crash diet 1 week 5 kilo

[music] the western, or european honeybee, pollinatesthree-fourths of the fruits, veggies and nuts we eat. we’d be in trouble without ‘em.of course, there’s a reason we don’t call them zucchini bees, almond bees, or applebees. they also give us honey. one healthy hive will make and consume morethan 50 kg of honey in a single year, and

crash diet 1 week 5 kilo, that takes a lot of work. honey is made from nectar, but it doesn’tcome out of flowers as that golden, sticky stuff. after finding a suitable food source,bees dive in head-first, using their long, specially-adapted tongues to slurp tiny sipsof nectar into one of two stomachs.

a single bee might have to drink from morethan a thousand flowers to fill its honey stomach, which can weigh as much as the beeitself when full of nectar. on the way back to the hive, digestive enzymes are alreadyworking to turn that nectar into sweet gold. when she returns to the hive, the foragerbee will vomit the nectar into the mouth of another worker. that bee will vomit it intoanother bee’s mouth, and so on. this game of regurgitation telephone is animportant part of the honey-making process, since each bee adds more digestive enzymesto turn long chains of complex sugars in the raw nectar into simple monosaccharides likefructose and glucose. at this point, the nectar is still prettywatery, so the bees beat their wings and create

an air current inside the hive to evaporateand thicken the nectar, finally capping the cell with beeswax so the enzyme-rich bee-barfcan complete its transformation into honey. because of its low water content and acidicph, honey isn’t a very inviting place for bacteria or yeast spoilage, and it has anincredibly long shelf life in the hive or in your pantry. honey has been found in egyptiantombs dating back thousands of years, pretty much unspoiled… although i wouldn’t personallyeat it, just in case. for one pound of honey, tens of thousandsof foraging bees will together fly more than three times around the world and visit upto 8 million flowers. that takes teamwork and organization, and although they can’ttalk they do communicate… with body language.

foragers dance to tell other bees where tofind food. a circle dance means flowers are pretty close to the hive, but for food that’sfarther away, they get their waggle on. the waggle dance of the honey bee was firstdecoded by karl von frisch, and it’s definitely one of the coolest examples of animal communicationin nature. first the bee walks in a straight line, wagglingits body back and forth and vibrating its wings, before repeating in a figure eight.whatever angle the bee walks while waggling tells the other bees what direction to go.straight up the line of honeycombs, then the food is in the direction of the sun. if thedance is pointed to the left or right, the other bees know to fly in that angle relativeto the sun.

the longer the waggle, the farther away thefood is, and the better the food, the more excited the bee shakes its body. if that’s not amazing enough, even if theycan’t see the sun itself, they can infer where it is and the time of day by readingthe polarization of light in the blue sky. a single bee is a pretty simple creature,but together they create highly complex and social societies.there’s three main classes in a beehive: drones, workers, and queens. when a new queen is born, she immediatelyruns around and kills her sisters, because there can be only one.during mating season, she’ll fly to a distant

hive to mate with several males and storeaway the sperm, which she’ll use back at her home hive to lay more than a thousandeggs a day throughout the rest of her life. any unfertilized eggs, those that don’tjoin up with sperm, will mature into male drones, which means they only have one setof chromosomes. but fertilized eggs are all genetically female,destined to become either queens or workers. queens do the egg-laying of course, but workerbees are the backbone of the beehive. so what makes most females become workers,while just one wears the hive crown? a baby bee’s diet activates genetic programmingthat shifts its entire destiny. every bee larva is initially fed a nutrient-richfood called royal jelly, but after a few days,

worker bee babies are switched to a mixtureof pollen and honey called “bee bread”. but queens eat royal jelly their whole life,even as adults. scientists used to think it was just royaljelly that put queens on the throne, but just last year they discovered one chemical inbee bread, the food that queens don't get, that keeps worker bees sterile. being a queenseems to be as much about what bees don't eat as what they do. making honey is insect farming on its grandestscale, with intricate societies cooperating to make a food fit for bear tummies big andsmall… with the pleasant side effect of pollinating most of the world’s flowering plants.

i’d sayit’s a pretty sweet deal. stay curious.