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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick, and it is Saturday, so we are heading down into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally published on April 9th, 2024, and it's called In the Name of Osiris. I think it was a follow-up of our series on Osiris. That's right. This one, I believe, mostly revolves around things in the scientific realm that are just named after Osiris, but are still fun to talk about. ♪
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I'm Joe McCormick. Last week on the show, we did a two-parter about the ancient Egyptian underworld fertility god, Osiris. And today's episode is kind of a spinoff of that. While I think you're going to have more fun if you go into this episode with some familiarity regarding the mythology in question. So I would say if you have a
choice in the matter, yeah, go back and listen to the two previous episodes about Osiris, the god, and surrounding mythology. Go ahead and listen to those, but it's also not completely necessary.
The basic gist here is, OK, Osiris is a mythological figure who continues to resonate with people around the world. And even his name has this kind of regal mystery to many of us. Just to say the name aloud, Osiris, you know, it kind of summons a certain amount of mystery and and I don't know, strangeness and power into the room with you.
And scientists are far from immune to such charms. So we have various things in the scientific and technological world that are named after him. In some cases, we're talking about highly tortured acronyms. Other times, there seems to be even less connection. So we're not going to touch on everything in the scientific and technological world that is named after Osiris. There are some things we're not going to get into, like there is an exoplanet that is
nicknamed Osiris, not officially named Osiris. But we are going to talk about two things in particular. You know, it's an opportunity to chat about some very deserving science in the name of Osiris, as well as some scientific tidbits that we might not otherwise have discussed.
Right. So first up, I wanted to talk about a couple of aspects of OSIRIS-REx, which was the name of an asteroid sample return mission operated by NASA, as well as the original name of its associated spacecraft. But it has since been resurrected with a new identity. It has now been reborn as OSIRIS-APEX. I'll explain that in a minute.
Well, that sounds really cool, too. And if nothing else, this is just an awesome name for a space mission. Yeah, I'm trying to discern the mythological significance of going from Rex to Apex. I guess that would be like going from Osiris the King to Osiris the Peak. That's what Apex means, I think. In either case, I mean, it is fitting to name things in space or sent into space after Osiris.
given the ancient Egyptians' fascination with the stars.
Fair enough. So I'll start with just a very short, rough sketch of the mission history and then come back and talk about a couple of aspects of it. So OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and in 2018 successfully achieved a deep space rendezvous with its target, an asteroid called 101-955-BENNU, B-E-N-N-U.
The spacecraft spent roughly two years after that orbiting Bennu, mapping its surface, doing analysis of the asteroid from orbit, and trying to select an ideal landing zone, which proved a bit more difficult than had originally been anticipated.
In October of 2020, OSIRIS-REx managed to touch down on the surface of Bennu and collect a sample of its regolith. The regolith is the rocky outer soil covering the object. But it was not like a full landing where it sat down and chilled for a while. It was a touch-and-go sampling operation.
So it touched down. It sort of poked the asteroid with a mechanism called its sampling arm. So it had kind of a leg or a limb that came out below it that poked down into the asteroid's regolith, did a blast of nitrogen gas to try to stir up some of the soil, captured a bunch of it, and then blasted right back off. So kind of like a mosquito. Yeah.
Didn't land for as long as a mosquito, though. It was more like if a mosquito just had to kind of like jab you and then retreat. Gotcha. Like if a mosquito would fly down, poke you, hit your blood vessels under the skin with a blast of nitrogen gas, cause a little sort of explosion of blood, and then just suck up a bunch of that as it is bouncing back off of your skin. But anyway, the sampling was successful. It got a significant amount of the material from Bennu.
And then it lifted off and returned to Earth, which and so the spacecraft didn't fully return to Earth. But it had a capsule that was for the sample return, which touched down on Earth. I think it landed in Utah in September 2023.
And the asteroid soil sample was intact and it was ready to be studied. So that is something we now have in the possession of Earth scientists who have already gotten to work analyzing it and doing science on the basis of it. Yeah, it's a pretty impressive technological achievement.
