These Bees Hustle to Put Food on the Table

You know honeybees make honey, but did you know they make bread too? And four other types of bees are also dedicated chefs! Alfalfa leafcutting bees take a punch from a flower for your ice cream. Blue orchard bees bring you almonds and sweet cherries. Plus, stingless bees protect their tasty honey in creative ways. And bindweed bees’ way of gathering pollen deserves a fashion award.

TRANSCRIPT

There are over 20 thousand species of bees on the planet, and each one is full of surprises.

These bees prove there’s more to bees than just honey and stingers …

Like, did you know that honeybees turn the pollen they collect into a special food called bee bread?

Check it out!

Honeybees Make Honey … and Bread?

OK, time to head to work.

But before this honeybee starts her commute, she’s prepping her tools.

Because honeybees collect pollen. You knew that.

But it’s not as simple as you might think.

Plants want the bees to carry the pollen away and spread it to other flowers. That’s pollination, how plants reproduce.

But bees also need to carry lots of it home – pollen is a protein-packed food for the hive.

Luckily, they have the right gear.

They’re hairy, like tiny flying teddy bears. She’s covered in 3 million hairs for trapping pollen. They’re even on her eyes.

Here on her legs, they’re shaped into spiky brushes and flat combs.

When she lands on a bloom, she really gets in there.

Nibbling on the flower’s anthers detaches the pollen.

Time to pack up her haul.

She cleans it off her eyes and antennae with those brushes on her front legs, like windshield wipers.

Here it is up close.

That leg wipes the pollen right off her eye.

Then she moves the pollen from leg to leg, like a conveyor belt – front to middle to back.

The bee does this super fast, while she flies from bloom to bloom, moving the pollen into special baskets on her back legs called corbiculae.

She bends her leg, using it to squish the pollen into a ball, packing it together with a little saliva and nectar.

She can get as many as 160,000 pollen grains into each ball. She’s hauling as much as one-third of her weight.

Back at the hive, meal prep is about to start.

But the pollen isn’t for making honey.

The honey, under this wax, is made from nectar. They eat it for its sugar.

Bees turn pollen into something completely different: bee bread.

That’s their source of protein.

Step one: Find an open spot.

Step two: Deposit your goods and pack them neatly.

Step three: Let the pollen “marinate” with a hint of honey.

And voilà! It’s ready.

The pantry is stocked – both for adult bees and the babies that are growing in the cells next door.

The adults pop in to drop off a special bee bread snack … a little home cooking for the hive’s future hardworking flyers.

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Next time you enjoy an ice cream cone, thank an alfalfa leafcutting bee.

These bees are so tough, they get punched in the face by flowers.

This Bee Gets Punched by Flowers For Your Ice Cream

OK, this bee seems confused.

That leaf she’s gnawing on is no flower.

But this is an alfalfa leafcutting bee.

She needs hunks of leaves to build her nest.

A lot of them.

All this is her lacy handiwork.

She hauls the pieces back home.

Leafcutters use them to line the inside of their nest.

In nature, she might use a nook and cranny in a log.

But here, her nest is in what’s basically a bee apartment building. A high-rise made of Styrofoam.

These markings help the bee find her way back to her personal condo. You know, like, 7B.

And furnishing it takes a while, because, see that pile? These are the pieces they dropped.

The bees are here to work in this alfalfa field in California.

They’re from Europe originally, but farmers here use them because they have a real knack for pollinating alfalfa flowers, which grow tiny seeds inside these curly pods.

Farmers use the seeds to plant new fields of alfalfa … which is grown to make hay … to feed these gals.

So, really, your glass of milk comes courtesy of these bees.

But pollinating alfalfa flowers is a lot trickier than it looks.

Even honeybees can’t really hack it.

Here’s why.

Alfalfa keeps its pollen locked away inside its flowers.

To get it, the bees have to step on a spring-loaded petal called a keel petal.

Here’s how it works.

Pop! It releases this column that has the pollen at the end.

It’s called “tripping” the flower.

Here it is again.

The column has some force – the bee might get a good thwack in the face.

Leafcutting bees just don’t care; they can take a punch.

Pop.

Pop.

Honeybees don’t really like to tangle with that. They’ll usually step around gingerly, trying to sip nectar from the side without setting it off.

