Episodes

Did bumblebees really live alongside woolly mammoths? During the Ice Age, wild bumblebees buzzed across the same frozen mammoth steppe where woolly mammoths grazed — and the science behind how they su...

Everyone knows the honeybee isn't native to North America, and it arrived on colonial ships around the 1620s. Except a single fossil, pulled from paper shale in west-central Nevada and described in 20...

Hover flies hang in the air at eye level, hold perfectly still, and dart off the second you move — then come right back. If your garden's been "invaded" by little hovering insects this season, you're ...

Why living alone beats living together for most of the native, wild bee world. This episode is about those bees — the quiet majority. How a hundred solitary females can nest side by side and still not...

You step outside on the hottest day of the year and the flowers are still there, but the bees have vanished. So where did they go? The good news: they didn't die, and they didn't leave. This episode f...

Most native bees don't live in hives — they live alone, underground, in tunnels a single female digs herself. This episode is about what those ground-nesting bees need from a patch of bare earth: the ...

Do bees actually fight? Yes, and it's more brutal than most people imagine. In this episode: a desert bee whose large-headed males duel underground in fights that always end in death, an Australian bu...

That snap from the bug zapper on the patio? It's usually killing a night pollinator and almost never a mosquito. When researchers counted every insect six zappers killed over a full summer, only two-t...

Cellophane Bees Make Natural Polyester That Chemists Can't Replicate Transcript: Speaker A: welcome back to Secret Pollinators. I'm your host, Kelly Parks. And today is a really interesting episode be...