Kind: captions
Language: en
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we met with a scientist on a remote
island an hour off the main Coast by
boat this is where I do my work this
investigation of the bees appledore
island sounds like a reject from Harry
Potter well it's a beautiful laboratory
setting the reason he's chosen this
island for his experiments is there are
no trees on that island and therefore no
Bees nests bees usually use a cavity of
a tree as their nest and the reason he
wants that is he wants to build his own
bee nests that he can control in
placement and size he's studying how
bees as a collective choose a nest and
it's completely unbelievable the level
of sophistication in the decisionmaking
so here's what happens Scouts leave the
Swarm to find a new nest for example
when they've outgrown their old one and
come back and report on what they found
using the sophisticated waggle
dance that is they express to the other
bees in the colony where the potential
Nest is how good it is and how far it is
by doing this Figure 8 pattern oriented
toward the nest that they found and
during the portion of the figure8 where
they're running toward the nest they're
waggling their abdomen uh makes a unique
sound
and how long that run is determines the
distance in kilom to the nest and then
how many minutes long from 2 to 10
minutes that the bee is doing this dance
indicates how enthusiastic that bee is
about the potential nest because there's
other Scouts performing the same dance
explaining the distance and quality of
their potential nests and from this The
Colony studies the different options
there's actually negative campaigning
one Scout will headbutt another one
while it's doing the waggle dance saying
pipe down mine's better and eventually
The Nest the the Swarm settles on one
potential Nest they give the thumbs up
to the queen bee and off they go within
60 seconds something is happening
they're they're getting really agitated
yes they're about to launch my gosh are
you seeing them peel off like that yeah
this whole swarm cluster is going to
dissolve these bees have finished making
their decision they finished making
their preparations to fly to the new
home on mass all of a sudden 12,000 bees
up and fly to the new Nest together
Michel the liftoff is just now taking
place 12,000 bees look they're all
evaporating and we were there we watched
it we stood in the middle of this swarm
turns out when bees are not at their
nests they have nothing to defend so
they don't sting you I mean they were
crashing into us but nobody got stung
and off they flew through a democratic
process of
bees you can way you take it away oh
yeah sh
the
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