We got a glimpse of talking trees in The Hobbit series movies … remember those wise forest giants, the Ents? As far as we know, trees don’t talk in real life, but apparently, they can make music. Artist and engineer Bartholomaus Traubeck noted that the rings on a cross-section of a tree closely resemble the grooves on a vinyl record. With that in mind, he developed a record player that plays tree slices instead of vinyl, resulting in different melodies for trees of different ages and species. Listen to one of his eerie-but-beautiful compositions:

The natural world is abuzz with beauty as flowers begin blooming

and bees begin …

well, buzzing.

You know the sound, right?

It stirs thoughts of lush gardens on warm summer afternoons …

Photo by Counselling via Pixabay

But did you know that some bees’ vivacious vibrations are more than simply the beating of wings as they move from flower to flower?

Yup. When it comes to the big, beautiful bumble bee, “buzz” is the sound of pollination in progress.

Photo by P7r7 via Wikimedia Commons

This is yet another little bit of magic that happens right under our noses, and the Smithsonian Channel managed to capture some fabulous bee’s-eye footage of the bumble at work: