Bees

These black and yellow social insects swoop, swarm, and sting as they hover around their hive, which is both their home and hangout. But “bee” careful because you might get stung. We’ll babble on about bees on this week’s episode of FYI!

Transcript

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these black and yellow social insects swoop swarm and sting as they hover around their hive which is both their home and hang out but be careful because you might get stung we'll Babble on about bees on this week's episode of f why I welcome to for your info English you got it[Music] hello hello hello my Amigos welcome one welcome all it's time for another exciting edition of for your English FYI the topic based show and what do you want to talk about this week well this week we already have a topic but if you want to hear about topics in the future let me know as I always say some of my greatest suggestions or at least my favorite episodes have been episodes that didn't come from my mind so keep those suggestions coming and today I'm going to give you a little disclaimer before we start I know nothing about bees I never have and I learned so much when I prepared this episode so as I always remind you guys you aren't the only ones learning here all right let's take a look at our intro which is chock full of vocabulary I started off by saying these black and yellow social insects now this is an interesting word because they are insects but they are social insects and we'll see why a little bit later black and yellow obviously we're referring to the color and then we took a look at some cool verbs they swoop to swoop it's kind of what a bird does too it says I think is the word and you guys think English is hard man I don't know how to pronounce that word well to swoop means to fly down low and then go back up again and then I said swarm the word swarm and this is an interesting word because there was an app called Foursquare where you would check in and then overnight they changed the name to swarm and a swarm is oh here's some more difficult vocabulary here skiame nugolo nugolo oh my God this is a mass of insects and of course it's the name of the app because when a lot of people get together there's a swarm of people as I said I'm learning so many words here myself in fact please correct me if I mispronounce them I'm a student too yeah well when it comes to something other than English I'm usually learning I love to learn I have a thirst for knowledge and then the next word I gave you was the word sting which is an interesting one because mosquitoes bite after bite or after bite and bees sting but don't take my word for it listen to what Muhammad Ali had to say about it I'm gonna float like a butterfly and sting like a bee that's right the one and only Muhammad Ali float like a butterfly sting like a bee as they hover around their hive there's a lot of H there and to hover oh here's another difficult word this is killing me librarzi librarzi it says here it means to hang in the air a helicopter is a perfect example of something that hovers also these boats that kind of lift off the ground on a cushion of air those are called hovercraft as well so to hover around their hive and I think Hive is called Mena I believe you say or call menar it says here arnia oh my goodness I didn't get one of these words guys I'm telling you the I just learned at least in the intro at least six or seven new words and I hope you have learned many words as well and then I said it's both their home and we have an expression that is home is where the heart is and it's also their hangout and their hangout is your local hangout could be the local bar for example and then I tried to be punny punny gracioso right it's a mix of the word pun and funny so punny I said be careful see how I extended my B over there because you might get stung so we already said sting is the verb so it's sting stung stung the bee stings you and you get stung and then you heard the Wilhelm scream what the vilm helm Scream It's called I don't know if it's pronounced like that but it's this scream and I know you've heard that scream a million times because it was a scream that came out I think it was in the 50s it was a sound effect that was used for a movie and people loved it and it just blew up and you can hear this scream in hundreds of movies including Star Wars Indiana Jones I want you guys to listen for it next time next time you're watching a movie listen for that Wilhelm scream let me play it for you again I know it rings a bell but wait we're not here to talk about sound effects in Hollywood we're here to babble on about bees to babble on as segre much to Babylon about bees right the Tower of Babel that classic story so I know you've heard that scream before but believe me okay I'll stop believe me we came here to talk about bees now this is an interesting fact that I came across the honey bee and we'll talk about all the different kinds afterwards but the honeybee is the only insect that produces food eaten by man by humankind I know that sounds pretty crazy easy but yeah we eat animals but they don't produce our food and we'll find out how the honeybee is so important to our ecosystem and life here on Earth and we'll also tell you that there's a little technicality here there are other bees such as wasps that make honey but only in small amounts so yeah technically wasps also produce food eaten by humans but honeybees are really