You know, not even getting to just all the details of just making sure everything lines up just right here. In many ways. I mean, there are a lot of things that are hard about doing a mission like this. So, of course, there is just there are the navigational challenges of trying to intersect with a small, fast moving object in space like an asteroid. There is once you get there, the selection of the landing zone, this difficult touch and go process.
to try to capture a piece of the asteroid, some soil from it without contaminating it, to get that safely back to Earth intact and uncontaminated. And then also things people might not even think of. For example, when the spacecraft and the probe were conducting their operations on the asteroid surface, that's not something that a human pilot can operate in real time with a joystick. Right.
because it's so far away, there's a significant travel time for information back and forth between mission control here on Earth and the probe. So essentially these maneuvers had to be pre-programmed so that the probe could carry them out on its own because there wouldn't be enough real-time exchange of information for like a human pilot to do
see what's happening in the moment and adjust. You have to make sure you've programmed it correctly in advance and it can do what it needs to do without you being able to intervene. But anyway, after the successful conclusion of the OSIRIS-REx mission, the spacecraft was given a new mission and a new name to rendezvous with and study the asteroid 99942 Apophis and in keeping with its new role, the new name OSIRIS-APEX.
So as you previewed a minute ago, Rob, OSIRIS-REx is an acronym. It's one of these kind of, I always wonder how these things exactly come together when like, you know, you select all the things and they're supposed to stand for what it actually does, but then it makes a word that already exists. And you're like, that didn't happen by accident. Yeah.
Who organizes the acronym for formation process? I don't know. Yeah, it's like it is one of these situations where you sort of you get in within spitting distance of a really cool word and then you start turning the screws to get it a little closer, you know, because you're not hitting Osiris Rex, you know, first try with no manipulation.
Certainly not. So not without it being an Osiris miracle. But OK, so it stands for Origins Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security Regolith Explorer. So those parts of the name are basically a summary of.
of what OSIRIS-REx was meant to study or what types of questions it was meant to help illuminate. So, for example, origins refers to the fact that the target of the mission is what has sometimes been called a time capsule asteroid. Bennu was selected
Because it is thought to be a pristine 4.5 million year old carbon rich asteroid that has been preserved in essentially the same condition since the solar system was formed. So by looking at what it's made of, we can learn more about the early days of the solar system itself.
and learn about the initial distribution of various minerals and organic compounds and things like that. It'll help teach us more about how the solar system was formed and give us points of comparison between it and other objects in the solar system that have been changed more over time. So the spectral interpretation part, this refers to the use of spectral analysis in astronomy, looking at patterns of light colors reflected off of an object.
to determine its composition. There was spectral analysis of Bennu, of course, and there is spectral analysis of asteroids, even just from telescopic observatories to try to determine their composition. So it would help illuminate those questions as well.
There is a resource identification in the name that's understanding the chemical and geological makeup of a carbon rich asteroid. The security in the name is an interesting thing. You might think, wait, what is this security? Well, that refers to security for the whole of Earth, because it turns out of all the asteroids we know about today, there's
Bennu is one of the most potentially dangerous to our planet. Bennu passes near to Earth about once every six years. And scientists have calculated that in the year 2182, its path will bring it close enough that there is about a 1 in 2700 chance of a collision on that path. So you can get some relief from the relentless asteroid bound for Earth headlines in that
when it comes to the larger known space objects, even the most troubling ones won't get close to us for a long time. And even when they do, based on what we know today, the chances of a direct hit are like one in several thousand at worst. Now, how bad would it be if
Bennu did hit Earth, it would be not as bad as some impacts in Earth's history, but it would be quite bad. Bennu is about half a kilometer wide with a mass of about 67 million metric tons. So it would probably not be large enough to cause worldwide calamity. It wouldn't be like the object associated with the death of the non-avian dinosaurs. It would not be like the
KPG extinction object, but it would be bad. It would be extremely locally destructive depending on where and how it hit.
