Episode 1 Hive Alive

Welcome to the world of the honeybee,

surely the most incredible insect on earth.

Bees have been around since the age of the dinosaurs,

and human beings have harvested their honey for thousands of years.

These days, they're one of the most widespread insects

on the planet, with trillions of individuals.

So you'd think we'd know absolutely everything there is to know

about these amazing creatures. But there's so much more to discover.

And that's what we're going to do.

We're going to lift the lid on the secret life of the honeybee

as never before,

in Hive Alive.

-Hello, I'm Chris Packham.

-And I'm Martha Kearney.

Welcome to Hive Alive.

And we're here in this fabulous Somerset garden

in the heart of the countryside on a fine summer's day.

-Martha, it couldn't be better.

-It's perfect, isn't it?

And we're going to be here for two whole programmes

during which we're going to be unravelling the mysteries

of that most iconic insect of the British summer, the honeybee.

As a beekeeper myself, I'm really excited about what we're going

to discover in our very own hives.

We're showcasing the latest scientific experiments,

and unleashing an arsenal of amazing gadgetry to delve into the

miniature world of the bees inside and outside the hive.

Over the next week,

we're analysing their every move with high-speed cameras,

listening to their secret sounds with hidden microphones,

and using a thermal camera to reveal what goes on within the hive.

And we've even got, get this, a miniature helicopter,

so that we can track the bees as they leave the hive to forage.

That's going to be amazing.

And to find out more intricate details of bee behaviour,

we're joined by our resident expert, Professor Adam Hart.

-And you've been doing some weird stuff?

-Yes.

I've been tagging and numbering our bees,

so that we can follow them individually and see what they

get up to in the hive, but also what they do when they leave.

88, sounds a bit like a bingo call.

Anyway, thanks to number 88 and thousands of other bees,

we're going to be discovering some amazing facts about their lives

over the course of the next two programmes.

We are in the Yeo Valley organic garden.

It's in the lee of the Mendip Hills in Somerset.

And the height of summer, which is the most critical time, isn't it,

-for the bees?

-It's certainly is.

But in this garden, they've found themselves a utopia.

Let's take a look at it.

The planted garden here is absolutely packed

full of flowers, loaded with the nectar that the bees want.

Down there we've got our hives, which we're carefully monitoring.

And over here, an observation hive made of glass, so that we can see

directly into it to find out what they're getting up to.

With all this on tap,

you'd think that the bees would be happy, wouldn't you?

But actually, this is no summer holiday for them.

In fact, what they've got to do is to gather enough nectar and pollen

to make honey to feed themselves and their young.

And they've got to do all of this in the couple of months

of fine weather left before the chill winds of autumn start to blow.

Then, the flowers around me will start to die off,

and if the bees don't have enough stores, then they'll die off as well.

These are absolutely key to our bees' survival,

the hives.

They can't do without them because they overwinter as a colony.

Now, think about some of the other social insects that you know.

Wasps, for example. They overwinter as a single, fertilised queen.

All of the other wasps die in the autumn. But not honeybees.

This strategy gives honeybees a head start over other pollinating

insects when spring begins. But this comes at a price.

To make it work, they need to make enough honey in the good times

to keep the whole hive alive throughout the winter.

'To really understand the way bees live,

'we need to see inside their home.

'So, I'm going to take a guided tour of our beehive

'with local beekeeper John.

'Starting with the outer casing.'

John, everywhere I go in Europe and North America,

beehives look exactly the same.

My conclusion is, it must be a design that works.

It's quite a traditional design,

and the virtue of these hives is that they've got a cavity.

And it allows the air to circulate inside the hive

without cooling down.

So we'll take off the honey box.

'Inside, at its simplest, a beehive is a two-storey building.

'On the top floor,

'we find the food factory where the bees store the pollen

'and turn the nectar into honey,

'which in turn they store in the honeycomb.'

So, that is a typical sealed, ready to be extracted, frame of honey.

-For them, of course, that would be a winter food store.

-Absolutely.

That's what helps them get through the winter.

-For us, of course, it's the produce of the hive.

-Yes.

'This is the honey that we hope to harvest next week.

'But of course, we mustn't take it all,

'or the colony would starve to death.

'Of every five kilos of honey the bees make,

'they need four just to keep the hive going.'

They are a tremendous consumer of their own product,

and that's why they have to work so hard to go out and collect.

'Below, on the ground floor, is the nursery, or the brood box.

'It's covered with a metal grille known as the queen excluder,

'which stops the queen from getting into the honey chamber above.'

-Why do you want to keep her out of the honey box?

-Because of hygiene.

This is the maternity ward, that is a food store.

So you don't want her to be laying any eggs in amongst the honey?

-Exactly.

-Right.

So how many bees do you think are in this hive at the moment?

I would think there's about 20,000 in here.

And by the end of summer, if it continues productively,

-how many then?

-Well into the 50s.

-50,000?

-Yes.

All about securing enough pollen and nectar

-to get them through the winter.

-Absolutely.

Do you know what I like, John?

The fact is that humans have been doing this

for thousands of years, what we're doing at the moment.

Thousands of years.

And the bees have been very friendly and passive this morning.

-Long tradition.

-Fantastic.

-Yes.

'Our bees are in a race to gather food.

'So we'll be tracking exactly how much honey they make.

'The sensors show that the hive

'and all of its contents now weigh 53.1kg.

'By next time, we'd expect the bees to put on another

'three or four kilos of honey.

