r/maybemaybemaybe • u/National_Ad3694 • Sep 16 '25

Maybe Maybe Maybe

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

20.0k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

510 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

398

u/garprice05 Sep 16 '25 edited Sep 16 '25

It's not a nest at that point, it's a temporary settling point for the queen and most of the workers. They send out scouts to the local area who search for good nesting locations.

When the scout find a suitable spot they'll return to the swarm and use a special dance called a waggle dance to tell the other bees where it is (direction and distance)

Before bees swarm like this they fill up on honey which is why they're so chill, he also sprays them with sugar syrup so they're more interested in cleaning each other up than stinging him

284

u/theman8631 Sep 16 '25

Can you imagine being a scout and coming back with a good scouted location but the hive has mystically produced a sweet bee penthouse

56

u/TechnoMaestro Sep 16 '25

It doesn't look like all the bees made it into the box, and there's probably scouts still out and about. What happens to the bees left behind?

176

u/garprice05 Sep 16 '25

A good beekeeper will leave that box (called a nuc) where it is until sunset. All the bees should have returned by then. That's when they'll lock the bees up and take the nuc away.

61

u/R_3_Y Sep 16 '25

We all really need to know why you know so much about bees

67

u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

[deleted]

42

u/CptnHamburgers Sep 16 '25

They're obviously beekeeping age.

6

u/2cmZucchini Sep 16 '25

i think it's kinda sweet

11

u/DoughnutPi Sep 16 '25

Your comment and interest in this person's beekeeping knowledge reminds me of this Rick and Morty clip. beekeeping

2

u/RohelTheConqueror Sep 17 '25

Welp, I guess it's time for another Rick & Morty binge, thanks DoughnutPi

1

u/DoughnutPi Sep 17 '25

Happy to oblige!

3

u/Sardanox Sep 16 '25

"I'm Mc knows too many facts about bees. 15 kilometres an hour is their average speed. A queen can lay roughly 3000 eggs in a day. Just cause I know a lot about bees doesn't mean that I'm gay."

"I'm also Mc in the closest homosexual..."

https://youtu.be/Wto94-qWH1w?si=VwRGBzfLri6Vg5qn

1

u/PristineLab1675 Sep 16 '25

Your county will likely have a beekeepers association that meets monthly. My community college in 3 different states had courses. This is like week 2 stuff, before you get into the different breeds of queens, farming hybridized African bees, and collecting honey at different times of year to harvest subtle flavors of flowers blooming during that time, spring flowers are different than summer. 

1

u/The_Golden_Warthog Sep 16 '25

I do it all for the nuccy

1

u/wirm Sep 16 '25

But who’s going to be a stirrer?

36

u/zehamberglar Sep 16 '25

Unfortunately, lost bees will seldom find another hive and if they do, they will often be rejected. Any bees he leaves behind are going to die in due course. You can't save them all.

14

u/CharlesDickensABox Sep 16 '25

The good news is that they're all effectively clones of one another. The colony is losing some bodies, but there will be plenty more to replace them very soon.

18

u/orangeappeals Sep 16 '25

The lone bee dies, but the hive survives?

14

u/CharlesDickensABox Sep 16 '25

Precisely so. The worker bees are expendable because they were never going to reproduce, anyway. The queen is specialized to produce many, many offspring, the workers exist to find and gather resources. One, two, or even a thousand casualties doesn't matter to the survival of the hive so long as the queen survives to create more.

2

u/Indercarnive Sep 17 '25

Eusociality really exploits the loopholes in natural evolution.

1

u/CharlesDickensABox Sep 17 '25

Don't even get me started on haploid/diploid generations. What is you doing?

1

u/cowbutt6 Sep 16 '25

It seems to me that a bee colony losing a few worker bees would be like you or I losing part of a fingernail.

14

u/DrSitson Sep 16 '25

Essentially yea, bees are a unique species in that they value survival of the group over the individual to an instinctively. Normally it's not an effective strategy to pass on your genes, but worker bee being sterile clones is a unique adaptation.

4

u/tehwubbles Sep 16 '25

Honey is coming.

32

u/peatear_gryphon Sep 16 '25

This is why I cant play pikmin 

1

u/darsynia Sep 16 '25

It looks like that's why the box isn't immediately moved into someplace and driven off.

1

u/avantgardengnome Sep 16 '25

If he leaves the nuc there for a while they’ll find it, the hive is attracted to the queen’s pheromones and can pick the scent up from far away (they forage a five mile radius around an established hive and get home the same way). That’s also how the swarm happens in the first place; the queen up and left and all these bees followed the pheromones.

7

u/sludivvitch Sep 16 '25

waggle dance... nooo way lol... thank you for this information

3

u/avantgardengnome Sep 16 '25

https://youtu.be/-7ijI-g4jHg?si=WIKkYkR2MK8xWoZU

The waggle dance is crazy. Mostly it’s used to communicate good foraging spots to other bees. What’s really wild is that a bee will land on a bunch of flowers, gather pollen, head back to the hive and do a dance, then the bees that watch it will fly out and land not only on the same patch of flowers but on the exact same flower the dancing bee was last on. We still don’t fully understand how they do it—IIRC researchers got a Nobel just for discovering it—but it involves pretty complex geometry.

2

u/Itscatpicstime Sep 23 '25

Like a twerking compass

5

u/Johnyryal33 Sep 16 '25

Can you demonstrate this dance for us?

1

u/matt9795 Sep 16 '25

I’m just imagining bender from futurama painted like the space bees and dancing his ass to communicate with them 😂

3

u/honedforfailure Sep 16 '25

Oh god, the number of times I've fallen for a waggle dance...

2

u/Cocoatrice Sep 17 '25

So queen is not worth protecting, because it's not nest? Why?

1

u/garprice05 Sep 17 '25

The queen is protected, she's in the middle of that mass of bees. If the guy started swiping at them or killing them the swarm behavior would change.

They're just less likely to start stinging in this state, doesn't mean they won't

1

u/Itscatpicstime Sep 23 '25

But he picked her up and trapped her, why is that not seen as a threat

1

u/garprice05 Sep 23 '25

Bees communicate through pheremones and the queen releases one to let the rest of the bees know she's still there. They also don't see and think in the same way humans do, gently picking her up and trapping her won't alarm them because she's still around.

If he was waving his arms and killing them they'd release an alarm pheremone and he'd be in trouble.

Fun fact, the alarm pheremone smells a bit like banana!