So part of the mission was also focused on studying the forces acting on the trajectory of asteroids so we can better predict their course over time. Because probably the single thing we need to best understand in order to defend Earth from dangerous near-Earth objects is a very accurate prediction system for the future movements of space objects.
Right now we can predict with pretty good accuracy, but over time that accuracy degrades, right? So the farther out into the future you're looking, the harder it is to predict how close something is going to be.
And specifically, the OSIRIS-REx mission was looking at the influence of something called the Yarkovsky effect. And to do a short summary of that, when an asteroid is flying through space and rotating, this is specifically for a rotating object, its surface goes through patterns of heating and cooling, depending on which side is facing the sun. So as one side of the asteroid faces the sun, it gets star baked and it heats up, which
And then as the asteroid rotates, the hot side turns away from the Sun and cools. And that cooling means the asteroid is radiating infrared photons into space.
This radiation actually provides its own small amount of thrust. So as it's radiating that heat off into space, there's a bit of a push created there. And the effect is fairly small, but for relatively small objects and affecting the path over large periods of time, it can make a big difference. This does affect the asteroid's path through space significantly.
which makes it harder to predict the orbit of a rotating asteroid farther into the future. And that's something that we need to be able to do if we want to identify threatening near-Earth objects and protect Earth by potentially pushing them off course. Right, right, which to your point is essential with objects that we already know are going to get maybe a little too close for comfort anyway. We need to know to what degree these estimates can...
can be off, you know, exactly how much sway there is in the movement of one of these asteroids in our predictions. Exactly. And then finally, so that's the OSIRIS part of the name. Finally, there's the REX part. That stands for Regolith Explorer. And this is the sample return aspect of the mission.
So OSIRIS-REx was the first successful U.S. mission to return a sample from an asteroid, though it was not the first such mission worldwide. Actually, the first successful asteroid sample return was carried out by the Japanese Space Agency. That was the Hayabusa probe, which got a sample of small dust grains from an asteroid called 25143 Itokawa and returned the material to Earth in 2010.
Though OSIRIS-REx is not just a duplicate of that mission because it targeted a different type of asteroid. And also Bennu was able to get a lot more just mass of material returned to Earth for us to work on.
Now, here's something about the naming of this asteroid that is kind of backwards of what it's kind of the opposite of what you might expect. The asteroid Bennu got its name by association with the OSIRIS-REx mission. So it was originally called 1999 RQ-36. But in advance of the mission in 2013, it was named RQ-36.
The Planetary Society held a competition to name the asteroid. And a kid from North Carolina who was nine years old at the time named Mike Puzio
came up with the idea of naming it Binu, which was the name of a pre-existing deity from Egyptian mythology, an animal-formed god often depicted as a long-legged bird, though there's some dispute over which natural bird, if any, it's supposed to correspond to. I'll talk about that a bit more in a minute. But Puzio apparently picked the name for the asteroid because
Because of the OSIRIS-REx probe's resemblance to a long-legged bird. And Rob, if you look, I attached an image of the spacecraft here.
for you to have a gander at. I can see this here. So the solar panel flaps are very much like wings. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. You know, I got to hand it to this nine-year-old. This is a great space nerd and a great mythology nerd. Two great nerddoms for anyone, especially at this age. Now, we're getting a little off track of the mission here, but I actually got
I'm interested in the concept of Bennu itself. And the context of this episode is the Egyptian mythology. So I wanted to follow this tunnel under the pyramids for a moment. So Bennu, you can if you're looking this up, it's sometimes as the God's name is spelled Bennu with two N's or Bennu with one N. So B-E-N-U sometimes the asteroid is with two N's.
It is a figure associated with the creation of the world and with the creator sun god. And for what I'm about to discuss, my main source is Geraldine Pinch's Handbook of Egyptian Mythology. So according to Pinch, in some Egyptian myths, binu is said to be the oldest creature living.
During the creation of the world, when a hill of dry land was first raised out of the darkness, out of the waters of chaos, the binu bird landed on this earth. So it was the first living animal, and its cry was the first sound. The moment of its cry marked the first moment of time.