'But to pull this off, they're going to need to use

'all of the natural skills

'that they've spent millions of years honing.

'Beginning with navigation.'

To make just a single pound of honey,

bees have to fly a total of 50,000 miles.

That's twice the way round the planet. An awful lot of flying hours.

And it all begins when a foraging bee

leaves the hive for the very first time.

Now, you'd think that they'd be pretty expert

at finding their way around.

But in fact, it can be a pretty hit-and-miss business

when they venture out for the first time.

One group of scientists is using some pretty unusual equipment

to try to solve the ancient mystery of how bees navigate.

Here at Rothamsted Research, Stephan Wolf has found a novel way

to track the exact flight path

of a bee on her maiden flight.

This cage has actually just meant that we can see

the upside of the bee nicely, to put the label on it.

-Like us, Stephan puts a numbered tag on each bee.

-There we go.

So he can follow them as individuals.

Even on this first reconnaissance flight,

our bee may cover a huge area, so it would be impossible

to follow her without some pretty specialised equipment.

He's using military radar.

In one more crucial procedure, Stephan attaches

a radio-frequency transponder onto the bee herself.

This sends a signal which will be tracked by his colleague.

So with that, the bee should be able to fly around quite nicely.

And hopefully get herself orientated around the new location of the hive.

OK... Three, two, one, go.

OK, she's out, she's out.

-RADIO:

-'Bee flying towards me.'

Our bee's transponder gives off a unique call sign, so as the

radar dish scans the landscape, this shows up on the screen.

Over the next few minutes,

we see a pattern emerge showing how she's systematically mapping

the area around her hive. Programming her internal sat nav, if you like.

This mental map will help her find her way between the hive

and various different sources of nectar on the hundreds

of foraging trips she'll make over the next few weeks.

Adam, I can't tell you the number of times

that I've watched my bees go in and out of the hive.

And I've no idea of what they're up to.

But actually this military hardware can tell us where they've been going.

Yeah, it's incredible we can follow individual bees.

When they're in the hive they're all together, but when they're out foraging, they're on their own.

To get back to the hive, they have to be excellent navigators.

How are they managing to navigate?

Well, you can see on the screen here that when they leave the nest,

when they leave the hive, they're doing these orientation flights.

That bee is coming out

and orientating itself within the landscape.

It's using landmarks, it's working out where the sun is.

Bees have magnetic crystals in their brain,

so they can actually detect the Earth's magnetic field.

They can detect polarised light in the sky.

They've got different mechanisms they can use

to build up its navigational map

so it can get that nectar and pollen back to the hive.

Because it's absolutely crucial it doesn't get lost on the way home.

Yeah, it doesn't matter how clever it is finding flowers.

If it can't find the hive, it's all pointless.

And what about the kit that they're using?

That transponder they're putting on the bee, is that all right?

Yes, they do look quite big, but they're only about 10% of the bee's body weight.

Bees can typically carry about five or six times that

if they're flying back with nectar and pollen.

It's a little bit like us carrying a bag of shopping.

-We don't want to carry it all day, but it won't affect what we're doing.

-Not harming them.

-No.

And is this technology able to tell us

the kind of territory that the bee's looking for?

-You can see that it's flying down the edges of the field.

-Yes.

Edges are very important to bees because that's often...

You've probably seen your bees doing this,

edges are where you find a lot of flowers,

and hedgerows particularly are very good for bees with all those bramble flowers.

This time of year they're all over the brambles, which makes rather delicious honey.

It does.

I suppose what they're really learning to do is,

-how to become a forager when they'll go on much longer flights.

-Yeah.

We used to call these play flights before we knew they were orientation flights.

It's like play fighting in other animals.

They're learning how to do that next job. That's exactly what they're doing.

They're learning the environment, preparing themselves for the rigours of going out there

-collecting nectar and pollen.

-They can go quite a long way, can't they?

I mean, up to three miles?

Yes, and in fact when I was a student we were looking at some bees

flying out to heather moorland that was seven or eight miles away.

So, if it's a really good resource,

they will fly a very long way to find it.

It's almost like us travelling hundreds of square miles to look for food.

-And still being able to find our way back home.

-And finding our way back to our house.

And it's not just a house with a town in a street and an address.

It's a house in the middle of nowhere.

OK. We can see our honeybees arriving back at the hive,

loaded up with nectar and pollen.

But then, they're disappearing inside.

And we want to know what's happening inside that hive.

The problem we've got is that we can't keep taking it to pieces,

otherwise we'll simply disturb the bees.

So, what we need is a different type of hive.

-Adam.

-Hi, Chris.

-This is what we need.

-Take a look.

A good old observation hive, so we can see what's going on inside.

Most of what we know about bee behaviour in a hive

comes from using one of these. It's a really, really important tool.

And the bees are used to this? They're used to the light

-and are behaving naturally?

-Yep, they're flying in and foraging. The queen's laying eggs.

-It's all happening just as it is inside the main hive.

-OK.

We've got another piece of technology here, this small camera.

If I turn it on,

we should be able to get some views of the individual bees here.

-There we are.

-There we go.

-Now, these are all the workers.

-These are female bees.

-Yep.

'The vast majority of bees are female workers,

'and as the name suggests, they do all of the work,

'performing a wide range of roles from nursemaids to bouncers

'and cleaners to undertakers.

'And crucially, when they get older, as foragers.'

The interesting thing is,

they don't do the same job throughout their life, do they?

