The information I’m after here is all about bees - not just what bees, but how many bees
are out here in this great big forest.
This is the best trick there is for studying bees... you put out an attractant that gets
a male bee to come out of the forest and I count it and measure it and do all my science
and there are bees coming in already. When I put out a little bit of the chemical,
the bees come to it thinking ‘I’m in luck! I’ve found an orchid and I’m going to
collect some of that smell from the orchid,’ because male bees must have this to be successful
mating with the females.
It’s perfume, if you want!
But only males get it and they keep it in the hollow spot in their hind legs, which
is a very bizarre thing, there aren’t other bees that do this, just these rare orchid
bees in the tropical forest. It so happens right here in Panama I have
the chance to do things that no one has ever done before. Years ago we used to think in
the tropics things are very stable. Life just thrives and everything stays pretty much the
same.
Once we have real information like from these bees, we see that things go up and down and
they go up and down in drastic ways.
It’s becoming very important in this world to keep good records on how abundant things
like bees are because of the very important work that they do. They pollinate flowers.
They make this forest possible. With no bees to visit the flowers and move pollen around,
there’s no seeds, there’s no fruit, there’s nothing.
This is absolutely the most interesting, fun activity you can imagine. It’s not work!
It’s creative fun, this feeds me everyday. It gives me energy, gives me hope, makes me
happy I’m here. See if anybody’s really there... bees do
live somewhere. These normally live in trees but this one happens to be a colony I put
in a nest box like this. First thing that comes out is pollen. Bees
have a long and successful relationship with flowering plants, mostly because of this stuff,
called pollen. They start with a good food - pollen is about 30-40% protein, that’s
better than steak, it’s also tasty! I’m not kidding, this is very good.
Every social bee colony is actually a little information gathering station, if you want
to think of it that way. These bees fly out maybe a kilometer away, survey the whole area,
pick the flowering plants that they can use and bring the pollen or nectar back to their
nest. So once you learn to interpret the information that’s here, which is by identifying the
pollen that bees have brought in, you know their ecology completely from A to Z and there’s
no other way to get that information. After getting a bee pollen sample out of a
bee hive I bring it back to our lab at the tropical research institute and we take that
pollen sample, we wash it, we dress it up, put it on a microscope slide and then we compare
it to our known species reference material on known kinds of pollen grains to figure
out what that bee’s been up to, what it’s ecological ties are, what food it eats and
what it pollinates, basically.
About one in fifty is in perfect condition, the rest are kind of shredded looking, that’s
too bad. If nobody had a chance to take a good, long
look at bees and what flowers they really go to and what pollination they really do
or don’t do, we would have a pretty biased and inaccurate picture of what they’re about.
Every bee tells its own story, that’s what I’ve been finding all the way through this.
And it comes out making me feel a lot better because I feel we’re a few steps closer
to finding out how nature really works.