♪ Music ♪
Good morning, welcome to the National Museum of
Natural History's Otto Orkin Insect Zoo.
One of the exhibits we have here is an observation
honey bee hive. In fact, one of our staff members here,
Elio Cruz, is working on the bee hive this morning.
>What are you up to this morning, Elio?
>> I'm actually cleaning and maintaining our exit tube for
the observation hive, as you can see here, so the visitors can
see the bees coming in and out of the observation hive.
> Great, that's really important. It's a very popular
exhibit, and if you see here, the queen started laying eggs
in early March in this small frame, and they only took up
an area about this size. Now you can see by mid-April,
the hive has expanded and by mid to late June, the bees
will take up all of the frames here and we have six of them.
But let's focus on what's going on in this one frame
of activity, where there are lots of workers, larvae,
and pupae and probably the queen.
Over here you can see the capped cells, from which
adult worker bees will emerge sometime in the next five
to ten days. Right here, you can probably see
some white glistening grubs way down in the cell
that these worker bees are caring for and feeding.
If you look closely here, you can see some bees
waggling their abdomens, waving them back and forth,
that's what we call a waggle dance.
One female worker is communicating to the others
where a pollen and nectar source is and how far away it is.
Let's head over to our Partners in Evolution, Butterflies and
Plants exhibit and look at some other pollinator partnerships.
You can see this long-wing butterfly species from
Central America, here in our butterfly pavilion,
is stopping by the flowers, sipping nectar,
and at the same time obtaining pollen.
It's one of the few butterflies that will actually be able
to extract nutrients from pollen.
Well let's head on upstairs into our research collections
and see what Dr. Seán Brady, our bee curator, is doing today.
There he is. >Hey Seán. >> Well hi, Nate.
>Whatcha up to today? >>Well I'm studying these
different species of bumble bees right now.
> Oh wow. Holy cow. Is that the extent of the bumble bee
collection here? >>Oh no, we have lots of
different species of bumble bees and thousands of other
species of bees. You wanna take a look at some of them?
>Sure, sure. >>Well, let me first put these
bumble bees away. We store these bees in this special compactor.
So as soon as it opens I'll put these away and show you some
of the other bees. So let me put away these bumble bees and show
you some of the other types of bees that we have in our
collection. So here's a bee that I think there's some pollen
on it, so let's go take this out and have a look at it
under the microscope. So let's go take this to Eugenia Okonski
who's a biologist here at the museum who runs the ant lab.
>>Hi Eugenia. >Hi, hello.
>>Is it ok if we use your microscope and your computer
screen to have a look at this bee?
>Yes, of course. >>Great, thanks. So here
we have a honey bee that's under a special microscope.
This microscope is connected to this large computer screen,
so that everything that's under the microscope,
we can see blown up here on the screen.
And here we see a honey bee, we're looking at it face-on
so that we can see its head, with its two eyes, here are its
antennae, here's its long tongue, it uses this to drink
nectar from flowers. And here are its wings,
and here we can see the legs, and if you look closely here,
you can see that there's some pollen that's stuck
to these hairs here on the bee. This part of the bee is called
the pollen basket, actually, and it uses this to pack in pollen
and carry back to the nest to feed its young.
So let's zoom in on this leg and see if we can see any of
the pollen. And we gotta change the focus here a little bit
and sure enough we can see here that there's individual
pollen grains that are stuck to the hair of the bee here.
And if we look at this other part of the leg, we can see
just a whole wad of pollen, almost like chewing gum,
that's just all stuck to the side of this bee's leg,
that's called the pollen basket.
And this is actually how pollination happens.
Some of these pollen grains get stuck to the hairs of the bee
on one flower, then the bee will fly to a next flower and
a few of these will fall off on that other flower
and will pollinate that flower.
The reason why studying bees up close under a microscope
like this is so important is that by looking
at the different types of pollen on the bees and
the way that they're shaped, we can tell which types
of flowers the bees have visited. We have thousands
of different bee species here in the museum,
so by looking at their pollen, we can tell that different
species of bees will visit and pollinate different types of
flowers, all by just looking at, up close,
what the pollen looks like on the bee.
Well we hope you enjoyed our look at the exhibits and
research collection here at the National Museum for Natural
History, so now let's head back live to the National Zoo.