the Kings or shall I say the queens and we're going to talk about that later too we'll talk about the types of bees and we'll also talk about their different roles such as the Queen the Drone drone is thangano hmm if you think about it that drone that thing that flies it looks like a thangano I love it when things make sense so right off the bat we see that bees are not only special but they are essential and we're going to look at a lot of fun facts remember folks there's a bonus episode that comes out every week along with this episode you can also get PDF documents with all the vocabulary and you can get weekly and monthly classes with me it's tons of fun and I sure hope you'll join us it's all over on patreon.com Alberto Alonso and I want to send a shout out to everybody in my Curious Community especially my super duper students Marta candy Javier Roberto David Jose Maria Mila Alex Edgar and Aina and don't forget about my Interstellar students Lina Isa Paco Diego and the lovely Carmen if you guys want to find out about how you can join our curious Community go on over to patreon.com Alberto Alonso and if you want a sample we'll just reach out on social media contact a conmigo in redes sofiales I'll give you a few fun facts right now just to wet your appetite you know why bees are so noisy and be careful with this word noisy escandaloso Ruidoso and nosy is Right nose nosy noise noisy I have seen students mix them up quite a bit well why are bees so noisy why do you think well it's because they beat their wings or they flap their wings eleven thousand four hundred times in one minute now I've done the math here that is a hundred and ninety times a second move over Usain Bolt another fun fact if you're worried about getting stung we'll just make sure that you only hang around male bees what will male bees don't have stingers those things that are at the end that logically sting you it's only females embras only female bees that can sting and what it is is the Stinger is a modified egg laying device and then it serves as a stinger wow these animals are fascinating and we're gonna learn so much more in the rest of the first episode and of course more fun facts in the bonus episode I always like to Define things as well because sometimes defining it you look at the basics we Define a b as a stinging winged insect okay and in fact they have four wings they have two Wings on each side which hook together to form one larger pair when they're flying and then they unhook when they're not flying so these little animals are like well-oiled machines and we'll see that I mean think about that four wings five eyes they are really sensitive their five senses are on fire or maybe not all of them but again I don't want to get ahead of myself a stinging winged insect which collects nectar and pollen I think I don't have to tell you what those words are and produces wax Theta and honey and lives in large communities that's why I love defining things what does it be there you go speaking of their senses they smell really good what okay well yeah that has two meanings in English well in this case I'm talking about olfato they smell really good why they have a 170 odorant receptors I think you say and that means that they have got a sense of smell like nobody now when I think of bees I just don't think of them smelling but they smell really well because when you think about animals with a good sense of smell you usually think about a dog you know a hound dog but I wouldn't think bees but sure if they have a 170 receptors that's a lot of reception we also mentioned that they were Social Butterflies what Social Butterflies I thought were talking about bees here well a social butterfly is somebody who is very social very gregarious and they are they're very social Animals As I said in the intro honeybees and bumblebees now bumblebees uh we'll talk a little bit more about the difference but bumble bees are usually more round and more fuzzy and honeybees are usually smaller and thinner that would be the difference between a honeybee and a Bumblebee and they often both of these they live in hives as we said before I'll have to look at the the vocabulary sheets but these hives can be above or below ground and that's pretty interesting because I always think of them above ground and you can find them in a lot of locations sometimes in rather shocking or surprising situations because you can find them in marshes a marshes like a muddy area you can find them in sand dunes Cliffs Wetlands quarries aquarius so they can live in a lot of different atmospheres but one thing is certain they stick together Athen Pina I love that they make pineapple they stick together and all together a hive of bees can fly over 55 000 miles I know I know Europeans 88 500 kilometers to make honey and you know how much they make with all that flying back and forth that makes them about one pound of honey so it seems like a lot of work it seems like thankless work now one pound for my European friends is 0.45 kilos so a little bit under a half a kilo that's a lot of work for a little bit of honey and in a year's time they can create about a hundred pounds of honey the equivalent of around 45 kilos that's yearly also while we're on the topic of bee hives a beehive is not only a place where bees hang out but it's also an old school haircut it was also called a B-52 a B-52 or a beehive the reason they called it a beehive is because it looked like