No, they have a schedule of work that starts off in the hive,

doing lots of nice, safe jobs, looking after the young.

The colony gets its investment back.

Cos it's put a lot into making one of these bees.

It wants to make sure it gets everything back.

When they get older, they start going outside

and doing the dangerous work.

So they don't forage until they're at the end of their life?

Yeah, couple of weeks old they'll start going out into the environment.

And if they get lost, the colony... It's a business, if you like,

it's got its resource back.

What are they doing in the early part of their life then?

-Looking after the hive? Building the cells?

-Exactly.

They're feeding some of the young, nurturing the larvae,

attending to them a huge amount.

They are visited more than 2,000 times during the course

of their lives. So they're really looking out...

Each larvae is visited 2,000 times to get it to pupate?

Yeah. And they're looking after the queen,

they're building the wax later on in their life.

So they're doing all these housekeeping jobs within the hive

before they go outside and do the dangerous work.

What is it, then, that triggers them

to change their behaviour from one thing to another?

It's a complex schedule of hormones and genes

being switched on and off.

But also they have to react to the situation around.

If we suddenly started removing all of these foragers,

the hive would realise they didn't have enough food coming in,

and you'd get what's called precocial foragers.

-You'd get younger bees realising there's a job to be done.

-They get promoted?

-Yes.

Interestingly, their whole physiology starts to change. Their brains change.

-You get structures in their brain starting to enlarge, so they can navigate.

-Fantastic.

The whole thing is all linked in to getting all that stuff back

into the hive and to looking after the young when they're in there.

So the two other types of bee we might find in here

are the queen, of course, and drones, the males.

'Unlike their sisters, the bigger, bug-eyed males, known as drones,

'take a rather more laid-back approach to life.

'They play absolutely no part in the day-to-day running of the hive.

'They're the bee equivalent of gentleman of leisure,

'loafing around until the time finally comes

'for them to mate with a queen.'

-The queen is in there though.

-Oh, I can see her abdomen.

-You can see her abdomen, yeah.

-Which is longer, narrower.

-Yep.

So, that's our abdomen going into that cell. She is laying an egg.

And that egg is fertilised, and it's going to become another worker.

And you can see this little group, little coterie, a royal court

that surrounds her, looking after her, shepherding her around.

She's never left on her own.

-You can see they are cleaning her, grooming her.

-Lovely.

-How many eggs will she lay a day?

-Up to 2,000 eggs a day, she can lay.

2,000 in a day?!

Yeah, which gives rise to this kind of egg-laying machine cliche

that you often hear when it comes to queen bees. She is incredible.

And that's all she does, really.

And she's choosing to fertilise those. Because she can choose

not to fertilise them to produce the males, the drones?

Yes. If she lays in a drone cell, which is slightly bigger

because the drones are slightly bigger,

she lays an unfertilised egg, and that develops into a male.

So there's a conscious decision being made

about which type of egg she lays?

She's able to control whether she fertilises that egg,

-and very, very accurately.

-Who is in control?

The old adage is that the queen is controlling this super-organism

of bees, but that's not strictly the case, is it?

No, the queen's up here at the moment. She's laying eggs.

She's not controlling what's going on down here.

The workers have to organise themselves. It's a self-organised

system. It is very different from the way we organise things. There is no hierarchy in here.

There's no boss telling them what to do. They're organising their own behaviour.

The other thing is that we've got a microphone inside here

and we can hear the activity.

A huge amount of buzzing, of course, but also you can hear them

licking their lips, smacking their mouths!

Yeah, there's all sorts of sounds going on

as they're doing these jobs.

BUZZING

Some of those sounds are being used to communicate as well

as actually just incidental to the huge amount of work they're doing.

I see you've also got some of them marked.

There's some here with white tags, and numbered as well. There we are.

Yes, it's great,

because it means we can follow our bees individually.

We began by tagging a cohort of newly emerged worker bees,

just a few hours old.

At this stage, they are pretty docile.

They can't fly very well as their wings aren't fully developed,

and even if they do sting you, there's virtually no venom

so it doesn't hurt.

John and Adam stuck a little numbered tag on each bee's

thorax using a spot of glue.

And once it's there, it doesn't impede the bee at all.

Then, they put them back into our observation hive.

We marked two sets of female workers bees. The older,

with red tags, and the younger, with white,

to find out exactly how their roles change over time.

These red ones that you can see are the ones that we marked

-two weeks ago.

-Oh, yeah.

The white ones are the younger ones that we did a few days ago.

-Hopefully next week we'll see how their roles are changing as they get older.

-Fascinating.

It's going to be interesting to come back and look, to see what

-happens to our marked bees over the course of the week.

-Absolutely.

We should see...

In theory, we should see the white bees becoming foragers.

We should see the red bees almost dropping off.

But this is a fairy adaptive and dynamic environment.

They don't always follow those textbook clockwork rules.

It will depend on what's going on out there

as well as what's going on in there.

Our red-tagged bees are now two weeks old.

Very soon, they'll be ready to leave the hive on the most

dangerous mission of their short, but eventful, lives.

A mission from which they may not return.

Over the next week they'll be going hundreds of miles in search

of nectar and pollen.

But how do these tiny insects fly in the first place?

The flight of the humble honeybee is worth a closer look.

And we've managed to capture these tiny insects' aerial acrobatics

in ultra-slow motion.

They may be small, but they are powerful flying machines,

beating their twin pairs of wings

at an astonishing 230 times a second to stay aloft.

