out.

Wali: Okay.

Mace: So what they do is they send out a swarm.

Wali: Right.

Mace: Not all the bees, but maybe half the bees in that colony will leave with the queen.

Mace: Now what they gotta do is they gotta stay together. Now the way they stay together is they use pheromones. Okay, they use perfume, if you want to think of it that way. These bees are smelling for each other. That’s how they talk, in a way.

Mace: Now the queen has her own pheromone and the workers have theirs and they use these to keep her with them in the swarm. If you were to go to a normal hive, when it was working in the middle of the summer, it’s gonna be full of eggs, and larval bees and pollen and honey and nectar that they’ve just brought back.

Title Card: eggs, larval bees, pollen, honey, nectar

Mace: This is a lot of stuff and they need to protect it. Because if they don’t and someone comes in and starts to gather and steal that honey or eat those brood then the colony’s not gonna survive the winter and they’re gonna die.

Wali: Got ya.

Mace: But when they’re swarming, they’ve got nothing to defend. A swarm of honeybees is an incredibly gentle thing.

Wali (VO): Oh man, to prove his point, Mace is trying to get me to hold a bee swarm. First, I gotta get the queen.

Mace: Okay.

Wali: Ready.

Mace: You ready to go?

Wali: I’m ready.

Mace: Ok. We got sound rolling? You good to go?

Wali: Good to go!

Mace: Okay, let’s see you do it. Remember, don’t pinch them, just go slow and gently move them out of the way.

Wali: Okay, there’s a lot of buzzing, vibrating going on in there.

Mace: That’s good.

Wali: That’s fine?

Mace: Yep. They keep themselves warm. They’re ready for flight.

Wali: Okay, here we go.

Wali: Going in slow. I’ve got the cage.

Mace: You’ve got it. Excellent. The queen is yours.

Wali: I feel them holding on to the…

Mace: That’s good. You can pull – they’ll let go.

Wali: I’ve got the cage.

Title Card: queen inside cage

Mace: Now all these bees are gonna fly up in the air. I’ll help you out here.

Wali: Okay, yeah, okay, good, good idea.

Mace: You can use this hand too, just move it back and forth.

Wali: I forgot I had another hand. Okay, here we go. It’s like a windshield wiper.

Wali: I’m watching them, um, doing the thing with their back end there, They’re pushing out the pheromone you say?

Mace: Yep, they’re all sticking their abdomens up. They’re beating their wings to blow it out, blow it out so all these other bees in the air can figure out where to go.

Wali: Ohh…

Wali (VO): Wow, I never thought I’d be holding a swarm of bees, And I didn’t get stung! And you know what? I kinda like these gals.