a beehive or some say it looked like the nose of the B-52 bomber unavion Americano and if you're a fan of the group The B-52s which I am I love the song Rome if you want to roam around the world well the reason and I never realized this because it would in my area we call it a beehive but in some areas they call it a B-52 well if you watch the videos the B-52 the group their videos guess what haircut they have they have the Beehive aka the B-52 mind blown and now we're going to change gears as promised as promised we're going to take a look at the different kinds now we already talked about honeybees which I think are the most common ones and the ones I'm referring to today in general then as we said bumblebees they're rounder and well they're just a little bit more fuzzy then inside of our honey bee Community we've got the Queen the queen bee as she is called and if the queen bee dies in a hive the workers can create a new queen bee yeah they don't vote they create although we will find that bees use a voting system and we'll find out about that in the bonus part so how do they create this replacement queen bee they select one of the young larva and they feed it a special kind kind of food which is called royal jelly and this helps this selected larva turn into a fertile Queen it sounds like a scene from the movie Alien but that's so cool again something we're seeing about bees here is they are so complex you know so small but they have so much going on during Peak production the queen bee can lay around 2 000 eggs per day that's a lot of eggs I mean it must be really really tiring and worker females now we've got the queen bee we said we've got the workers the workers the the second kind of bee in this scheme in this dream team they put together so we've got the queen we've got the workers the workers are female bees that don't lay eggs and they live for about five weeks in the spring or summer and up to six months only yeah only six months during the winter but the worker bees their job is to set up shop Monterey and to protect the hive as well while the honeybees well they're busy laying eggs as I said 2 000 eggs whoa and then thirdly we have the drones loss they are the male ones and they are the largest and you guessed it their job is to fertilize the queen now the queen May mate to mate is to procreate with up to 17 drones over a one or two day mating period and the crazy part is okay she's uh she's doing a lot of mating but the drones die after they mate so that's a pretty tragic thing but I guess death brings life if you want to get philosophical oh my God[Music] I just realized no wonder I didn't recognize any of the words before I've got word reference on in Italian I'm like none of these words ring a bell oh my god well hey look at it this way at least we learn some Italian words in the first part of the show the next one I want to look at is hornets and you might recognize this if you like basketball the Charlotte Hornets and it's still in Italian I don't know why it's giving it to me Espanol English what is going on here English definition all right all right I think I finally got it in Spanish who knew we were going to get an Italian lesson today well a hornet is avispon they say in Spanish so it makes sense and then don't forget about wasps and hornets I didn't tell you this I should have mentioned this Hornets are the enemy of bees they are predators I think you say de predadores then we've got wasps as I just said and wasps are white Anglo-Saxon Protestants[Laughter] to be a wasp is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant but no I'm talking about avispa and hornets belong to this family so Hornets abispones belong to the WASP family but again they're Predators as well and believe it or not honeybees along with many other bee species are believed to be descendants of wasps and again I don't mean white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or like the group there's a heavy metal group called wasp and in their case it stands for we are sexual perverts hey we're not talking about that today get your mind out of the gutter and we're gonna wrap up the first part of today's show talking about their importance to the ecosystem almost 90 percent of wild plants and 75 of leading Global crops cosechas depend on animal pollination one out of every three mouthfuls mouthfuls of food depends on pollinators such as bees and crops that depend on pollination are five times more valuable than those that do not because they're waiting for this magical process to happen do you like kiwi I'm sure you do what about cotton you'd have to take off your jeans and your shirt if you don't like cotton and eggplant blueberry cranberries well these would all cease to exist if bees ceased to exist so a world without bees would not only cause a financial crisis but it would cause a global food crisis as well now that doesn't mean I like bees I still don't want to get stung but now I respect them a little more and I'm gonna wrap up with this expression you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar and this means you can get much more done in life by being nice than by being mean to people again you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar we'll take a look at more idioms and fun facts in the bonus episode you guys should join us it's going to be the bee's knees kissing La Bomba thanks so much for joining us in this part of today's FYI[Music][Music]