Bees carry more than half their body weight in nectar and pollen.

So if they flew by simply flapping their wings up and down

like a bird, they'd never even get off the ground.

Instead, they twist and fold the wings to create spinning currents

of air that allow them to get airborne.

And just look at how manoeuvrable they are, turning on a sixpence

and surviving G-forces that might kill a human being.

They're just amazing.

I have to say, I do think these images are quite extraordinary.

We've been using a very special kind of camera that slows

the motion down to 40 times of what it would be normally.

It means you can see every little detail, doesn't it?

Yeah, you can see those wings beating.

You can see the little movements they have to make.

Not just to generate lift,

but also to get them onto those flowers to pick up the pollen,

to pick up the nectar, and then get it back to the hive.

And here we can see them coming back to the hive, can't we?

I love watching these flights.

-And they're not just flying straight...

-Is that one having a poo?

-One has just done a poo.

You often see that as they're leaving the hive or coming back in.

They don't like to defecate in the hive. It makes good sense.

I love just watching the landing boards there.

They're not just flying straight in.

It's not like some kind of robotic device.

They're having to allow for the bees around there,

they're having to find the right area.

Sometimes they land and have a little bit of a skid.

These aren't perfect little toys, these are animals

that are responding to the environment around them.

You get a sense of...

Whoa, there's one just fallen out of the sky. There we go.

-They'll be fine, they're very light.

-It's not easy for them, is it?

That's the sense I get. They're kind of battling against the odds.

So far on Hive Alive...

..we've lifted the lid on our hive,

and begun to understand the complex tasks each individual bee

must perform to enable the colony as a whole to survive.

And still to come -

we'll be carrying out a ground-breaking experiment

to show how bees and flowers

use superhuman senses to communicate with each other.

As our tagged bees leave their hive on their maiden flight,

we are going to be hot on their heels.

And we'll be decoding the secret language of bees

that helps them find their food and foil their competitors.

But first, the rather intimate relationship

between bees and flowers.

-It's a very important relationship, isn't it?

-It is indeed.

It's all about food and sex,

and from the bees' point of view, of course, it's the food.

The nectar, that's their fast fuel, if you like.

The sugars, the carbohydrate they need to keep going

and to convert to honey

so that the hive can keep going through the winter.

The pollen, on the other hand, that's their proper meal,

as my mum would have called it. The protein, if you like.

And again, of course they will store that to get that hive

through the winter.

From the plant's point of view, it's all about cross fertilisation,

moving pollen from one plant of a species to a different plant

of the same species.

So it can enrich the genetic diversity, and in the long-term,

these plants can continue to evolve and change to changing conditions.

Without that, they'd be stuffed, basically.

So, what you're seeing when you watch the bees

in your garden, is nothing less than evolution in action.

You see, when a bee visits a flower to collect nectar and pollen,

some of that pollen rubs off on the next flower.

The bee doesn't know it, but every time it lands on a new flower,

it may be helping it reproduce.

And the way that flowers have changed over time is mimicked

by the bees

because they've had to become much more efficient, productive about

the way they get their fast food and their protein in the form of pollen.

I love watching, when you see the bees

bringing in the pollen into the hive in their bright yellow sacs,

these are these little baskets on their legs with hairs

on the outside so they can gather the pollen more easily.

The nectar they've got in, I suppose the easiest way

-of explaining it, it's sort of like a tank, really, isn't it?

-Yeah.

And they manage to carry so much! Up to a third of their body weight.

What I like about the pollen baskets is the way they fill them so neatly.

They are like little capsules of pollen at the end there.

-Perfectly balanced.

-Perfectly balanced on either side

otherwise they'd be flying in circles. That wouldn't work.

They do a lot of flying around. 2,000 flowers a day,

a bee can visit. And in the course of its lifetime,

perhaps 44,000 flowers can be visited by a bee.

So you've got this remarkable process of plants and bees working

together over millions of years to shape the perfect organisms.

Not quite perfect. Otherwise it wouldn't be going anywhere else.

There's always going to be variation,

so the honeybee could get even better, Martha.

I find that hard to believe, but I'll take your word for it.

So we've been looking at the whole way that flowers have evolved,

with their wonderful scent, beautiful bright colours

and, on occasion, rather bizarre shapes like that foxglove over there.

It's all because of their relationship with bees

and other pollinating insects.

And without that, we'd be living in a much more boring world.

In fact, gardens like this would be predominantly green.

Yet ironically, given how beautiful we find flowers, bees

see them and the rest of the world very differently from the way we do.

When we look at the flowers in this garden,

we see a range of attractive hues. Blues and yellows, reds and mauves.

It's easy to assume that the bees see exactly the same thing.

But they don't.

Just as dogs can hear sounds at a much higher frequency

than the human ear,

so bees can see a different range of light waves to us.

Now a team from Queen Mary University, London,

led by Professor Lars Chittka,

has been doing pioneering work to investigate

exactly how bees use vision as a signpost to find nectar.

And how flowers, in turn, help them to do so.

Bees need to be careful shoppers in the floral supermarket.

There are many flower species out there that all differ

in their quality, that is how much nectar and pollen they offer.

Bees need to remember which floral advertising advertises

the best products, the best nectar for them.

And to do that, they use a completely hidden dimension

to us, that is the ultraviolet.

There are patterns in flowers that are a secret to our colour vision,

but they're obvious for bees, that help them remember flowers

and locate the nectar in the flowers once they've detected them.