Leafcutting bees get coated in pollen and bring it back home to their nest so they can pack it in there to feed their growing babies.

Each one is bundled in a little leaf-wrapped bassinet.

Aw, there they are. The siblings all lined up together.

A new generation of the toughest little bees around.

Why would these bees be digging into the dirt?

Well, building your nest underground is a great way to protect it from invaders.

Unless, of course, freeloading flies torpedo the nest.

This Fly Torpedoes a Bindweed Bee’s Nest

Life for bindweed turret bees is violent and unfair.

It’s spring in California, and these male bees are in an all-out brawl, desperate to mate with the female trapped at the bottom of this pile.

Sometimes the fight is so intense that the female they’re going after gets crushed to death.

But if she survives … she and the winner steal away and mate.

Until another male wants in. Buzz kill!

Now she starts an epic dig, prepping a place to lay her eggs underground.

She tirelessly scoops earth with her mandibles, dousing it with nectar she collected earlier to soften it.

The majority of the world’s bee species – 70 percent – nest in the ground. These ones chose a dirt parking lot. Some nice folks cordoned it off to protect the bees.

Females work side by side. Each is “queen” of her own funky little castle.

They build turrets, but only some of them are vertical.

Many are tunnel-like, with a sideways entrance.

Others curve down.

You’ll see why that’s important in a bit.

Once the bees are done digging, they head off on another mission. They gather pollen from one plant only: morning glories, also known as bindweeds.

She rubs her shaggy legs all over that pollen.

And down she goes with her haul.

Pollen pants!

Inside her nest, she packs the pollen into neat balls – each one in its own chamber – and lays an egg on top.

When the egg hatches into a larva, it will live off the pollen.

As she toils, freeloaders show up.

They look like a bee, but their huge eyes give them away.

They’re called … wait for it … bee flies.

The fly doesn’t dig or gather pollen for her young. She just hovers over a bee’s nest and … yup, she’s dropping her own eggs in there. She’ll drop 200 eggs over her lifetime.

This is where those tunnels and curved turrets are useful. They make it harder for the flies to drop their eggs in from the air.

But when the fly does succeed, the fly’s egg hatches into a larva that digs tiny hooks into the bee larva.

As the bee eats the pollen and grows, the fly larva sucks it dry.

Sometimes the flies are so successful, they can nearly wipe out a population of bees.

But these bees don’t give up.

Two or three months of mating, foraging and warding off parasites come to an end when they seal up their nests with dirt.

Below ground, babies will grow.

The following spring, if the bees are lucky, a new tiny city will burst to life, full of bees persevering just as their mothers did before them.

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Bees may be famous for their sting, but these stingless bees defend their delicious honey with barricades, bouncers and bites.

Take a look!

Stingless Bees Guard Tasty Honey With Barricades, Bouncers and Bites

At the break of dawn, in Oaxaca, Mexico, bees are tearing down the barrier they built last night to cover their nest entrance.

Another successful night protecting their honey and babies from thieving ants.

They make this lattice out of a blend of wax and a potent ant repellent.

More on that later.

They’re not eating the waxy material – they’re stashing it to reuse tonight.

Just like the honeybees that sweeten your tea, these honeymakers live in a colony.

But they’re smaller and don’t have stingers to protect the sweet stuff.

That’s why they’re known as stingless bees.

There are more than 600 species of them in the tropics around the world, mostly in the Americas.

And they’ve been around twice as long as honeybees.

No bee stingers? No bee suits needed!

Emilio Pérez is a stingless beekeeper in the highlands of Oaxaca, land inhabited by the Chinantec people.

This is Melipona beecheii, one of the four bee species he keeps.

He only raises native bees.

Scientists say moving species around can spread diseases that harm them.

So, how do these teensy bees without stingers protect their honey?

By annoying you.

Some tangle in your hair … or eyebrow … and give you a bite.

It only feels like a pinprick. But they could summon a whole swarm of their sisters by releasing pheromones.

In any case, for these bees, the best offense is a good defense.

Guard bees stand watch at the nest entrance.

Melipona beecheii has just one imposing guard, stationed on this ledge shaped like a flower.

