[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And let's begin today with something deceptively familiar.

STEVE STROGATZ: Fireflies are something that we have all loved as kids, right? Catching them in the backyard, putting them in a jar and watching them glow. So we don't tend to think of them as anything all that mysterious. Well, they do one thing very nicely, which is flash on and off.

JAD: That's all fireflies do: flash. But what interests Steve Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University, is that there are places in the world ...

STEVE STROGATZ: Not here, but in Southeast Asia, in Malaysia or Thailand ...

JAD: ... where fireflies don't just flash randomly like we're used to, they somehow flash together.

STEVE STROGATZ: There are enormous congregations of fireflies along riverbanks.

ROBERT: How many?

STEVE STROGATZ: It could be tens of thousands.

ROBERT: Tens of thousands.

STEVE STROGATZ: Tree after tree, extending for literally miles along the rivers all flashing in sync like a Christmas tree. Rows and rows of Christmas trees all wired together going off. And it's one of the most hypnotic and spellbinding spectacles in nature because you have to keep in mind it is absolutely silent.

ROBERT: Hmm.

STEVE STROGATZ: Picture it: there's a riverbank in Thailand in the remote part of the jungle. You're in a canoe, it's slipping down the river. There's no sound of anything, maybe the occasional, you know, exotic jungle bird or something. And you're looking and you just see—voop, voop, voop—with thousands of lights on and then off, all in sync.

ROBERT: Imagine all the trees as far as you can see are all brilliantly lit and then totally dark. Brilliantly lit, total darkness.

JAD: All of them in sync.

ROBERT: Yeah, and no Westerner had ever seen this sight. There was folklore, there was the stories about it, but nobody'd gone in and photographed and captured samples.

JAD: Well, not until 1965.

STEVE STROGATZ: This was done by John Buck.

JOHN BUCK: John Buck. B-U-C-K.

STEVE STROGATZ: One of the great researchers.

JOHN BUCK: According to the records, I'm 92.

STEVE STROGATZ: Buck and his wife Elisabeth ...

ELISABETH MAST-BUCK: ... Elisabeth Mast-Buck.

STEVE STROGATZ: ... went to Thailand and captured bags full of male fireflies.

ELISABETH MAST-BUCK: You could just reach up and shake the branches, and fireflies would rain down.

STEVE STROGATZ: And brought them back to their hotel room.

ELISABETH MAST-BUCK: And we turned off the lights.

JOHN BUCK: We turned them loose.

STEVE STROGATZ: And saw that the fireflies flittered around on the walls and ceiling.

JOHN BUCK: They flew back and forth.

ELISABETH MAST-BUCK: Flashing randomly.

JOHN BUCK: Elisabeth lay on the floor of the room.

ELISABETH MAST-BUCK: I was just tired, and John stayed awake. And he was the one who saw.

STEVE STROGATZ: Within a few minutes, little groups, duos and trios formed.

JOHN BUCK: And after a while ...

STEVE STROGATZ: A fourth one would join in.

JOHN BUCK: ... they got closer and closer together, and then finally they were synchronized.

STEVE STROGATZ: The whole room was blinking in perfect harmony.

ELISABETH MAST-BUCK: He was excited. The next morning he told me about it. [laughs]

JOHN BUCK: [laughs]

JAD: 20 years later, John Buck is still asking this question:

JOHN BUCK: Well, what is going on?

JAD: Because no one knows.

STEVE STROGATZ: There are literally 10 theories.

JAD: What seems to be clear, says Steve, is there is no one firefly that makes it all happen. It just happens on its own. Order materializes out of nothing, and that has him puzzled.

STEVE STROGATZ: How can order come out of—out of disorder? And this is what the creationists love to talk about, and it's because they don't understand and neither do we. This—this is the big, big mystery of science, I think bigger than black holes or bigger than super strings. I mean, science has had hundreds of years of success since the time of Galileo and Newton, from reductionism, from looking at the smallest parts, whether they're genes or atoms, whatever. That's great. We need to understand the individuals, but that's not enough.

JAD: Obviously, we're not just talking about fireflies anymore. Today on Radiolab, we will do as Steve urges and step away from the individual to find mystery, beauty and order in the group. Not fireflies though, groups of city dwellers, groups of internet surfers, stock traders, even the group of neurons that are inside your head.

