DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: April 19, 2026

Can Bees Outsmart The Elements Conspiring To Render Them Extinct?  I don’t know.  But they’re smart, and they know what they have to do to survive:

In April 2025, American beekeepers reported that 55 percent of their colonies had perished over the previous year—their worst losses ever. Kirby’s honeybees, however, are thriving. She’s spent the past 20 years working with her farming partner Mark Spitzig to breed and raise colonies, cleverly branded “LongeviBEES,” that are well adapted to New Mexico’s high desert and the Rocky Mountain region. Kirby and Spitzig don’t treat their hives with the synthetic chemicals most commercial beekeepers use to fend off the varroa mite, an invasive parasite that feeds on bees, weakening colonies and carrying viruses, and is thought to be the primary culprit in recent die-offs. Instead, they wait to breed their queens until after they’ve lived for at least two years—long enough to prove the bees are hardy and wily enough to survive on their own.

Ten years ago, Kirby brought some of those bees to Lucero, who creates candles, balms, and salves from the beeswax she harvests. Kirby’s instructions were simple: Leave the bees mostly alone, and let them learn to solve the challenges of their volatile world. And they have. “They really can figure things out,” said Lucero.

Over the past few decades, scientists have been learning more and more about the ways that bees figure things out. They’ve studied how honeybee foragers fan out across miles of unfamiliar terrain in their six-week adult lifespan, navigating by sunlight and memory as they visit thousands of flowers to retrieve nectar for their colonies. They’ve followed bees back to their nests and seen how they dance to tell others where the best flowers are, and how they make collective decisions to swarm and relocate their homes.

There was a time not too long ago when scientists believed that bees were automatons—mindless robots whose actions were hardwired into their genes. Even the most eminent scholars of animal behavior believed that bees’ actions were guided purely by instinct—“inherited through countless generations,” wrote German scientist Karl von Frisch, who won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for discovering how bees communicate. “The brain of a bee is the size of a grass seed and is not made for thinking.”

But in recent decades, researchers like behavioral ecologist Lars Chittka have designed a series of increasingly ambitious experiments that reveal the many ways that bees’ brains are indeed made for thinking. In 1990, when Chittka was studying bee neurobiology as a Ph.D. candidate in Berlin, he led a group of undergraduates to a gigantic agricultural field to explore how bees estimate distance and direction in a featureless landscape with no trees, bushes, or hills.

Now a professor at Queen Mary University of London, Chittka has become well-known for designing studies in custom-made testing arenas, confronting bees with unusual problems that they would never see in nature. (He has switched from using honeybees as his primary subjects to bumblebees, which live in smaller colonies that are easier to observe inside a lab.) By introducing bees to challenges “that none of their ancestors ever came across in their evolutionary past,” he says, his team explores the limits of the insects’ cognitive flexibility: their ability to alter their behavior as situations change. His pioneering work has spurred a growing body of research demonstrating that bees can recognize patterns, differentiate between symbols, identify human faces, cooperate on novel tasks, and plan for the future.

These unexpected abilities may stem from the unpredictable world that bees must negotiate. Foraging insects have to process more complex information than other insects. To retrieve nectar for their colonies, for instance, bees must search across miles to locate the sweetest and rowdiest blooms, remember where they are, and, on the fly—literally—perform cost-benefit analyses to determine whether the energy required to reach a sweeter flower is worth traveling the extra distance from the hive. They also must find water, dodge predators, and navigate a shifting compass of sun and sky. Social bees communicate that information to their sisters; solitary bees bear the additional burden of foraging, nestbuilding, and tending their young all alone.

The Chelsea Hotel 1970.   We’re talking the universe of Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol, all under one roof. Two samples:

‘Patti was focused in some ways but anarchic in others. Her room was the epitome of “creative” chaos. Her husky voice gave you goosebumps, especially when she was reciting her own poems, which she did happily and often. It was obvious that Patti was on her way up, she wanted to go on stage, she wanted to be seen and heard. You could sense that success was not far away, that she would be famous one day’.