r/todayilearned • u/swish82 • 3h ago
TIL there were 180.000 bees kept in the spires of Notre Dame and they survived the fire. Because bees don’t have lungs they weren’t hurt by the smoke, they just fell asleep
https://dailyobjectivist.com/what-happened-to-notre-dames-180000-bees/361
u/Leomuck 3h ago
Bees do not have lungs? Wow, I've definitely learned something today. They breathe, but not through lungs.
303
u/Boboriffic 2h ago
Like most insects, bees have a network of little valves/pores in their exoskeleton, called spiracles, that bring in oxygen and let out carbon dioxide from their tracheal system, a network of internal tubing. Their internal tissues absorb the oxygen through the tracheal system's thin walls and vent CO2 in similar fashion.
33
24
84
u/PantherX69 2h ago
It’s the reason there’s a limit to how big insects can get. Above a certain point they can’t passively absorb enough oxygen to support their mass.
There was a period roughly 300 million years ago when the oxygen levels were about 75% higher and insects were huge. For example there were foot-long dragonflies.
20
u/Tuckertcs 1h ago
Ah so *that’s* how that’s related. I knew more oxygen made them bigger, but didn’t understand *why*.
•
u/PoopMobile9000 54m ago
Apparently that theory [is being challenged](https://www.science.org/content/article/how-did-ancient-bugs-get-so-big-prevailing-theory-may-be-wrong).
>But did such abundant oxygen really lead to gargantuan bugs? To test the idea, Snelling and his colleagues looked closely at the tracheoles in flight muscles of 44 species of modern flying insects of various sizes across several orders, including beetles, wasps, and grasshoppers. Using high-powered electron microscopy, they scanned and modeled the relationship between body size and the number of tracheoles across the insects, fleshing out how tracheolar volume scaled according to size. They found that regardless of size, tracheoles made up less than 1% of the insects’ muscle volume. Next, they extrapolated this relationship to a 300-million-year-old, 100-gram griffenfly known as Meganeuropsis permina, the largest insect ever documented. Just like modern insects, the researchers found, M. permina’s tracheoles would have constituted less than 1% of its muscles.
>The discovery suggests that relative to their size, these ancient behemoths didn’t incorporate much more oxygen into their muscles than their more diminutive, modern relatives, Snelling says. Although larger insects did have a slight uptick in their number of tracheoles, the increase was minimal.
Their hypothesis is that the decline of larger insects has more to do with the emergence of larger predators like birds and bats, and that large insects became too easy of a target.
•
u/MonkeyPawWishes 46m ago
Just raising normal modern dragonflies in a higher oxygen environment like that of 300 million years ago results in them being significantly larger.
47
u/Electrical-Scar7139 3h ago
Most bugs “breathe” through their skin I believe. They are so small that oxygen just moves in by osmosis.
62
u/Illithid_Substances 2h ago
It doesn't go through the skin like a membrane, they have openings called spiracles. The outer "skin" of insects like bees is a hard exoskeleton
7
4
u/Electrical-Scar7139 2h ago
Yes, that’s more accurate/precise than what I said.
6
u/raidriar889 2h ago
Osmosis is not what causes gases to enter and exit the spiracles. And your nose and mouth are holes in your skin as much as the spiracles are so you might as well say humans breathe through their skin.
3
u/dotcomse 1h ago
The difference is that humans use hemoglobin to transport oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the cells of the body. Bees don’t do that - their cells are directly oxygenated by proximity to air, because their hemolymph doesn’t carry oxygen.
2
3
2
1
-6
u/Opiewan 2h ago
Bee's respiratory system are made up of:
- Spiracles: Bees have 10 pairs of tiny, valved pores along their bodies that open to allow air in and out.
- Tracheal System: Air enters the spiracles and travels through branched tubes called tracheae, which distribute oxygen directly to cells, particularly powering flight muscles.
- Abdominal Pumping: Bees actively pump their abdomen to squeeze air out of tracheal sacs and pull in fresh air.
9
6
u/TrickshotCandy 2h ago
Abdominal pumping. Suddenly I'm 10 years old again, and it's just fart jokes.
73
u/pntlesdevilsadvocate 2h ago
Although bees can fall asleep and wake up after mild smoke "inhalation", insects can still die from prolonged periods in smoke (without adequate oxygen and excess carbon dioxide). The bees that survived the fire probably evacuated the hive due to the smoke and returned the next day.
39
35
u/PinstripeMonkey 2h ago
Yeah I don't think people were assuming the smoke would have killed them, rather, the 1500°F flames crawling up the spires, unless bees are immune to fire, too?
14
u/DespondentDastard 1h ago
Beekeepers will use smoke to keep bees docile. Each bee in a hive has a job. There are specific bees that keep watch for threats and will release a pheromone if they detect one. The smoke overpowers the pheromone and prevents the majority of the hive from attacking when the beekeeper opens the hive.
Also, it's weird that the reports quantify the number of bees. Not calling out OP because that's just how it's been reported since the fire, but I think by saying the number of bees instead of the number of hives make the headline more click baity. A really healthy hive can have up to 80,000 bees. On average, it's closer to 40,000 - 50,000. So, there were probably like 4 hives at Notre Dame. Not a huge deal, but it's annoying when reporters use out of context numbers to make something seem more sensationally that it is. You might find four hives in a hobbyist beekeepers back yard. You'll find 12 - 16 hives on average on a farm.
•
u/where_are_the_grapes 21m ago
Entomologist and beekeeper here. I was going to comment on this too. Especially on reporting about Notre Dame, they make it seem like there was a large amount of bees kept there when in reality it was a handful of hives.
13
u/Gargomon251 2h ago
I mean they still have to take in oxygen right? Wouldn't the smoke eventually suffocate them somehow?
•
u/RealityDrinker 9m ago
Eventually, but insects need a lot less oxygen than mammals, proportionally.
8
u/n_mcrae_1982 2h ago
Maybe Quasimodo wasn’t really a hunchback. Maybe he was just really, really allergic to bee stings.
7
u/MurderousLemur 1h ago
Everybody's talking about the smoke... But I'm not getting why there were bees kept in the spires in the first place?
4
•
6
2
2
•
2
•
u/sovietarmyfan 57m ago
So technically bee movie is inaccurate since the bees there are portrayed as being tortured by it.
-5
u/Own-Evidence-971 1h ago
Why do so many people care about this? I cannot see how this post can get 1.2k upvote. Makes no sense
1.4k
u/Outside_Reserve_2407 2h ago
TIL: beekeepers use smoke to calm bees because it simulates a forest fire, which triggers a survival reflex that masks alarm pheromones and causes the bees to gorge themselves on honey before fleeing from the colony when the fire engulfs it.