She pushes as hard as she can. She sticks her head out and throws her round, hairy body into battle. The blue block slowly moves backwards, so that the way is clear. Now the red block. She pushes. And pushes. And pushes. Until the turntable with the opening in which she walks is exactly above the container with sugar water and she falls into it. A mechanism like the adjustable sprinkling openings of a salt shaker. Cracked by a bee.
Fifteen minutes ago she saw someone else doing this job for the first time. And purely by observing that behavior, she can now do it too. “Bees have incredible intelligence,” says American bee researcher Samuel Ramsey (37). “They play, they use tools, they learn and can think problem-solving. They are much more complex organisms than people think.”
Back in the day, when he was growing up in Maryland, he spoke of insects with a lot less admiration. “If you don’t understand them, they are terrifying creatures,” says Ramsey in Amsterdam, where he is presenting the National Geographic series Secrets of the Beeson which he contributed. As a child he was terrified of them. “An armed butt is just scary. And then those jaws that move in the wrong direction.” He moves his hands in front of his mouth from left to right.
At the age of seven I knew for sure that I wanted to become an entomologist
To get rid of his fear, his parents took him to the local library, where he says he read every available book about insects in one summer. “At the age of seven I knew for sure that I wanted to become an entomologist.”
The fact that he ended up with more than a million described insects among the bees was a coincidence. While he was already well on his way with his PhD research into stink bugs, he suddenly had to stop. “My supervisor said that something in me did not match what a researcher should be and sent me away with the message that I was not worthy of a promotion.” He was at home for nine months, during which time he learned Thai – “because that language sounds so beautiful and everyone should speak more than one language” – and in the meantime looked for a new lab. “The only professor who wanted to take me in as a ‘refugee’ student was the bee researcher and that’s how it started.”
Ramsey now runs his own lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. Here he and his colleagues conduct research into several of the 20,000 bee species. From vulture bees to bumblebees. But he does most of his work with the western honey bee.
Science communication is an important part of his work. He makes videos for his YouTube channel and Instagram and performs as a singing entomologist. So he made a “goofy version” of the love song that cicadas produce to attract a mate. And he worked for two years on the Secrets of the Bees-series. “If a message is not catchy, people will not remember it.”
Melipona beecheii, a stingless bee, in a beehive.
Ramsey collects bee larvae and parasites.
Photos Nadege Laici/National Geographic
According to him, this attention is desperately needed, because bees are doing badly worldwide, both wild bees and bee colonies at beekeepers. The decline of these pollinators not only affects nature, but also global food production; bees pollinate the vast majority of our vegetables, fruits and nuts. In the Netherlands 22 percent of the bee colonies did not survive the winter of 2024-2025. That is more than double the 10 percent that scientists see as natural mortality. In America it was even more dramatic. “Last year we lost more honeybees than ever,” says Ramsey. “More than 60 percent of the colonies died in one year.”
The main culprit? The varroa mite.
“Suppose there are several parasites the size of a hand on your body,” he says. “And that they don’t drain some blood, but liquefy your liver and slowly absorb it?” It is one of the entomologist’s most important discoveries: the varroa mite does not feed on blood, but on the fat body of beesan organ similar to the liver. Specifically, the parasite sucks up vitellogenin, a protein it uses for its eggs. But bees also need the protein to form egg cells and it plays an important role in their defense. That is what makes the mite so deadly.
According to Ramsey, this discovery requires a new control approach. “For decades we have been pumping more and more chemicals into nature, without sufficient effect.” There is now great resistance among mites. According to the entomologist, we must ensure that the mite cannot use the vitellogenin.
In an unpublished article, he describes how the protein goes from the mite’s digestive system to its eggs. “The mite needs various transport proteins for this route. My goal is to ensure that the RNA that codes for these transport proteins can no longer be read. Then the mite will no longer be able to produce eggs and the population will slowly disappear.”