It all comes down to the different ways that flowers

either absorb or reflect ultraviolet lights.

These two flowers, for example,

that look rather similarly yellow to us, to human observers,

look completely different for a bee.

The one I am holding in my right hand is homogenously UV absorbing,

whereas this bidens flower is two-coloured.

The periphery of these petals reflects ultraviolet,

whereas the centre does not. It's completely black in the ultraviolet.

So what looks like a homogenously yellow flower to us

is actually a two-coloured flower for a bee.

To reveal exactly how this works, we are setting up

a specially adapted camera that can detect ultraviolet light.

This is the first time Lars has been able to see moving images

of the bees in action.

The nectar and the pollen in these flowers is in the centre.

These flowers present a kind of bull's-eye pattern where the

periphery is a brightly shining UV signal that can be seen from

a distance, whereas the centre of the flower absorbs the ultraviolet.

And this pattern guides the bee to the centre

so she can locate the nectar and the pollen there.

It's just amazing what the ultraviolet camera reveals.

It shows the secret signals sent by flowers,

which guide the bees to the exact place where the nectar is hidden.

Well, those are flowers as we haven't seen them before.

What intrigues me is that they make themselves attractive to bees

in so many different ways, don't they? Shape, I guess.

Colour, scent. So why go this far?

Well, those things you're describing are like the shop front.

They get the bees in. This is showing them exactly where the goodies are.

-It saves a little bit of time for the bees.

-Why does that matter?

Imagine, every time they visit a flower, they save half a second.

They might visit 2,000 flowers in a day, that's 1,000 seconds.

That's about 15 minutes that they save.

That's either more flowers they can visit, or they can get back

to the hive before the weather turns, before the rains come in.

So it's really, really good for them just to hone that trip down.

But it's a symbiotic relationship, isn't it?

So what do the flowers get out of it?

The flowers get more and more visits from bees.

That is what is perfect for them.

It gets those bees into the middle, where the pollen is,

which is brilliant for bees, it means they get covered in pollen,

they get more and more trips in there. So they get more pollination.

But bees don't just use ultraviolet light to find nectar more quickly.

They also use a skill that's very rare in the animal world,

a time-saving trick that allows them

to pack the hive with as much nectar and pollen as they can.

We can't see it, but we can hear it, with a little help from technology.

Scientist Dominic Clarke is setting up a remarkable

experiment in our garden.

He's hoping to reveal the way bees and flowers use electric fields

to communicate with one another, a kind of super sense.

When a bee flies around,

she picks up a positive charge from the air.

This positive charge interacts with a negative charge

that's held by the flower, and when the bee lands,

these two opposite charges create an electric field between them.

And this can help the bee pollinate the flower.

It can help pollen jump from the flower to the bee,

or vice versa, from the bee to the flower.

What's even more amazing though is that bees can sense

these electric fields and detect when changes have taken place.

So could they and the flowers be using this as the floral equivalent

of a fuel gauge to help the bee judge

when a flower is running low on nectar?

That's what Dominic is hoping to discover.

We can hear the electrical interaction

between the bee and the flower

if we connect the flower up to a speaker.

These electrodes take the current in the flower and turn it

into a sound that we can hear, a little bit like a bat detector.

BEEPING

As the bee approaches a flower to take nectar,

we hear the signal change.

BEEPING GETS SHRILLER

That's because the bee's positive charge interacts

with the flower's negative charge,

and changes what scientists call the flower's electrical signature.

When the bee's finished feeding and flies away,

this electrical signature remains altered for some time afterwards.

So what happens when a bee approaches a flower

that's just been visited, and hasn't yet reloaded its nectar supply?

She flies straight past.

The change in the flower's electric field lasts just around 100 seconds,

and this may be just enough time for it to replenish its nectar

supplies, re-gain its negative charge

and signal to the bees that it's once again open for business.

This is so ingenious, isn't it?

I've watched bees loads of times on the big clump of flowers

and wondered why they kept flying past certain ones.

This is great, this is honesty in nature.

So the flower really wants to be able to say to the bee,

"Don't bother wasting your time, don't learn that I am bad,

"don't learn I'm a tease." It wants to tell the bee, "Don't bother with this.

"We've not got nectar yet." So it almost turns the lights out.

Imagine a big house and you've turned the lights out

of the rooms it's not worth looking in.

That's what the plants are doing.

And do we have any sense of how the bees detect

-that electric field?

-They're covered in hairs,

which will probably be deflected by those electric charges.

The hairs are wired up to their nervous system,

so it's probably something to do with that.

Still to come - we've seen how individual bees behave,

but now we'll be using our hi tech tricks to explore the many ways

this hive works as a super organism to keep the precious brood alive.

As the bees come and go, buzzing in and out of our hives,

it's easy to forget that they didn't always live like this.

Long before we started to keep them for their honey,

these were wild animals. And some of them still are.

I want to find out whether bees behave differently

when they are left to their own devices,

without a beekeeper in sight.

My guide is naturalist Brett Westwood.

-It's a nice spot, isn't it?

-It is.

-Quiet little valley.

It's a lovely little valley.

And there they are. Busy as they can be.

Wild honeybees like these obviously don't have the benefit

of a ready-made hive, so they've got to rely on natural cavities

in rocks, or hollow trees like this one.

I'm going to tuck in down here, out of their direct flight line.

Yeah, it's best to be on either side of them.

You don't want a face full of wild honeybee.