ROBERT: This is a science called "emergence." So let's begin.

ROBERT: "In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth." That's the King James Bible, that's how it starts. The ultimate expression of the Boss—God—telling everything else what to be, how to be. It's a top-down kind of order.

JAD: But about midway through, the Bible contains another passage, more of a bottom-up thing, from King Solomon, the wisest of the kings, where he says, "Look to the ants, consider her ways and be wise." So we start in California.

JAD: All right. Here, Deborah Gordon.

ROBERT: Deborah Gordon?

JAD: At the office of an ant expert.

DEBORAH GORDON: Hi. I'm Deborah Gordon, professor of biology at Stanford.

JAD: Deborah Gordon has been studying ants for over two decades.

DEBORAH GORDON: It's because such mindless individuals collectively can do so much that I'm just entranced.

JAD: You might say she's the reigning ant queen.

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, as long as you bring up the 'reigning' part?

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: When we went there I thought, "Well, let's—" she has a lot of ants, but I wanted to see what the boss ant looked like.

JAD: So she led us to her lab.

JAD: We're going to the secret ant place.

DEBORAH GORDON: Correct.

JAD: Where we found, to our disappointment, that she keeps the ants in a big Tupperware container.

DEBORAH GORDON: Well, this is the foraging area of a colony that's stuck living in the lab instead of out in the desert where it would probably rather be. And ...

ROBERT: It's a big plastic box with plastic around it, and little bits of sand on it.

DEBORAH GORDON: That's right. And so I'm gonna take off the top. Maybe we can see the queen better by going like this.

ROBERT: I've never seen a queen before. When I'm looking for the queen, what am I—am I looking for just the ant in the center of just the biggest crunch of other ants?

DEBORAH GORDON: Well, usually there are a lot of other ants around her. She doesn't look much different, but she's bigger.

JAD: Do the ants know that she's special?

DEBORAH GORDON: I think the ants know that she's the queen.

ROBERT: [laughs] What does that mean?

DEBORAH GORDON: Well ...

JAD: The queen in the way we think of the queen?

DEBORAH GORDON: Yeah. I mean ...

ROBERT: But do they know her as 'Mommy?' Or not even?

DEBORAH GORDON: I don't think so, no. I don't think they know anybody as anybody, and remember she's not in charge, she's not telling anybody what to do.

ROBERT: Wait a second. Wait a second.

JAD: Yeah?

ROBERT: This is different than I had actually imagined. I thought that queens gave commands. Like, you know, in Alice in Wonderland?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Off with her head!]

ROBERT: Kind of thing. But she says no.

DEBORAH GORDON: She's just a big ant that lays the eggs.

JAD: That's it.

DEBORAH GORDON: That's it. Every year there's a mating flight, and all of the colonies send out their virgin queens who have wings and males who also have wings. And they all go to one place and they gather and they mate. And the newly-mated queens fly off and start new colonies.

JAD: That's how it starts: queens scatter, make babies. But that's all they do—they're just the colony's ovaries. They don't sit on a throne and decree anything, nor are there generals or even bosses. The colony somehow gets by without any of that, which is especially hard to believe when you watch these ants.

JAD: Well, tell us what's happening here. This is ...

DEBORAH GORDON: That's an ant carrying a dead ant.

ROBERT: Remember there was this one little itty-bitty ant carrying a big, fat dead ant on her back.

ROBERT: And look at this: she seems to be gradually, although with some difficulty, moving towards my elbow.

ROBERT: Then she dropped it. Then she picked it up again, then she dropped it, and then up again.

ROBERT: But now she's turning in the other direction, all the while carrying this heavy corpse.

DEBORAH GORDON: She may lug it back and forth like that for hours. Sometimes some object will get in there that they can't all carry, and they can spend months tugging it one way and tugging it the other way.

ROBERT: Months tugging back and forth on either side of one seed.

DEBORAH GORDON: It wasn't a seed, it was a little twig.

ROBERT: One of them is thinking, "This way!" Another one's thinking, "No, this way." And one's going, "This way." And one's, "This way." And that's all that's going on?

DEBORAH GORDON: Well, I don't know what they're thinking.

ROBERT: Right. No, I know. I understand.

DEBORAH GORDON: One of them is pulling one way because the stick feels like something that needs to be pulled. And the other also feels that the stick needs to be pulled and they just pull.