It hasn’t gotten that far yet. And in the meantime, Ramsey is also looking for other solutions. In his lab he conducts research into bees that found a way to get rid of the mites. They come from a genetics lab that, by crossing resistant specimens, has created an increasingly resistant honey bee. “They are actually very grumpy, oversensitive bees that preen themselves as soon as they feel something on their body.” Much more often than their non-resistant counterparts.
This resistance also occurs in nature among species that have evolved together with the mite. Asia is the only continent where all eleven honey bee species occur. The varroa mite originally comes from there. For his Honey Bee-nome project, Ramsey wants to map the DNA and RNA of all species to see which resistant genes they have and which viruses travel with them. Together with his students and local experts, the biologist collects bees from nests in the most inaccessible places: from treetops to volcanoes.
Ramsey with a honey bee comb.
Honeybees during a study of their interaction with the varroa mite.
Photos Nadege Laici/National Geographic
Actually, he was going to collect the last species this year; an expedition to Vietnam and Borneo was already planned. But while walking with his friend he broke his leg and now the project is delayed by a year. “I wanted to be as tough as him and jump off a cliff. And then I heard my own bone snap. I was lucky my friend could carry me back.”
With CRISPR, a technique for very precisely editing DNA, he hopes to ultimately transfer the resistant genes of wild honey bees to honey bees in the US. “Of course that is not something we are just going to do, but I think it is the best solution.”
All that knowledge is only useful if beekeepers also use it. And that requires trust. The corona pandemic made it clear to Ramsey that scientists still have a lot of work to do in that area. “We proclaimed: listen to us, we know how to prevent yourself from dying. And yet people preferred to get their advice from self-proclaimed experts on TikTok.” By regularly talking to beekeepers about his research, he hopes to gain trust for new treatment methods such as CRISPR.
And according to him, we will only solve this bee problem if everyone cooperates. “A beekeeper who does not treat his colony against varroa is not only infecting his own bees.” The mites travel with foraging bees and infect colonies of neighbors who do take good care of their animals, he explains. “I am my brother’s beekeeper,” says Ramsey, who grew up in a strict Christian environment.
But varroa may not even be the greatest danger to the western honey bee. Tropilaelaps mercedesae is advancing, or the tropical mite. “They reproduce very quickly, but I don’t think we know the real reason why they are so dangerous yet. We know almost nothing,” says Ramsey. “For decades we ignored it because it seemed to only be able to reproduce in tropical climates in Southeast Asia.” That turned out to be a misconception. The mite has now appeared in Russia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. A publication earlier this year shows that swarming bees can carry the mite to new colonies, even in temperate climates. “Weird,” he calls it. “For a long time we thought that bread was the only way to survive [door bijen gefermenteerd stuifmeel, opgeslagen in raten] needed.”
Tropi is knocking on our door, but we are completely unprepared
Late last year intercepted by US Customs a swarm of giant honey bees on a freighter from South Asia outside the port of New Jersey. The bees were carrying live tropical mites after two weeks on the open sea.
According to Ramsey, there is another problem underlying this. “We tend to ignore problems as long as they occur in countries that we label as ‘developing countries’. Only when they affect a major Western economy do we see it as a problem.” With the tropimite, he says, we are making exactly the same mistakes as we did with varroa. “Tropi is knocking on our door, but we are completely unprepared.”
Still, he remains hopeful. “The group of scientists who study bees is more diverse than ever. Diverse ecosystems are the healthiest ecosystems. Diverse research groups are the best at solving problems.” Ramsey sees himself as a champion of justice, equality, diversity and inclusion. For a long time, as a gay black man, he had to adapt everywhere. “I was too gay for the Christians and too Christian for the gays,” he said about that earlier. “And many scientists thought that black boy with dreadlocks had nothing to contribute.”
Now that he runs a lab himself, he sees it as a task to keep the door open for other “odd kids”. He quotes his favorite scene from the documentary. A swarm of bees in the rain keeps rotating so that the core always stays warm, while the outer rows brave the cold. “Bees’ ability to trust each other has made them one of the most successful organisms on earth. We humans can learn so much from that.”