Well, they'll use the sun and the landscape

when they come out, to get their bearings.

So if you're standing there and they can see your silhouette,

you destroy their picture as you emerge,

and that's unsettling for them.

These are feral bees, aren't they? These are not wild bees.

This one's pretty wild, the one buzzing around me at the moment!

It's a good question. I presume they're feral bees,

because the big question with any bees' nest out in the wild

that's not being managed in a hive, is, where did they come from?

Are they bees that have just escaped from domesticated colonies,

or could they be a remnant of the old, British...

Well, the North European dark bee, as it is called,

the dark honeybee, sometimes called the black bee.

Some people maintain that they're out there somewhere.

It's a bit like the Holy Grail of beekeeping.

This lost British race which do look appreciably different...

-You're getting a bit bothered.

-I think I'm going to put this on. I'm being investigated.

That's better.

This is perhaps the closest we'll get to wild bees in the UK today,

-isn't it?

-I think it probably is. But I think they're fascinating,

because they don't need people around them at all.

They're out there foraging, they're building their cones, they're connecting the nectar,

and they're raising young and queens

and presumably swarming entirely independent of us.

I'll tell you what, why don't we get the endoscope out of its box

and you stick it in there, and we'll see what we can see from the inside.

'Using this specialist camera, we are hoping

'to get right inside the hidden parts of the nesting cavity.

'Perhaps even finding the chamber where they raise their young.'

-Can you see...

-That's fantastic!

-How am I doing?

-It's glorious.

-It gives a lovely perspective, Brett.

-OK.

-As steady as you can.

Have you been drinking very, very, very heavily in the last 24 hours?!

-That's better.

-That's about as steady as I can go.

I've just shortened the length.

I've got bees' faces and abdomens filling the frame.

They're swarming over the front of the endoscope at the moment.

I've got a bee's tongue licking the tip of the endoscope.

THEY LAUGH

You can see all of their anatomy, their hairy bellies.

-The tongues and eyes.

-Ah! Another one got me.

-Ah.

-OK.

-Would you like a go?

-I can't wait...

BRETT LAUGHS

Ah, right.

There's a face full of bees now.

Split-second images of huge bees looming out at me

like a horror film, almost. Hairy limbs...

Ah! Hang on, hold it. Hold it.

-That's it, we've got a comb.

-We've got it?

-Yeah, we've got the comb.

It's amazing. I've got a view of...

These are empty cells, these are, from which the bees have emerged.

They look almost like egg containers, hexagonal egg boxes.

These wild bees have created a hexagonal comb just like

the one in our hive, but without the benefit of a frame to build it on.

This is because it's simply THE most efficient geometric shape

to maximise the space available to store honey, nectar and pollen.

This elegant, mathematical design is repeated everywhere you find

honeybees, whether wild or in hives, and anywhere in the world.

It's a pattern created by nature,

and it's lasted for tens of millions of years.

Because it works.

I mean, it's all to do with temperature regulation, isn't it,

where they place the combs, to be able to ventilate them

when it's too warm, and warm them when it's too cold.

So we would expect the brood combs to be in the heart of this tree,

-wouldn't we?

-Yes, yes.

-Insulated.

-And the honey's even higher up.

The honeycomb tends to be higher than that, I think,

because they rely on that over winter,

so that has to be kept in the warmest place in the tree.

This is amazing, actually, to think I've walked past this for three...

Well, maybe four or five years, who knows?

And I've never, ever had a view quite like this.

-OK, I'm going to withdraw it, Brett.

-OK.

'Something's happening here that we don't often see in our hive.

'These workers are acting as guard bees, attacking the probe,

'because they think that it's a threat to their colony.'

You can see how angry the bees are.

They're swarming over the tip of this endoscope.

But this is what they're doing,

in terms of their duty to protect the nest.

They're responding with the swarm mentality.

-Amazing.

-I think though, probably a good idea

-to leave them in peace now. They're getting quite excited.

-It's been good though, hasn't it?

It's been most enjoyable. I've never seen...

Well, enjoyable is probably the wrong word! But it's been revealing.

It's amazing to see how bees behave in the wild,

so similar to the way they act in our hive.

It's not just the way they behave as individuals,

but the way the colony works as a whole.

Constantly adapting to changes happening in the outside world.

Take a look at this.

This is our thermal camera's view of our beehive.

At this time of year, high summer, the temperature outside these hives

can reach a peak of well over 30 degrees centigrade.

Now, that's uncomfortable for us,

but for the bees, inside that hive, a heat wave can be a killer.

'And just how they stay cool is a real feat of ingenuity,

'skill and teamwork.'

But of course, this is the hive that we've got bugged, as it were.

Mini cameras here.

The whole thing is on scales, with this green contraption here.

And even more exciting,

deep in the heart of it we've got our thermometer.

Yeah, that thermometer's on the brood itself,

but also we have a thermometer on the outside of the hive,

so we can see the difference between in and out.

I, in fact, have got this remote gadget here which is set up

to show us just that. So here's the hive,

with the variable conditions we've got here.

Temperature, brood temperature, humidity, and of course the weight.

Let's have a look at what we've got in terms of daily temperature.

Two things on this graph then, we've got the exterior

-and then we've got brood temperature from that internal thermometer.

-Yep.

-And it's a striking graph to look at.

-I mean, just look at that, Adam.

-It's highly variable outside.

-Yes, you can see day and night.