ROBERT: God, it must be frustrating watching these mindless exchanges.

DEBORAH GORDON: It is. It can be very frustrating.

ROBERT: [laughs]

DEBORAH GORDON: I don't have very much empathy for ants. They're so—the more you watch ants, the more weird it seems the way they never get discouraged, they don't care if they do something well. It's very alien.

ROBERT: I think she hates them!

JAD: Not really. Because here's the thing: you can make an argument that ants are the most successful species on the planet. They thrive in places that are too hot for us, too dry for us, even too cold for us. They outnumber us by a factor of many thousand. In pure evolutionary math terms, they're winning. Which intrigues her, and also forces her to think about them differently.

DEBORAH GORDON: I think about what the colony is doing and then I try to think how it would work.

JAD: If you do it like that, she says, ants are actually amazing. But you have to ignore the individual.

DEBORAH GORDON: Individually, they're totally incompetent.

JAD: You keep your focus big.

DEBORAH GORDON: As colonies, they do great things.

JAD: It's kind of a constant whiplash. You zoom in, stupid. Two ants pull a twig back and forth for months. You zoom out, smart.

DEBORAH GORDON: I'm impressed that it works at all.

JAD: That somewhere between the zooming in and the zooming out, a bizarre intelligence appears almost like a phantom.

DEBORAH GORDON: I think the most intelligent thing I've seen harvester ants do is to build a little turret around the opening of the nest just as the summer monsoons are gathering. And then when it rains and floods, it's raised up so that the water doesn't go in. So when I see the first few ants coming out with their little twigs, and I look up in the sky and I see a few clouds in the distance, and I realize that there's some link between the change in the barometric pressure or something, and it really is a very tidy and effective little construction.

ROBERT: And what else do ants do? Well, let me just count them for you, shall I? Ants farm. They have livestock. Ants make gardens. Ants organize wars, have generals and soldiers and things. Take slaves. Nurse young. Ants tunnel. Evolve incredibly good and sophisticated climate controls. They can start from two opposite directions and meet precisely midway. Ants are engineers. Ants orchestrate massive public work projects that put FDR's New Deal, I'm talking about the Tennessee Valley Authority from your home state!

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: That's nothing compared to what ants can do.

JAD: All of which raises the question at the center of this program, which is: how do so many very stupid creatures with no boss add up to be so smart?

ROBERT: The scientist who first really tackled this idea with some success in the mid-1950s was E.O. Wilson from Harvard University, because he made one of the great discoveries in all of the science of communication, certainly. We know that creatures make noises to each other, sometimes touch each other, but he figured out pheromones.

E.O. WILSON: Pheromones are the key to understanding communication of the vast majority of animal species. We didn't know it then.

ROBERT: It's a neat story. He told me it a few years back at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

E.O. WILSON: One day I set out. I was culturing fire ants in the laboratory at Harvard, and I said, "I'm gonna get to the bottom of this." And the way I did it was to dissect these tiny, tiny ants. Very difficult to do, but I dissected them. And under magnification I can see that it's sticking out its sting and dragging the sting. Something's coming out of that sting.

ROBERT: Kind of like a fountain pen or something?

E.O. WILSON: A little bit like that, yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah.

E.O. WILSON: So I proceed to—believe me, folks, this is the way science goes. I mean, it really is simple-minded.

[audience laughs]

E.O. WILSON: It's only later when you're doing the technical paper, you know, and you're producing the mathematical models and then it looks tough. It's really—this is the way you're thinking when you're doing science. So I said, "I'm gonna find out what the organs are inside this ant." So what I did was to do anatomy, and then, you know, just dissect it. I knew approximately what the different glands were and so on.

ROBERT: You mean, you snipped—you snipped off the part where the glands were?

E.O. WILSON: Well, you just dissect open ...

ROBERT: Oh, you opened it.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah, an ant. And just the way you would any animal, although it's exceedingly difficult when it's about the size of a grain of salt. That's the tough part. But anyway, I took out the various organs one after the other, and I made a preparation, and I made an artificial trail. I smeared out one organ after another. No effect.

ROBERT: Oh, so there are ants over here. and you're drawing lines of gut stuff, I guess.

