Bees

MICHAEL S. ENGEL: Over twenty thousand species of bees are at work every day trying to keep our planet alive, and it's true to say that if they were to disappear, our planet would wither and die. That’s how vital bees are to our very existence.

PETER KUPER: Dr. Michael Engel is Senior Curator and University Distinguished Professor at the Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas.

ENGEL: Bees are the pollinators not only of our crops, but they also pollinate our fields, our meadows, tropical forests, and even our deserts—none of which would bloom without their pollinators. The very oxygen that we breathe is a result of forests producing O2 for our atmosphere, and none of that would come about unless those plants were thriving—and for the plants to thrive we need bees, of course.

KUPER: People have for millennia, and in many ways, expressed the significance of bees.

ENGEL: There are cave paintings depicting early humans climbing cliffs to collect honey from beehives. In many early ancient religions, the world mother goddess was portrayed as, or somehow associated with, bees. 

KUPER: Only in the last century have scientists begun to better understand the remarkable ways in which bees express themselves.

ENGEL: When one worker bee goes out, finds a rich source of pollen, or nectar, or floral oils, they can come back to the hive and tell their nestmates exactly where that resource is so that they can go and collect more and also bring it back to the hive. They do this through an abstract language that is presented to one another in the form of a dance. Abstract movements and abstract vibrations symbolize relative distances and relative directions. It is truly incredible.

We like to think of language as a very human characteristic. And yet tens of millions of years before we ever appeared on this planet, bees had already evolved their own abstract language.