You can see the temperature rising then dropping again,

exactly what you'd expect. And then it almost looks like it's broken.

But actually when you zoom in you realise it isn't.

-That's a genuine reading. It's that constant.

-That's a genuine reading.

And they're keeping it at about... Well, not about.

It's 34.1 degrees in there, and it's really not varying at all.

It's just flat-lining across. And that's actively being done.

This isn't just responding to what's going on, they're doing this.

OK, so they've got two jobs, basically.

The first thing is, they have to keep it cool. The other thing is, keep it warm.

Let's deal with the warm first. How are they keeping this warm?

Well, what the bees can do is disconnect their flight muscles

from their wings. So it's almost like revving a car

when you're in the garage or something. You drop the clutch,

you can get the engine running. And that's exactly what they're doing.

vibrating those muscles and producing heat. But they need energy to do that. So it's not free.

It's costly for them to do,

but it's worth it because it keeps the brood just perfect.

So, that's another reason why they're collecting honey?

So they can burn that honey

so that they can exercise their muscles to keep the brood

-at the optimum temperature for development, I take it?

-Yes.

The foraging isn't just about storing stuff for winter.

It's about keeping the hive going through summer, building up,

getting those reserves in. So it's all to do with getting energy.

OK, so muscle power keeps it warm.

What about ventilating it, or keeping it cool?

Muscle power again, actually. They start fanning their wings

and generate a nice air current through the hive.

But they can add a little bit of cooling to that, because they

can regurgitate water into the hive and get some evaporative cooling.

-You've probably seen bees and wasps collecting water.

-I have.

Yeah, on the pond, or any dish outside. Bird baths.

Sometimes the bees will come to that and drink furiously.

Yeah, they use that to cool the hive. They also use it to cool themselves.

So they can regurgitate over their own faces and thorax

-to make the body cool down as they are flying.

-Is that right?

So they make themselves almost artificially sweat, as it were?

And while you were talking, I was looking down here.

Look, there are three bees here fanning furiously now.

Is that part of the cooling process then?

No, this is more to do with the air-traffic control.

Bees are very good at navigating large distances,

but they're not so good at finding the entrance to the hive.

These bees are releasing what's called

Nasanov pheromone, and there's a nice plume of it coming out here

that these incoming bees can lock into,

just like landing lights at an airport, to find that entrance.

And look, they're in line. There are two distinct lines of bees.

-Yeah!

-Head to backside, head to backside.

-Building out that plume.

That's fantastic, isn't it?

Foraging bees don't have much time left to live,

which means that all through the summer, the hive must

constantly replenish its numbers, just to keep the colony going.

So as well as producing honey,

there's another thing they need to make.

Baby bees.

This is when our cameras captured a truly magical site.

The exact moment when a single bee emerges from her pupa.

With just a little reluctance.

She began life three weeks ago as a grub, or larva,

hatched out of a tiny egg.

Since then, she's lived in her own individual cell,

cared for as attentively as any human baby.

An army of worker bees performs the role of nurse maids,

feeding her honey and pollen.

Finally, she emerges to take her place amongst the thousands of others

in our hive, and to begin performing her duties to keep the colony going.

As one of our honeybees flits from flower to flower, she may

look as if she's working alone, but she's very much part of a team.

As well as collecting nectar and pollen, she is also gathering

intelligence which she takes back to her fellow bees in the hive.

You've probably heard of the waggle dance, the famous ritual

where bees communicate to each other where the best flowers can be found.

So how does it actually work?

If you take a look at our observation hive,

you can see it in a lot more detail.

What the bee does is, when she's come back from foraging,

she traces a figure of eight in the hive,

then at exactly the same point every time, she shakes her booty,

if you like, she waggles her abdomen,

to tell the bees the direction of the best flowers.

But actually, there's an awful lot more going on than that.

Adam, because as well as the direction of the flowers,

she's also telling us the distance.

Yeah, it's great to know which direction to go in,

but if you know how far to go, it's really good.

And that's exactly what she's doing.

The length of time that she does that waggle for

correlates with the distance that the flowers are.

So the longer she dances for, the further they are away.

And the other thing that I find so amazing is, we are able to see it

here in bright, clear light. She's doing it in the dark.

The other bees are gathering around her in the dark that is

-inside the frame of a hive.

-Yeah, this is all about touch and feel

and vibrations through the comb. They're communicating in that way.

Like you say, we're doing it visually.

It's easy for us to read their language.

For them, they have to do it through their antennae and legs.

And also, the more vigorously that she does her waggle,

-the better the quality of the flowers?

-Yes, that's right.

So not just distance and direction,

but they can also communicate quality.

And as you say, the more dances they do, the more circuits they perform,

is related to how good the nectar is.

So she's almost playing more vigorous advertising for that site,

and that attracts more bees to that site,

and they start playing the advert as well.

It's a brilliant way for them

-to get all the workers that they need to the right resources.

-It really is, isn't it?

And I know that some bee experts say it's the most sophisticated

-form of communication amongst non-humans.

-Yeah, absolutely.

We're used to ants and things communicating with pheromones

and chemicals, but that's not really going to work for them,

trying to find their way around kilometres of countryside.

They have to have some way of communicating that.

-That's exactly what they've evolved.

-Really, so pheromones wouldn't work,

because they're going up to three miles from the hive?

Yeah, they'll diffuse in the environment. There's nowhere they can follow it.

The other thing is, pheromones are very public.

Other bees can follow them, other predators might be able to find them.

