Time is Honey

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

History, Science, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Society & Culture

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early 2000s, Sunil Nakrani felt stuck. Back then, websites crashed all the time. When Sunil noticed this, he decided he was going to fix the internet. But after nearly a year of studying the architecture of the web, he was no closer to an answer. In desperation, Sunil sent out a raft of cold emails to engineering professors. He hoped someone, anyone, could help him figure this out. Eventually, he learned that the internet could only be fixed if he paid attention to the humble honeybee. This is the story of the Honeybee Algorithm: How tech used honeybees to build the internet as we know it. Special thanks to John Bartholdi, John Vande Vate, Sammy Ramsey, James Marshall, Steve Strogatz, Duc Pham, and Heiko Hamann. We found out about this story thanks to our friends at AAAS, who run the one and only Golden Goose Awards. The award goes to government funded science that sounds trivial or bizarre, but goes on to change the world. The Honeybee Algorithm won a Golden Goose Award back in 2016 (https://www.goldengooseaward.org/01awardees/honey-bee-algorithm). Thank you to our friends there: Erin Heath, Gwendolyn Bogard, Valeria Sabate, Joanne Padron Carney, and Meredith Asbury. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Latif Nasserwith help from - Maria Paz GutiérrezProduced by - Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Annie McEwen and Pat Waltersand Edited by - Pat Walters EPISODE CITATIONS: Videos - Golden Goose Award video about 2016 winners (https://zpr.io/eXwTJKGL6F8S) Books - The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honeybee Colonies (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674953765) by Thomas D. Seeley (1995, Harvard University Press) Piping Hot Bees & Boisterous Buzz-Runners: 20 Mysteries of Honey Bee Behavior Solved (https://zpr.io/tNDqkw372Rhr) by Thomas D. Seeley And, Paths of Pollen (https://zpr.io/cqRPpAdGRwMi) by Stephen Humphrey. One of our former transcribers who we recently learned had hidden talents far beyond the invaluable work they did for us. This book is only tangentially related to the content in the episode, but super cool in its own right. Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening.
0:03.1	Okay.
0:04.4	All right.
0:05.3	Okay.
0:07.0	All right.
0:08.5	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:11.4	Radio Lab.
0:11.9	From W. N. Y.
0:13.9	C.
0:14.8	See?
0:15.1	Yeah.
0:19.3	Lulu.
0:20.2	Hello.
0:38.3	Hey. Should we start? Let's do it. Okay. All right. So today we're going to start with a guy, a very sweet, very tall guy named Sunil McCrani. Yeah, hi, I'm Sunil Nakrani. Where did you grow up and were you just a computer kid? Like you just love computers? No. How did this all start? So you want to start from there? Yeah, I mean, a little bit. Yeah, so I was actually born in Kenya. But he grew up between India and the UK. Right. He studies hard. Bachelor's in a master's degree in electrical engineering. And in 1989, he lands a job at IBM,
0:59.9	just as the world is encountering this new thing called the Internet.
1:00.3	Welcome.
1:01.7	And what about this internet thing?
1:02.9	Do you know anything about that? There's loads of useful information in here.
1:05.0	You can get news, recipes.
1:06.9	So, Danil is like,
1:08.2	OK, why not go and study communication engineering?
1:11.9	He goes to Oxford to get his PhD, and one day, near the beginning of the semester,
	...

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