Dr. Kirsten Traynor

Sure. So my name is Kirsten Treanor. I'm a honeybee biologist at the State Institute of Bee Research here at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. Wow. So I spend my whole day working with honeybees.

It's not so easy to answer because honeybees normally wouldn't coordinate to move a key. You would need to get quite a bunch of them to work together. But honeybees do have a really cool behavior that they carry out their dead. And a honeybee, so one honeybee can pick up another honeybee and carry her out of her hive. And a honeybee weighs about 100 milligrams.

So if we look at how much a key would weigh, which I looked it up online, it's about 0.25 ounces, which is 6,700 milligrams. So you would need about 67 bees coordinating together to move a house key.

Sure. So a honeybee hive is, you know, 20 to 40,000 individuals living together in a hot, humid environment where microbes would normally flourish. And so having decaying dead individuals in your hive is not a wise decision. because they have the potential to make the others sick. And so they, on a nice warm winter day when it's warm enough to fly, they will carry out all their dead.

And so if it's been snowing, you will actually see a trail of dead bees in front of your hives. And this is a good sign because it means the colony is still alive and well and strong enough to carry out their dead.

So I'm not sure how you'd get all 67 bees to work together to move one key. That would be another trick. But theoretically, it would be about 67 bees.

Yeah, they collaborate on a lot of things. So the bees will cluster in this winter cluster, and that leaves their entrance undefended. And a honeybee hive is, of course, warm and dry and quite cozy. And so field mice, if a beekeeper hasn't put a mouse excluder on the front of their hive... will try and sneak in and chew their way through the comb that's undefended down below.

And then come spring when the bees notice, oh, we have an unwanted visitor living in the bottom of our hive, they will sometimes sting that mouse to death and they can't carry it out because it's too big. So they'll remove the parts they can and then they will propylize and entomb the rest of the mouse, the skeleton, so that it doesn't make the hive sick.

What? Yeah, they basically mummify anything too big that they can't move.

Well, beekeepers have actually tested this. I think in American Bee Journal, there was actually a beekeeper who had attached mice, dead mice on the bottom of the hive to see how quickly they removed them. And they chew off their fur and anything that they can remove with their mouth parts, they will. But of course, the skeleton, they can't break apart. And so that they propylize and entomb them.

A propolis bees gather from tree buds. It's an antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal substance that plants produce to protect the new buds on the tree. And the bees collect that and will mix it with beeswax and they'll use it as an antibacterial doormat and for other things in their hive.

Correct.

You're very welcome. I hope it's been useful.