Beakman’s World - Season 1 Episode 24

Addressing a question about bees, Beakman explains that a beehive is a highly organized colony with each of its 50,000 members having a specific purpose, while sharing a common goal and function. Identifying the members as workers, drones and queens, Beakman notes that bees make honey after gathering nectar and pollen from flowers. Demonstrating how a pair of stomachs work together to create honey, he then tells his queasy colleagues that the sweet sticky substance is actually bee vomit. After noting that bees die after losing their stingers, Beakman concludes by describing how they communicate through a series of dances. In "Beak-Mania," Beakman reveals that lightning can strike in the same place (and even the same person!) more than once, the number of taste buds on the human tongue (ten thousand), and that penguins have been around for about forty million years. Asked to make a piece of paper stay up on a wall using only a pencil, Lester tries and fails to meet the "Beakman Challenge." So, rubbing the paper with the pencil to charge it with static electricity, Beakman shows that it is a relatively simple task once you know how. In response to an inquiry about earthquakes, Beakman begins by describing how the Earth is composed of a series of layers that, near its surface; move around as fifteen huge plates. Revealing the motion of the plates as a source of earthquakes, Beakman notes that there are as many as a million tremors a day around the globe. Then, with the aid of a seismograph, an instrument which detects even the slightest movement on the Earth's surface, Beakman describes how the famous San Andreas fault is caused by the motion of the North American and Pacific plates.