Name: 【TED】Marla Spivak: Why bees are disappearing (Marla Spivak: Why bees are disappearing)
Uploaded: 2014-06-30T07:28:30.000Z
Duration: 15 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

and crops like alfalfa hay that feed our farm animals.

More than one third of the world's crop production

But the ironic thing is that bees are not out there

They're out there because they need to eat.

Bees get all of the protein they need in their diet

and all of the carbohydrates they need from nectar.

basically on a shopping trip at the local floral mart,

they end up providing this valuable pollination service.

In parts of the world where there are no bees,

or where they plant varieties that are not attractive to bees,

people are paid to do the business of pollination by hand.

These people are moving pollen from flower to flower

Tomato growers often pollinate their tomato flowers

Now this one's the tomato tickler. (Laughter)

Now this is because the pollen within a tomato flower

and the only way to release this pollen is to vibrate it.

So bumblebees are one of the few kinds of bees in the world

that are able to hold onto the flower and vibrate it,

and they do this by shaking their flight muscles

at a frequency similar to the musical note C.

So they vibrate the flower, they sonicate it,

and that releases the pollen in this efficient swoosh,

and the pollen gathers all over the fuzzy bee's body,

Tomato growers now put bumblebee colonies

inside the greenhouse to pollinate the tomatoes

because they get much more efficient pollination

So there's other, maybe more personal reasons,

There's over 20,000 species of bees in the world,

These bees spend the majority of their life cycle

hidden in the ground or within a hollow stem

have evolved highly social behavior like honeybees.

Now honeybees tend to be the charismatic representative

because there's something about honeybees

and I picked up a book in the library on bees

It was like the best of science fiction come true.

And even stranger, there were these people,

these beekeepers, that loved their bees like they were family,

and when I put down the book, I knew I had to see this for myself.

So I went to work for a commercial beekeeper,

a family that owned 2,000 hives of bees in New Mexico.

Honeybees can be considered a super-organism,

Now this society has no central authority.

So how they come to collective decisions,

and how they allocate their tasks and divide their labor,

how they communicate where the flowers are,

all of their collective social behaviors are mindblowing.

My personal favorite, and one that I've studied for many years,

So in my lab, we study how bees keep themselves healthy.

where some bees are able to locate and weed out

sick individuals from the nest, from the colony,

And more recently, we've been studying resins

So bees fly to some plants and they scrape

these very, very sticky resins off the leaves,

where they cement them into the nest architecture

We've found that propolis is a natural disinfectant.

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【TED】Marla Spivak: Why bees are disappearing (Marla Spivak: Why bees are disappearing)

world

natural

plant

food