The Buzz On “Secrets of The Bees” With Dr. Sammy Ramsey

James Cameron’s new documentary Secrets of The Bees makes these unassuming little insects big stars. This series gives you a “bee’s eye view” of a honey bee hive as well as some scientific firsts including: the world’s first shot of broomstick bees in flight, footage of a vulture bee nest, and varroa mites invading a hive of honeybees defending themselves. To get the buzz on National Geographic, overcoming a fear of bugs, and getting kids outside, I sat down with Dr. Sammy Ramsey.

Dr. Ramsey is a professor at University of Colorado Boulder, BioFrontiers Institute and the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department. He has been featured in the Hulu docuseries Your Attention Please and runs the nonprofit The Ramsey Research Foundation to remove paywalls that keep the general public from engaging with scientific research. Now a member of the National Geographic Society, Ramsey continues his mission in Secrets of the Bees.

The Geekiary: So why bees?

Dr. Sammy Ramsey: Well, one of the things that was the scariest to me was the fact that there are insects out there who have an entire section of their body that’s just weaponized. Who does that? What is the point? Why have a stinger? And learning about them, about how those stingers have been generated to protect something really, really important. I mean, bees make honey.

And honey is one of the most remarkable substances on the entire planet. It is an incorruptible source of carbohydrates, and that is insane to think about. Carbohydrates are so valuable to the biological world because they power our energy systems, they make sure that our bodies are capable of running through our mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells.

And so, the bees have to protect this resource that they have, because it’s one of a kind. There are no other sources of carbohydrates that can just sit out in the environment pretty much indefinitely and never be spoiled. That stinger that they have, if they didn’t have it, my goodness, they would be robbed blind in seconds. Everything would take their honey.

TG: How were you first approached about doing the docuseries?

SR: After I joined the National Geographic Society, so I was inducted through something called the Wayfinder Program, which was really exciting. So exciting that I almost missed the opportunity, because they sent me an email, and I thought, “This can’t really be National Geographic.” So I deleted it.

And they actually had to call me to tell me that it was a real thing, and that I was going to be inducted. Well, as someone who is a part of the society, I am connected to all of these amazing opportunities to communicate science, and that is huge for me. As a professor, I am evenly split between science and science communication. I conduct cool research, and then I do everything I can to tell people about it.

So the capacity to work on a documentary, and one as ambitious as this one, where we are telling the stories of several different bee species in ways they’ve never been told before. The moment that they called me and asked me if I would want to work on a project like this with director James Cameron, I was like, “Yeah. Yeah, I think I’ll do that.”

TG: There are lots of new and interesting things being caught on camera for the first time. Which one excited you the most; if you can pick?

SR: Bumblebees are really, really, really cool insects. They are just adorable, fuzzy, flying around, bouncing through the air, but even though I’ve known that they are really intelligent, I was shocked. I mean, my jaw was on the floor during one of the segments where we were able to capture an aspect of their intelligence I didn’t expect to see.

These bees, they have to solve complex puzzles out in the wild in order to get food. There are flowers that will exclude certain pollinators that haven’t met the muster, that don’t know the password to get inside. And in order for these bees to get inside, they’ll have to move different parts of the flower, and they’ll have to move one section, and only after they’ve moved one section can they move the next one so that they can get to the reward inside. And so it requires this projection of thought beyond the immediacy of “If I do this, I get the reward. If I do this, only then can I do that, and after I do that, then can I get the reward.” And so it’s this thought process of a future state. That was already quite remarkable.

But what was the most mind-blowing element of it was after the bees have experimented, pushing back and forth through these parts of a puzzle to see if they can figure out the answer. They then taught other bees how to do the same thing. A bee that only lives a month, if it discovers something incredible, I mean, that’s amazing, but it’s only going to exist in that space for a month. But if you can teach other individuals and pass down that information. Well, then you have something that is a thriving and enduring investment in the intelligence of the entire colony.

