The Life Scientific: Adam Hart
Discovery
BBC
4.3 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 June 2022
⏱️ 28 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 | Ever wondered what the world's wealthiest people did to get so ridiculously rich? |
| 0:05.4 | Our podcast Good Bad Billionaire takes one billionaire at a time and explains exactly how they made their money. |
| 0:11.9 | And then we decide if they are actually good, bad or just plain wealthy. |
| 0:15.5 | So if you want to know if Rihanna is as much of a bad guy as she claims, |
| 0:19.2 | or what Jeff Bezos really did to become the first person in history to pocket a hundred billion dollars, |
| 0:24.6 | listen to Good Bad Billionaire with me, Simon Jack, and me, Zingsing. |
| 0:28.4 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:31.1 | On the podium season two is available now. |
| 0:33.9 | Like many people in this world I have never seen an Olympic medal before. |
| 0:38.3 | Bringing you more remarkable stories of Olympic and Paralympic athletes |
| 0:42.8 | and their incredible journeys to the podium. |
| 0:45.5 | This is my dream and it's came true that day. |
| 0:48.0 | Find out more at the end of this podcast. |
| 0:51.0 | This is Discovery from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:54.0 | I'm Jumal Khalili and in my series The Life Scientific, |
| 0:57.6 | I get to talk to some of the extraordinary men and women who are trying to understand our world |
| 1:02.6 | and make it a better place. |
| 1:04.6 | Let me start with a question. |
| 1:06.3 | What's hard working, small wasted and highly organised? |
| 1:10.6 | The answer I'm looking for, of course, is ants. |
| 1:12.9 | And which is the favourite subject of my guest on The Life Scientific today. |
| 1:19.8 | Adam Hart has spent a lot of time studying the behaviour of ants, |
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