Adam Hart on ants, bees and insect burgers
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ant-loving professor, Adam Hart, shares his passion for leaf cutting ants with Jim Al Khalili. Why do they put leaves in piles for other ants to pick up?
Talking at the Hay Festival, Adam describes the experiments he designed to test the intelligence of the hive mind. When does a waggle dance become a tremble dance? And how do the honey bees know when this moment should be?
We like the phrase ‘as busy as a bee’. In fact, bees spend a lot of time doing nothing at all, a sensible strategy from the point of view of natural selection.
And where does Adam stand on insect burgers? Producer: Anna Buckley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts |
| 0:04.8 | Welcome to the Life Scientific, the podcast where I get to talk to leading scientists |
| 0:09.4 | about their life and work and find out what makes them do what they do. |
| 0:14.3 | I'm Jim Elkelele, and the last time I counted, I talked to more than 260 scientists about |
| 0:20.7 | everything from bumblebees to black holes. |
| 0:24.0 | And if you subscribe to the Life Scientific Podcast, you can hear them all. |
| 0:28.6 | I recorded this interview with Adam Hart at the Hay Festival in the UK. |
| 0:33.0 | We talked about the intelligence of the hive mind. |
| 0:36.4 | We do a waggle dance on stage, and we end up talking about insect burgers. |
| 0:41.6 | I hope you enjoy listening to Adam as much as I enjoyed talking to him. |
| 0:45.5 | Hello, and thank you for having me here at the Hay Festival. |
| 0:49.8 | Let me start with a question. |
| 0:51.5 | What's hard working, small wasted and highly organised? |
| 0:55.7 | The answer I'm looking for, of course, is ants, which is the favourite subject of my |
| 1:02.5 | guest on the Life Scientific today. |
| 1:04.9 | Adam Hart has spent a lot of time studying the behaviour of ants, bees, other social insects, |
| 1:11.5 | and almost as much time talking about them at public events on radio and on TV. |
| 1:17.2 | He's presented hive alive and planet ant. |
| 1:21.2 | And he once gave a non-stop 24-hour public lecture about social insects. |
| 1:27.3 | Today we've only got one hour here at the Hay Festival or 28 minutes for the radio broadcast, |
| 1:33.2 | so we have to keep things tight. |
| 1:35.4 | Now, Adam's first insect love was the leaf-cutting ant. |
... |
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