TIL: A Bumblebee's Buzz Is Basically a Superpower | Today I Learned

All bees buzzed, but bumblebees are one of the very few types of bees that actually take that buzzing sound and use it like a secret weapon to get pollen. In fact, what the bumblebee is doing is sonication, or buzz pollination. It's a technique that it's adapted to get pollen that other bees can't get.

Certain flowers are specially adapted to keep their pollen high up in the flower, and a bumblebee can't actually reach that with its legs or with its tongue. So what it needs to do is vibrate to get that pollen to fall down.

How this works is they unhinge their wings from their flight muscles and vibrate their muscles really, really rapidly, creating an anger that causes the pollen to fall down onto their bodies. Then they fly onto another flower and do the same thing. That's a superpower, as far as I'm concerned, for bumblebees.

You have a regulator in your mouth; you're wearing a mask so it's not coming in your nose, you're not breathing it in, yet you're smelling hydrogen sulfide, and it's actually going through the pores in your skin.