-This way, they keep all their communication private.

-So secretive. It's their code, I suppose, isn't it?

-A kind of code.

-Absolutely. The beauty is, we can eavesdrop.

Using our observation hive,

we can find out where the bees have been.

They're the only animal that can tell us where they've been foraging.

This is where you've also been tagging some bees, haven't you?

That's right. You can see them leaving the hive.

That's the wire coming from the microphone that's inside.

They're just popping out of the entrance.

We should see some of... There is one, with the red tag on it.

-Ah, yes.

-Red, number 36.

-Number 36 coming. Your time's up!

-Yep.

-Here's another one coming out, look.

-Number 78, obviously.

-Yes, red 78.

So she's been an adult for about two weeks.

So she's starting to make her way out of the hive.

And they're so curious, aren't they,

about something that is alien in the hive, ie our microphone.

It smells different, feels different.

Yep, they're very defensive about what's going on in there.

And she's headed off.

So will we be able to discover what's going to happen to her?

Yeah, well, hopefully she'll make it back.

But we know where she might be going

because we've been following some of those waggle dances,

and we're sending our military helicopter out

to see where they might be foraging.

In the meantime, news is breaking inside the hive.

A bee has just arrived back and is telling the others

about a brand-new source of nectar that's just coming on stream.

Looking at the waggle dance, it seems the bee is telling us

that the new supply is 1.2km away, about 22 degrees west of due north.

Well, that's what they seem to be signalling,

so can we follow them using our ultimate

gadget? Just over a kilometre away, in the direction predicted

by our dancing bee, a hedgerow is coming into bloom,

absolutely packed with bramble blossom.

And bees, filling their tanks to the brim with nectar and pollen.

This is great news for our hive.

With the brambles finally in flower,

there should be plenty of food for the next few weeks.

More good news, bee 78 does return, laden with nectar.

But, given that she's still learning her way around

and needs to make dozens of flights

and visit thousands of flowers each day, she's going to be very busy.

Predators, bad weather or simply running out of fuel

and getting lost, are just some of the challenges she'll have to face.

We'll find out if she survives next time.

With fine weather, and plenty of nectar-rich flowers,

it may look as if our bees are having things pretty easy.

But appearances can be deceptive.

These animals are always living on a knife edge.

Just when we thought that everything was fine,

something extraordinary happened.

One morning, we came down to our observation hive to find

that all of the bees had cleared out without any warning.

Probably because a spell of cold and wet weather

had meant they weren't getting enough food.

Fortunately, our beekeeper John spotted them

resting on a hedge in another part of the garden.

They are clustering and preparing to make a small home,

possibly tonight,

and tomorrow morning they'll then fly off and continue

searching for an ideal home in which they will develop the colony.

The next step will be to put a box underneath and just help them

into a box, and the queen will then settle down

because there will be frames of food and pollen.

The colony will get larger, and then she will be transferred into

a full-size hive

and be used next year for honey gathering and pollination.

-And what are you thinking now?

-How lucky I am to find her.

This is just a reminder of how precarious the life of a hive is.

And it's all down to the queen.

If at any moment she thinks the colony's threatened,

she may head off, taking thousands of followers with her.

There's a great saying among beekeepers, which is - the bees

don't read the same books that we do.

And that is so true. Cos there's always something you can find out

about their incredible lives.

I haven't been reading enough of the right books, because I learned

something today I should have figured out for myself.

I always thought that once the workers had a role in the hive,

as a nursemaid, as a guard, as a nectar bearer, a pollen sorter,

whatever, they stuck with that throughout their lives.

I didn't realise that they matured into foraging insects.

I'm quite cross about that because it's pretty obvious.

-I should have figured that out.

-Which job do you fancy, then?

I'd be an instant forager.

-It's a bit too claustrophobic in there for me.

-Not a nursemaid?

No, no, I'm after nectar. There's no doubt about that.

I think I quite fancy being a bouncer.

Isn't it great we can find all this out with something as simple

-as an observation hive?

-Yeah.

-It's the observing part of it

that I've enjoyed so much. Because of course I've seen bees

going in and out of their hives thousands of times.

But it was that close-up, slow motion photography that made me

realise how precarious their lives are.

Particularly when you saw them taking off for flight.

They were really wobbling around.

Or trying to land on flowers to get the nectar and pollen.

It's not easy out there for them.

We've already learned a lot, but we've got a lot more to learn too.

By next week, we should advance what we know.

We've got the scales on the hives,

so we could see a lot more honey being brought in.

I suppose that depends on the weather.

We've got our marked bees too.

Will they be spending more time outside foraging, those youngsters?

And then, of course, there's the queen. Will she carry on laying eggs?

You never know, she might even swarm.

We're also going to be looking at our relationship with the world

of bees, how bees can help us in the most surprising of ways.

And actually, what's extremely important is how we can help them.

And in the interest of science, I'm going to be finding out

exactly what happens to my body when I get stung.

I can give you a tip there, mate.

-It might start with a small amount of pain.

-Yes!

-For sure!

-Goodbye.

-Goodbye.

-Goodbye.

# Sisters, sisters

# There were never such devoted sisters

# Never had to have a chaperone, no, sir

# I'm here to keep my eye on her

# Those who've seen us

# Know that not a thing could come between us

# Many men have tried to split us up But no-one can

# All kinds of weather We stick together

# The same in the rain or sun

# Two different faces But in tight places

# We think and we act as one

# But don't come between me and my man! #