Other species employ as many as 15 guards.

They cover the perimeter of trumpet-shaped entrances.

If an outsider tries to come in – like this bee from another colony – the guards sniff it out and kill it.

These peculiar structures also make great runways, as bees go off to work in the flowers.

They’re not picky.

They collect nectar and pollen from dozens of plants, which they pollinate in the process.

Stingless bees also collect resin.

It’s the sticky stuff that plants like this cedar make to keep out burrowing insects.

See how she stows the drops on her back legs?

Different plants have different hues of resin: yellow … white … red.

They mix the resin with wax to make a pliable building material called cerumen.

Your average honeybee just uses wax.

Stingless bees shape cerumen into little capsules for their offspring, and stack them like a tiered cake.

They also use the material to make their honey pots … these orbs. Yum!

It’s a freewheeling architectural style, compared to honeybees’ hexagonal cells.

Now, remember this protective barrier?

It’s made of cerumen.

The resin mixed in with the wax is what keeps the ants away. They hate the resin’s smell and stickiness.

Once a year, Emilio and his daughter Salustia collect honey from their nests.

Stingless bee colonies are smaller and usually make less honey than honeybees.

Each of their Melipona beecheii colonies makes about nine pounds a year, just one seventh of what a honeybee hive produces.

Salustia: We’re having a honey tasting.

The Deep Look team got to sample it.

Gabriela: A strong fermented flavor.

Josh: It tastes like SweeTarts. Yeah. Really good.

Stingless bee honey is sold as a health product to treat things like sore throats.

All honeys contain hydrogen peroxide, which is antimicrobial.

Stingless bees visit a variety of plants, many in the rainforest.

So, scientists are studying their honey and resins for chemicals that might have medicinal properties.

As the sun goes down, bees head in for the night and cover their nest entrance once again.

No effort is too great to protect the riches everyone is after.

These bees build nests out of mud that they pack with purple pollen for their young.

And in the process, they help us grow nuts and fruits.

Watch This Bee Build Her Bee-jeweled Nest

What’s this bee up to digging around in the mud?

This blue orchard bee is a mason, a builder. Her material is – you guessed it – mud.

And she works alone.

In fact, unlike those honeybee hives you might think of, most of the 4,000 types of bees in North America are solitary.

See how she scrapes the wet earth? She collects it with two huge pincerlike tools on her face called mandibles.

She’s gathering mud to make her nest.

The nest is long and thin. In nature, she goes into places like hollow twigs.

At the University of California, Davis, she uses a six-inch-long paper straw provided by researchers.

In this nest without a straw you can see how she builds a wall of mud.

Then she gathers food from spring flowers, but not only to feed herself.

See the pretty purple pollen on the anther of this flower?

She grabs the anthers with her legs and rubs the pollen onto hairs on her abdomen called scopa.

And while she’s at it, she sips a little nectar from the blooms.

When she climbs back into her nest, she turns the pollen and nectar into a sweet morsel next to the mud wall.

On this purple ball she lays a single egg.

She repeats this several times in her narrow nest. Egg. Wall. Egg. Wall.

When she’s done, she seals it all up with more mud.

A cross section of the nest shows her incredible craftsmanship: It looks like a piece of jewelry.

Soon, the eggs hatch.

The hungry larvae feed on their pollen provision, the purple lunchbox their mom packed for them.

Still in the safety of the nest, the well-fed larva spins a cocoon.

The following spring, the adult bee chews its way out.

Just like their name says, blue orchard bees love orchards: fields of almonds and sweet cherries.

And they’re really good at pollinating them.

A few hundred females can pollinate as many almonds as thousands of honeybees.

And their tube nest means they’re portable.

That makes it easy to distribute them to farmers.

So why haven’t they taken over the fields?

Well, they reproduce slowly. They only have 15 babies a year.

A queen honeybee has 500 … a day.

So there just aren’t that many blue orchard bees around.

But some farmers are enlisting them anyway, hoping they can provide some relief to their struggling honeybee cousins.

If you look carefully, you might just spot a blue orchard bee foraging out in a field, helping keep fruits and nuts on our plates.

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Now check out our playlist on hungry caterpillars and beautiful butterflies.

Or see if you can survive these five bloodsuckers.