And the cry of the Binu bird will also sound again at the end of the world to mark the time when all order will again descend into chaos.
The Bennu bird seems to have been related to or possibly the inspiration for the Greek myth of the phoenix. In the Egyptian context, there was a Bennu bird that was believed to dwell in Heliopolis and kings would pray to the bird for the renewal of strength after they had been in power for 30 years.
And here I just want to read a section from Pinch on the connection between the Binu bird and Osiris, as well as another major god from the Pantheon. Quote, "...both Ray and Osiris could be identified with the Binu bird, an expression of the secret knowledge that these two gods were one."
As a manifestation of Osiris, the binu bird led the spirits of the dead through the dangers of the underworld. Some spells in the Book of the Dead aim to assist the dead to transform themselves into binu birds so that they can travel freely between worlds. All right, so a kind of psychobomb here. Yeah, I think it's interesting that you would get both that so the binu
could be a creature that's sort of a guide because remember in, you know, there are different visions of the Egyptian afterlife, but in some views of this, you know, it's an adventure. It's like a journey that you have to go through and face obstacles along the way. And there is also, there's the famous judgment, the weighing of the heart against the feather of Mott. But there are also, you know, these trials you must go through, like facing dangers throughout the landscape of the dead. And,
And the binu bird here apparently could be a guide in that process. But you could also, if you knew the right spells, just turn into a binu bird, which seems even better. Now, coming back to whether this bird has a counterpart in nature, early texts describing the binu bird seem to be talking about a yellow wagtail, which is a small bird that eats insects and tends to seek out wet, open countries such as marshland.
However, Pinch notes that in later art, the binu bird is depicted somewhat differently as a huge heron. And this is why you'll see pictures of a heron often if you Google binu. This is, I think, more New Kingdom art. And I found a photo of some of this art for you to look at here, Rob, in the outline. Here, binu is a heron that would have been taller than a human with its neck outstretched. So a very big heron. And extant herons are
can get quite large. The still-living Goliath heron, or Ardea goliath, can reach a height of about 5 feet or roughly 150 centimeters. But apparently, there was an extinct giant heron that grew even larger, known today as the Binu heron, or Ardea binuides, bones of which have been found from the Arabian Peninsula dating back to the 3rd millennium BCE.
So this is a giant heron that would have been alive during human history here. And so this isn't known, but it has been speculated that this bird could have inspired the iconography of Bennu and thus also perhaps the story of the phoenix.
Fascinating. Now, how much larger was this, like a 20-foot tall heron? No, no, no. It is bigger than any living heron, but not by a huge amount. I think it would have been roughly maybe six feet tall. Still a big bird. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, any kind of heron species you encounter in the wild, it's kind of a breathtaking and magical experience. And imagining, like, the largest of herons here, this one.
extinct species, this would have been quite an impressive sight.
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Now, before we move on from OSIRIS-REx, there is one interesting thing I wanted to talk about from the sampling portion of the mission. Apparently, this asteroid had some surprises waiting for us when we got there. So I mentioned already that the sampling mechanism, how it would work to get some of the regolith from the surface of this asteroid.
It did not involve a permanent landing, so you didn't have to worry about that. It was a touch-and-go operation. So you would descend, you would poke the surface with the sampling arm, issue a blast of nitrogen gas, scoop up a bunch of what was stirred up, and then blast off and retreat immediately. But despite this, once we actually reached the asteroid site,
It proved a lot trickier of an object to touch down on than was initially expected because it had been thought that the surface of Bennu would be relatively smooth or at least have large, smooth patches. I think the asteroid that had been targeted by the Japanese Hayabusa probe had more kind of beachy areas, you know, with like smooth, fine-grained areas where, you know, you could select a good landing zone.
But for some reason, Bennu was, when we got there, more of a sort of a hell of boulders. It was a very rocky, bouldery surface, more uneven than expected. So the team had to very carefully map out the surface to select an ideal landing spot. And there were not many. They ended up selecting a place that was known as the Nightingale Crater.