And it was seeing that, and recognizing that there is actually culture embedded here, because that’s what culture is. When you pass down that kind of information through generations, that was mind-blowing, because even I, as a scientist who studies insects, didn’t think that there was actually culture being passed down between them.

TG: Given how you became interested in studying bees, how do you suggest we get people and especially kids interested?

SR: As a kid, I recognized that the only thing that I really thought of when I thought of bees, or at the very least, the first thing that came to mind, was always the stinger, the business end of the bee.
And I just kind of imagined in the morning that they wake up, and they’re just sharpening their stinger, thinking, “What picnic can I ruin today?” (Here Ramsey rubs his hands together in a stellar impression of an evil bee.)

That way of thinking about these bees as these nefarious creatures that are always plotting something evil. Well, that totally diminishes them and kind of puts them in this category that they’re not truly a part of. The bees aren’t trying to harm you.

And I think understanding so much of the other aspects of their lives keeps their stinger from being the only thing that comes to mind when students think about them. And then they have this more expansive idea of not just how these creatures work, but when they think, “Wait a minute, if I misjudge the bees, what other concepts out there am I looking at in a manner that is too simplistic?” And that is such a great tool for teaching, because it gives you such a great opportunity to say, yeah, and you might have thought that you understood this about elephants, or this about penguins, or this about octopuses.

TG: I absolutely agree. Though this docuseries does have something called “murder hornets”. And then we watch those murder hornets get murdered.

SR: Yes, precisely. So, this documentary was an incredibly, incredibly ambitious task to conduct a documentary, and I think sometimes when you hear this number, and you think, 9 bees out of 20,000? You guys could have done more bees than that, right? No. We really wanted to show people in depth
what these bees are doing, and so focusing on just 9 of them in the runtime of the first two episodes of this documentary was difficult.

Then also bringing in these hornets? Our work was cut out for us. But I’m really glad that we were able to show that, because it also showed the ingenuity of the bees. To be able to generate this convection oven and cook the hornet.

TG: So what is your dream project?

SR: My dream project would be getting kids, students of all ages, so excited about the bees, about their welfare, about their health and their wellness, that we can then a campaign led by students to help save the bees. There are a lot of contacts out here where people are like, “Oh, let’s save the bees,” and it just kind of feels like this nebulous thing. But students have this way about them of bringing attention to things where adults will go, wow, why haven’t I given enough thought to that? This kid is.

The fact that you can help hundreds of pollinators by simply planting one square foot of flowers is huge. But the fact that that’s something that any kid could get involved with, and learn so much about the world, learn so much about how plants work, how pollinators work, is incredible.

Even as a little kid, you can grab a chunk of wood, and with the help of a parent, drill some holes in it, and create a bee hotel, where, based on the size of the hole, different species of bees will show up, lay eggs there, and create a nursery. So, little kids can create daycare centers for bees, they can find food sources for bees through planting flowers, they can protect bees from pesticides, and I would love to see
A context where, inspired by the excitement from this documentary and other things they’re learning, and the excitement that teachers and educators are conveying to them. Kids take this and spearhead it forward and provide this as information that their parents will see, as something that they can also be involved with.

TG: What are your big hopes for this docuseries?

SR: I’m hoping that this documentary will inspire a level of empathy that’s pretty unusual. Interspecies empathy is something that we show towards dogs, cats, elephants; animals where we can see into their eyes, and we can see their faces contorting in ways that ours do to convey particular kinds of emotions. That kind of thing allows us to connect with the elephants, or the dogs, or the cats, a lot more easily than people typically connect with insects.

But I think a documentary like this, a documentary that used really unique systems of cinematography, absolutely incredible ways of building out a hive so that you can see the insides of it in ways that no other videography system has ever done before. I think that this can allow people to see the stories of these organisms, the lives of them, in ways that will generate a sense of closeness and empathy that I think can really change the world. That kind of interspecies empathy, it engenders compassion. It softens people, and I really hope that that’s something that we can bring to the world right now.

You can learn more from Dr. Ramsey and others in Secrets of the Bees, available to stream on National Geographic on March 31st, and then the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.

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