Sandy Ong

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279 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 11 Sep

Sandy Ong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Unexpected Elements · The phizz-whizzing science of Roald Dahl · 11 Sep 2026 podcast

So this is a new bit of research that came out just in July in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal.

And it was written by a joint team of researchers from Australia and China who discovered that bumblebees make facial expressions when they eat, which conveys whether they like something or they just really hate it.

So now I found this research really interesting because facial expressions are something we often see in mammals, but it hasn't really been observed in insects before.

Yeah, so did I.

But the researchers actually put out this really cool video of the bumblebee's expressions online, and I encourage you to Google it in your free time because it's quite cute to see these bees making these expressions.

But basically, the scientists conducted this experiment on 18 colonies of bumblebees.

They presented the bees with droplets of different solutions to try.

So there was one made of sugar, one of salt, plain water, and quinine.

which is a bitter substance found in the bug of the syncona tree that's used to treat malaria.

So as the bees were sampling all these different solutions, the researchers recorded them in slow-motion video.

And what they saw was that when the bees tasted something good, like the sugar solution, the insects would keep flicking out their tongues or their glosser.

in this kind of lapping motion and they kept doing this even after they finished drinking the solution.

But when they tasted something they didn't like, so that was the bitter quinine solution and the salt solutions, you see the bees shaking their heads vigorously and they're wiping their mouths with their front legs.

Okay.

Well I mean how do we know this wasn't just a reflex?

Great question.

So the researchers tested the colonies under a range of different circumstances.

So for instance when it was hot or when the bees were already full, and they did this because they wanted to see if the bees reacted differently to the same solution.

And they found that with heat exposure, for example,

When the bees drank salty solutions, their reactions changed from blah to yum.

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