But then there was another surprise waiting when they actually went to initiate the touchdown and sample retrieval moment. So the craft was descending and it poked the asteroid and then the sampling arm sank. It sank into the surface. I've seen this described as like poking into a swamp. Now, of course, it's not actually that there was liquid water there.
on the surface of Bennu. Instead, it's just that the soil covering its surface was a lower density than expected. So the sampling arm just kind of plunged in. I want to read a quote here from a Space.com article by Teresa Poltarova talking about this moment.
Quote,
As the sample collection had sucked in the sample and the spacecraft's back-away thrusters fired, a huge wall of debris rose from the crater, engulfing the ascending spacecraft. And Rob, I've attached some pictures for you to look at here because there's sort of like an animation you can look up of this. The spacecraft's camera had a camera facing directly down along the axis of the sampling arm.
So you're looking down as it's descending towards the surface and you can just see when it touches, suddenly it goes in and then there's this explosion and there's just stuff all over the place. And then it zooms back out and you can see like before and after images of the crater where it touched down, where like major rocks and boulders are moved all over the place. It just seems like this is, you know, it reminds you that
Asteroids, especially smaller asteroids like this, are not necessarily solid objects. It might be better to think of something like Bennu not as a solid hunk of rock in space, but like a big pile of rubble that's loosely bound together by gravity. Wow.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, even in our descriptions of like the size of these things, we compare them to things like skyscrapers, you know, or how big they are in comparison to a car. So we tend to get these kind of solid ideas in our mind. Yeah, to your point, it's more like a big ball of...
accumulated space rubble. Yeah, but despite the fact that it was a hell of boulders and sort of a dry swamp of sadness, the mission was a success. We got plenty of material from the surface. I think the initial goal was to get at least 60 grams, and they got well over that, so plenty of material to study.
And now the spacecraft is being repurposed. It is slated to enter the orbit of the asteroid Apophis in 2029. Wow. Apophis, by the way, another Egyptian mythology tie-in. Yeah, this is the Great Serpent, I believe, right? It's a monster god figure associated with chaos and destruction, kind of reptilian figure.
Yeah, yeah. Pinch describes it. It's sometimes depicted more like a crocodile, but more frequently as a great serpent. And it is like it is it is one of, if not the most important chaos monster of Egyptian mythology. But interesting thing to study because Apophis was previously thought to.
to be an asteroid that may in fact threaten Earth. But because of the unpredictability of its orbit, when later we got more precision about its trajectory, it was sort of ruled out. So for a while, people were thinking, oh, this one might really be a candidate for danger. But actually, now it's nothing to worry about, but still worth studying.
Yeah, yeah. And the more we understand how these things move and what impacts their course, the more we can protect ourselves and the more information we have moving forward. Thus, again, the security aspect of the OSIRIS-REx that we just described earlier. That's OSIRIS-REx in all caps except for the X because, again, it is Regolith Explorer at the end.
All right. Well, from there, the next logical place to go is, of course, to talk about bees. Perfect. And in general, you know, this is a fine area of connection for an Egyptian god because the ancient Egyptians were particularly connected with the honeybee.
As biologist, author, and former guest on the show, Gene Kritsky points out in his excellent 2015 book, The Tears of Ray, the honeybee was a pervasive cultural motif in ancient Egypt, in large part because of their perceived connection to the sun god, Ray or Ra, whose very tears were said to be honeybees.
And on top of this, honey and other bee products like wax were prized and used for a variety of medicinal, culinary, religious, and economic purposes. So, again, that's the god Ra. And, you know, as we already alluded to in this episode, there are connections between Ra and Ra and Osiris. But you may be wondering, OK, are there any specific bee
be connections to Osiris. So I have Kritsky's book on the shelf here. So I picked it up and I consulted it once more to see what he had to say specifically about Osiris. So I'm going to run through just a few examples here. The book includes an image from the tomb of Usrat depicting the offering of honeycomb to Osiris. So this is Theban tomb, TT 56 in the Theban necropolis near Luxor, New Kingdom period, I believe.