E.O. WILSON: That's basically what it is, yeah. Just different organs. I've washed each one in turn and then smeared it out. And finally I came to a little finger-shaped organ which we didn't know the function of. It's just a tiny little thing tucked down there. And I smeared that out and it was incredible. It wasn't—I didn't have to tell them to follow that trail, they exploded out of the nest running along that thing.

ROBERT: [gasps]

E.O. WILSON: I started playing around with this. It was so effective. For demonstrations I would write my name.

[audience laughs]

E.O. WILSON: And a column of 100, 200, 300 ants would come pouring out back and forth, and they'd actually write my name in ant.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: So that was the first clue: smell.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Ants may not take orders from above, but they can exchange information.

DEBORAH GORDON: See this one with its abdomen bent under?

ROBERT: Yeah?

DEBORAH GORDON: That one has somehow reacted to us.

ROBERT: Oh, really?

DEBORAH GORDON: The strange smells that we're making.

JAD: Back at Deborah Gordon's lab, as we watched the colony, one of the ants even stopped what it was doing to smell us.

DEBORAH GORDON: When they wave their antennae in the air, they're looking around because their antennae are their periscopes.

JAD: Sounds simple enough: ants follow scent trails, sort of like dogs. But if you stare at them long enough, you will see that when these ants get together, lots of them, the simple sniffing talents they have add up to solve pretty amazing problems.

DEBORAH GORDON: Here's a forager coming back.

JAD: What's that in her mouth?

DEBORAH GORDON: It's a seed.

JAD: Oh!

JAD: Like this: suppose there are a bunch of forager ants in one part of town and something good to eat in another part of town.

DEBORAH GORDON: Like, if there's a picnic, how does the colony get more ants to your picnic?

JAD: They're blind and virtually brainless, so how do they do it?

DEBORAH GORDON: That's the question: how do they do it?

IAIN COUZIN: Hello. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. [laughs]

JAD: With that question in mind, we visited a Princeton biologist, Iain Couzin.

IAIN COUZIN: This one here.

JAD: Yeah. What is this now?

JAD: He pops open his laptop to show us a beautiful map he's made.

IAIN COUZIN: So here on the screen, you can see the individual parts coded by color.

JAD: An ant map. It's as if he gave a few hundred ants a paint brush and then let them wander over a canvas.

IAIN COUZIN: And the computer has software which tracks the motion of each of these individuals.

JAD: The resulting picture is vintage Jackson Pollock—lots and lots and lots of layers of squiggly lines.

IAIN COUZIN: So you can put the food down, and here for example I've got droplets of sugar water here that the ants love to feed on.

JAD: Iain points to a splotch of white in the upper right-hand corner, then flips to the next image, jumping forward in time.

IAIN COUZIN: What—what I've actually shown with this is that the ants have begun forming a chemical trail. And you can actually ...

ROBERT: Look at that!

IAIN COUZIN: ... show how they've trailed to this good food source.

JAD: This is the type of image that makes you want to stare at static on your TV screen and look for patterns. It's downright eerie. One minute the screen is a mass chaos of squiggles overlapping, no patterns at all. The next, as if by magic, the squiggles have snapped together to form a vein leading directly to the sugar. It happens every time. And what's weirder, says Iain, is every time it happens it happens by accident.

IAIN COUZIN: Error, really. And this is really what we're talking about is these ants have probably just made a mistake.

JAD: Error is architecture. Imagine 500 ants are exploring a space. Number 411 finds the sugar completely by accident. Except it's not an accident because the ant has left a scent trail and there are 500 other ants, so surely one other will come along and make the same mistake. Suddenly you've got two chemical trails on top of each other, doubly hot, attracting a third ant which makes the trail triply hot, attracting five more, which makes it octuply hot. And soon what you've got is a blazing pheromone highway of bumper-to-bumper ants. Not unlike midtown during rush hour.

STEVEN JOHNSON: When I first saw the ants in person, one of the first thoughts I had was, "This looks like a small little city."

JAD: Steven Johnson noticed this connection and wrote about it in a book called Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.

STEVEN JOHNSON: A lot of what the ants do is positive feedback loops where they lay down a kind of pheromone chemical signal to recruit other ants to do something that they're working on. And those ants lay down more of the same signals, and so very quickly you can get a whole bunch of ants working on a single problem. That's the similar effect that you get in the way that city neighborhoods form.

