Foreign turret bees is violent and unfair.

It’s spring in California and these male bees are in an all-out brawl, desperate to mate with the female trapped at the bottom of this pile.

Sometimes the fight is so intense that the female they’re going after gets crushed to death.

But if she survives, she and the winner steal away and mate until another male wants in buzz kill.

Now she starts an epic dig, prepping a place to lay her eggs Underground, tirelessly Scoops Earth with her mandibles, dousing it with nectar she collected earlier to soften it.

The majority of the world’s bee species, 70 percent, nest in the grout.

These ones chose a dirt parking lot.

Some nice folks cordoned it off to protect the bees.

Females work side by side.

Each is Queen of her own funky little castle.

They build turrets, but only some of them are vertical.

Many are kind of like with a sideways entrance.

Others curve down.

See why that’s important.

Once the bees are done digging, they head off on another mission.

They gather pollen from one plant only morning glories, also known as bind weeds.

She rubs her Shaggy legs all over that pollen down.

She goes with her haul ing pants foreign into neat balls, each one in its own chamber, and lays an egg on top.

When the egg hatches into a larva, it will live off the pollen.

As she toils, freeloaders show up.

They look like a bee, but their huge eyes give them away.

They’re called: wait for it be flies.

The fly doesn’t dig or gather pollen for her young.

She just hovers over a bee’s nest and yep, she’s dropping her own eggs in there.

She’ll drop 200 eggs over her lifetime.

This is where those tunnels and curved turrets are useful.

They may get harder for the flies to drop their eggs in from the air, but when the fly does succeed, wising hatches into a larva that digs tiny hooks into the bee larva.

As the bee eats the pollen and grows the fly, larva sucks it dry.

Sometimes.

The Flies are so successful they can nearly wipe out a population of beads, but these bees don’t give up.

Two or three months of mating, foraging and warding off parasites come to an end when they seal up their nests with dirt below ground.

Babies will grow following spring.

If the bee bees are lucky, a new tiny City will burst to life full of bees persevering just as their mothers did before them.

Let’s talk about yellow jackets.

It’s true these ladies have a special taste for flesh, but they don’t eat it themselves, they bring it to their young.

How, by crashing your cookout and carving your burgers and dogs into teeny, tiny meatballs, enjoy foreign.