He also has an example. He mentions the tomb of Minmos, which includes the passage, Osiris, beekeeper of Amun, bearer of incense, Minmos justified, possessor of honor before the great God. And this is from the 18th or 19th dynasty, I believe. Indirectly, the salt 825 papyrus includes a spell that involves using beeswax figures to, quote, kill the name of Seth.
In this case, used against Seth, but such figurines made out of wax, which rarely survived, were seemingly burnt in spells against mundane enemies as well. So you could use them against great cosmic entities like Seth, but you could also use them just, I guess, against your actual real-world enemies. Okay.
And Kritsky also includes some other mentions to support the idea that honey or honeycomb in particular, these were often used in temple rituals concerning gods, including the god Osiris. So are we going to talk about honeybees now? No, we are in fact going to talk about a genus of bee found only in Central and South America, so completely removed from ancient Egyptian culture, but still named after Osiris. Hmm.
So the genus Osiris is classified under the Osirini tribe, which in turn is classified under the family Apidae, which itself contains well over 5,000 species of bees. So I looked at a few different bee manuals on this. Ultimately, we're dealing with some bees here that are not as well researched, and we'll get into some of the reasons for that.
But as Charles Duncan Michener, this guy was one of the leading experts on bees of 1918 through 2015. He describes them in The Bees of the World, Volume 1 from 2000 as kleptoparasites, kleptoparasites.
They seem to have likely evolved independently of nabenidae, kleptoparasitic bees. And this is based on various features that they have that are also found in non-parasitic bees, which are absent in...
in other examples of kleptoparasitic bees. He points out that Osiris bees have relatively thin but smooth and shiny skins, you know, kind of like smooth, shiny exoskeletons and no protective spines, but they do have an enormous sting. And
And this will come back to some of the reasons for this as we proceed here. But he writes that, quote, parasites commonly have stronger stings than their non-parasitic relatives. There are exceptions to that rule, but by and large, you'll find that they put far more far more evolutionary energy is put into these kind of like offensive slash defensive weapons.
Hmm. I already have some thoughts about why that might be, but I bet you'll illuminate me. So the whole gist of kleptoparasites, as we've discussed in the show before, comes down to the laying of one species eggs in the nest of another species. And the classic example of this from the world of birds is, of course, the cuckoo bird. And here we're talking about so-called cuckoo bees. This is more specifically known as brood parasitism.
Another source I was looking at for this is a really nice write-up on the topic on the website Entomology Today by Meredith Sweet Walker. And it's interesting, as a former avian endocrinologist, she seems especially well-positioned to compare cuckoo birds to cuckoo bees. Hmm.
She points out that cuckoo bees are actually thought of more generally as social parasites as well because they generally have to infiltrate, or in some cases anyway, we'll get into the details here. In many cases, we're talking about bees that have to infiltrate an entire eusocial hive structure or nest structure in order to deposit their eggs. So they can't simply like
like sneak in, dump their egg and run and be like, hee hee, now you have to raise my young. There's a lot more involved here. Like they actually have to blend in with the hive. Right. And I don't want to discredit the complexity of cuckoo birds. As we've talked about on the show before, there's kind of like a mafia-esque situation involved there as well with like additional. So it's not just dump and run with cuckoo birds either. But the world of bees is different from the world of birds.
So she points out that in some species of bumblebee, we see and we're talking about non parasitic bumblebees here. We do see examples of nest usurpation in which one queen bust into the nest of another queen of her same species, kills that queen and takes over the brood. So this doesn't have to happen. It doesn't always happen. It only occurs under certain ecological conditions.
You could probably, you know, compare this broadly to things like cannibalism, where, you know, you have species that are not obligate cannibals by any stretch. But if conditions are right, they will engage in that behavior. Right. Obligate cannibalism is impossible. Right. Yeah. But you can have an adaptation that...
Where a certain type of animal is more inclined to resort to cannibalism if conditions are dire. Right, right. So here with brood parasitism, we do, on the other hand, have true kleptoparasite bees that are obligate brood parasites.