JAD: Accidents that always happen. That is how ants find food and, he says, how cities find their shape.

STEVEN JOHNSON: It gets to what I've come to call "The swerve."

[car tires screeching]

JAD: Not that kind of swerve. This kind.

STEVEN JOHNSON: When you're walking down the sidewalk going from point X to point Y, you're going from the subway back to your house, and you pass by completely accidentally point Z—which is a new boutique or a new restaurant, something that catches your eye—and you swerve. You see the thing you've never seen before and you're like, "Hey, I want to check that out." The whole business in a sense of sidewalks in thriving urban centers revolves around the idea that somebody coming to see boutique A is going to be swerving into boutique B or boutique C just because they're near each other and because they're kind of window shopping.

ROBERT: What a neat idea!

JAD: Yeah, right?

ROBERT: You wake up thinking, "Well, here's what I'm gonna do in the city. I'm gonna walk my daughter to school. I'm gonna go to the newsstand and buy a paper."

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: And then on your way, something that you didn't expect, something new catches your eye. "Begonias, I always want—Sally, that's the begonias she wants."

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: So you swerve, which begins as an accident.

STEVEN JOHNSON: But all these kind of local, unplanned decisions all add up into this larger macro unit that does have a distinct personality, and that crucially can last for hundreds of years.

ROBERT: Which does make you wonder. Because the personalities of cities, we know about that.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: How come there are distinct neighborhoods for rich people, there are neighborhoods in some cities for artists?

JAD: Slums.

ROBERT: Consider 28th Street in Manhattan.

SHOPKEEPER: Today in the flower market we have hydrangeas and sunflowers from Florida.

ROBERT: How many flower stores are on this block, would you say?

MAN: If I had to guess, I'd probably say about 25.

ROBERT: There are flower stores all around.

MAN: It's like a Walmart for flowers in a way.

WOMAN: How much are the orchids?

ROBERT: But how did this begin? Let's propose that someone for some reason came here and set up a flower shop, which picked up a few customers. So then a second flower merchant says, "Hmm. Since he's getting the traffic, maybe if I open a store, like, ahead of his on the block, maybe I'll be able to pull some people away from him, have them swerve into my store."

STEVEN JOHNSON: Location, location, location.

ROBERT: And let's say that gets more traffic.

STEVEN JOHNSON: You gotta be where the traffic is.

ROBERT: So then you get a third store. And that works too.

STEVEN JOHNSON: You could sell pencils that look like ducks and nothing else, and if you're right in the middle of Times Square, you know what? You'll probably make money.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ROBERT: That's the key: traffic is everything. Once a neighborhood becomes the place for duck-shaped pencils or the place for flowers, what began as an accident then becomes a neighborhood. So much so, if I blindfolded a flower salesman and dropped him onto a hundred blocks, would he know which one was 28th Street?

FLOWER SALESMAN: Absolutely, yeah. Shit. Yeah, of course.

ROBERT: Why?

FLOWER SALESMAN: I just—I know my street, man. I can smell the flower. Hyacinths. Can you smell the hyacinths as soon as you walked in there? Of course. I mean, duh. The sound of the hand truck, reefers screaming, yelling. I mean, please.

STEVEN JOHNSON: It's a quasi-mystical concept, I really do think. I mean, when you think about a neighborhood in a great city, whether it's New York in the West Village or Paris in the Latin Quarter or the Montmartre, you know, ask the question, like, who created this neighborhood?

JAD: Right.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Who created things we love about this neighborhood? Who creates that kind of life force? And the answer is everybody and nobody at the same time.

JAD: So that brings us again to the central mystery of this hour. We're studying here the science of emergence, which asks: where does organization come from? How do you get a neighborhood, a district or a city? How do you get the complexity of an ant colony if there's no leader and everyone in town is stupid? Steve—Steve Johnson proposes that a city is the emergent quality of this swerve. It's a series of accidents you know is always gonna happen, you multiply the swerves and you get a neighborhood.

ROBERT: Deborah Gordon is arguing that if you look very closely at the ants and you watch them smelling and you multiply their smells, then you get the complexity of an ant colony. But buried in the system, both of them say, is a rule, a sense of direction. But how do you see that rule?

DEBORAH GORDON: That's the wrong question, and that's what's so uncomfortable. The instructions aren't anywhere, the instructions come out of the way that the colony lives and behaves.