They have evolved to depend on the practice absolutely. Otherwise, they can't reproduce at all. And obviously, all of their efforts have to be aimed on another bee species. So that's sort of the origin story of how we kind of get to this area where we have obligate brood parasitic bees. Hmm.
So cuckoo bumblebees, she points out, can't produce their own workers. They lack pollen baskets on their legs. This prevents them from feeding their own offspring. And they also can't produce enough wax to build their own nests. So without those adaptations, you know, that kind of frees you up from like an evolutionary energy standpoint.
Where do they focus that extra energy? Well, they focus it into the blunt offensive power needed to conquer another brood. So we're talking busting in,
overpowering other workers, if workers are present, killing the rival queen, and then taking over the nest. And what do you need to carry this out? Well, in many cases, you need heavier armor to protect yourself, more powerful mandibles, and key to what we just said earlier, an enhanced stinger. But she stresses that target selection is also key here, because if they go after, if a cuckoo bumblebee goes after a nest that's too large,
the workers are just going to overpower her and kill her in self-defense.
And if the nest is too small, well, she may conquer it, but then there won't be enough of a workforce to serve her needs. So it's kind of a delicate balance. Interesting. But ultimately, the battle and the regicide here is only the first phase because afterwards, the conqueror has to be able to quickly de-escalate things and convince the colony that she's the rightful queen and that work can continue mostly as before.
And I guess you can easily...
anthropomorphize here and compare this to, you know, examples from like military history, like, okay, you're going to conquer a kingdom, but now what? Are you going to rule it? And what do you have to do in order to pull that off? Yeah, I guess there's some persuasion involved there. Right. And so in the world of bees, scent is absolutely key. With the interloper, the invader, the kleptoparasite, depending largely on one of two strategies, depending on species.
So one strategy is simply scent acquisition. So the cuckoo bees, bumblebees that use this method, they don't have much of a scent on their own. They're kind of like scent neutral, you know, stealth scent, I guess. And they just simply acquire the scent of the nest they've invaded via contact with workers and various nest materials. Okay, so there's stuff lying around that smells right. You can just kind of like rub yourself on all that and it'll be good enough. Right.
But the more advanced method here is actual scent mimicry. And this is a case where the cuckoo bumblebees in question actively mimic the chemical cues of the host species. Wow. I wonder what is the mechanism for doing that, being able to like sample a smell and then recreate it yourself? Yeah.
Yeah, or they have evolved over time to prey on a particular species or a particular suite of species, I'm guessing here. So yeah, it's interesting. Like in one case, either just simply acquiring the necessary scents to command the new environment, or you have evolved over time to be able to mimic the necessary chemical cues. In either case, it's fascinating manipulation.
of a eusocial environment. Yeah. ♪
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Now, Walker stressed that there's much that's not known about how these bees function. They're pretty understudied. For instance, it's assumed that workers continue to raise the alien larva because at this point, their resistance to outsiders in general has been lowered, but we just don't know for sure. And I feel like we might have touched on this before regarding the
regarding parasites in general, but she points out that one of the reasons that brood parasites, parasite bees are understudied in general is that we easily fall into making a kind of moral judgment about parasites. And so you often see people who study bees tending to gravitate towards non-parasitic species, even thinking of them as quote-unquote true bees. Yeah.
Sort of siding with the complex sort of eusocial civilization builders, and you don't want to side with the invaders, the thieves and the tyrants. Yeah, I'd go out on a limb and say these bees don't know any better. Yeah.
Yeah, there's, I mean, really, even, I mean, that's the thing about the, about even a eusocial, you know, beehive situation. There's no good or evil there. There is just, there is just life. There is just the, you know, the will of the hive.