ROBERT: That's hard.

DEBORAH GORDON: It is hard. If you had one ant on its own, you couldn't take it apart and find the substance that would make it behave in a certain way.

ROBERT: But you see how hard that is.

DEBORAH GORDON: Yes.

ROBERT: I want to know where? Where? Where do you find the rule?

DEBORAH GORDON: Yeah. So when the ...

ROBERT: It's not in the individual ant. You see it when all the ants get together, but where is it?

DEBORAH GORDON: Well, where is the thought in your brain? Is it in a neuron? Does each neuron have a little piece of the thought? If you took your neuron out and lay it on the table, could you see the little tiny bit of the thought that's in that neuron? No, it's not in the neuron. It's in the way the neurons interact with each other.

JAD: Think about a Seurat painting, that one where they're all on the banks of the Seine River.

ROBERT: Yup.

JAD: You know the one?

ROBERT: I know the one.

JAD: If you look at it up close all you see is dots.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: You pull back, and the picture emerges with all the ladies and their parasols. But the question with these systems, the big question is whether there is a Seurat to make the dots, to paint the picture, or if somehow the painting just materializes on its own.

ROBERT: Hmm. Well, you know that I have an opinion about this.

JAD: I do.

ROBERT: It's not a—it's not a science-y opinion.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: I think it's not just fascinating that there are these hidden patterns and hidden rules, I think it's—um, this is gonna change the whole tone. I think it's kind of holy. And I don't have—there's no scientific evidence because there's no science behind this. It's just an instinct. I think when you look at the way ants work or the way a Seurat painting emerges before your eyes, you're looking at an author.

JAD: See—see when you say that, all the air just gets let out of the balloon for me. It's like the magic is gone.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Yeah, I think so.

ROBERT: But see, what you're left with then, everything that you see when you wake up in the morning, as beautiful—and we all agree that it's beautiful—is empty of purpose. Is that okay with you?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: In a way, it makes it even more mysterious to be alive. In any case, author or not, there's a really good reason why these systems would not centralize, put all their eggs into one basket, one supreme being: because if they did, they'd be vulnerable. Case in point: this story from producer Laura Starcheski.

JOHN CLAYTON: I'll walk you over toward the beehives.

JAD: Not about ants, though.

JOHN CLAYTON: We're sort of in their flight zone, but don't worry.

JAD: Bees.

JOHN CLAYTON: And we'll just see if we have any luck here.

JAD: She met up recently with a beekeeper named John Clayton.

JOHN CLAYTON: It's always hit and miss trying to find a queen, that's for sure. She's right there. Get off me. Thank you. One of the things that beekeepers really like to do is—is raise their own queens. All you need to do is take a frame out of an existing hive that has egg cells on it and a bunch of worker bees and put it in its very own box, and they'll realize that they don't have a queen and they'll pull an egg or pull larvae and start feeding it the royal jelly, make the peanut-shaped queen cell. And 16 days later, you got a brand new queen.

JOHN CLAYTON: Well, one time I made a brand new queen. It was my first queen. I was probably 17 years old at the time, and I had it out on my back porch. And I knew come day three she goes out to mate. So I'm sitting there and here sure enough comes the queen out the entrance. And she flies off and she takes off, and I'm watching. And I'm watching the whole mating process take place. And it takes place in flight. She mates in flight with about 10 drones, and the drones die after mating. They come crashing to the ground, dying. And the queen goes back to the hive. And well, she started coming back to the hive, and then I realized I had a piece of sticky fly tape hanging up on the back porch, and she flew right into it, and there's my queen all stuck to the fly tape like this, you know?

LAURA STARCHESKI: Oh!

JOHN CLAYTON: I said, "There's my first queen, and I killed the poor thing." Because there was nothing I could do to save it. You know, it's just a horrible story. So it's one of those things, it's you learn from experience, you know? But it was a sad moment because a queen's a special thing.

JOHN CLAYTON: Watch. Just got zapped there.

JAD: Thanks to producer Laura Starcheski and beekeeper John Clayton. Coming up: the science of how a trillion leaderless neurons in your head come together in musical fashion to sing the song of the thought you are thinking right now, which if you're a caffeine addict like me, just might be ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] "Coffee!"]

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I will continue in a moment.

 

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