But anyway, getting back to Osiris bees. And again, with the huge caveat that there's a lot we don't know and that in general, parasitic bees are understudied and Osiris bees as well. So Osiris bees are not bumblebees. So a lot of what I just said is not going to actually matter.
apply to what we're talking about here. So these bees are more wasp-like in appearance. I included a picture of one individual for you to look at below here, Joe, but anyone else out there, you can easily do a Google image search in their various entomology profile pages with images. They're generally pale, sometimes almost yellow or green,
And according to Sam Droge and Lawrence Packer in the book Bees, an up-close look at pollinators around the world, most of the time when an entomologist names something after a god from any mythology, they're basically just sort of showing off their knowledge of mythology. You know, just saying like you probably shouldn't read too
too much into the invocation of any god, much less Osiris in this case. But they do point out that the invocation of Osiris is perhaps kind of on point here, given the colorization. Because again, remember the green skin of Osiris.
And with Osiris bees, the skin is also reportedly often kind of this pale green or pale yellowish green color. I don't know that that's particularly present in the image that I included here for you, Joe. But still, I will value the connection here. Fair enough. I don't think I've ever seen a green looking bee. I'd like to see that.
Now, as we mentioned earlier, these Osiris bees also pack very large stingers. So I think that the species number I've seen for Osiris bees is something like 32, perhaps more than that, but not by a tremendous amount.
And as mentioned already and decided as well in Lawrence Packers Bees of the World, yeah, they have these oversized stingers, but they also don't have the extra armor associated with various like cuckoo bumblebees. So they're actually rather slim and smooth. So they're not just complete tanks anymore.
we might think of them a little differently, almost more like a sleek assassin with an oversized weapon. And indeed, that's how Packer kind of describes them. It's kind of a
an egg assassin or queen assassin. So they have the greatly oversized stinger that's curved, and even the abdomen harnessing the stinger is elongated, so it gives them extra reach. So you can kind of think of like a swordsman using a rapier, how they're able to lunge in and close the distance a lot more effectively. And he says that, quote, there is evidence that the sting is used to kill the host egg,
And in the book by Packer and Droge, they also point out that the adaptation could be primarily for dealing with the main nest document. They also stress, quote, almost nothing is known about the makeup of these nest parasites. But it's my understanding, based on the context of these descriptions and some details about the bees that they seem to target, that these are not large hives or nests that they're going after, but rather they're going after solitary ground nesting bees here.
Oh, OK. And thus they don't apparently have to protect themselves from a whole bunch of workers. It's not this full blown, you know, battle tank invasion like we see in some of these cuckoo bumblebees. Instead, it's like get in there, do what you got to do. Stab an egg that's already there. Kill the queen if she is already there and she messes with you. But that's the extent of it. The infiltrator model. Yeah.
Yeah. So, again, with this case, not a lot of connective tissue between Osiris, the god, and the thing named after Osiris. But, you know, now that we've talked about both Osiris Rex and Osiris B's connection,
I do see like some sort of loose similarities here. Like we talked about how the God Osiris is the opener of the way. You know, he's the he he goes somewhere in a sense that has never been visited before. He makes it possible for others to go there as well. You know, brings knowledge or, you know, it is one that journeys and.
And certainly with Osiris Rex, this lines up with some of this, you know, goes to a place that we have not explored before, makes certain things possible in the future that are even protective in nature. And I don't know, with the Osiris bees, you know, it's a little more...
If we're to, again, anthropomorphize recklessly, kind of sinister, but these are bees that open a way, that venture somewhere else and make life possible in a way that it wasn't possible before there, at least for their species.
I thought you were going to make the connection between the Osiris bees and Osiris rex because of the stinger and the sampling arm. There you go. I think there's a connection to be made there. Long stinger, long sampling arm. And we were comparing mosquitoes earlier, but we get into some of the particulars here and we're often talking about repurposed ovipositors and so forth. So, yeah, I think that's valid as well.
All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and close the book here again. There you'll find some other things named after Osiris. There are some exoplanets and asteroids, some individual craters that are named after Osiris, but, um, uh,
I feel like these were the most compelling examples to draw on for this episode. But if you disagree, if you have a particular favorite Osiris, or if you in your line of work or some line of work you're familiar with, there is another acronym involving or invoking Osiris or any other interesting Egyptian mythological figure right in. We would love to hear about it.
Huge.
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
so
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