National Geographic magazine, May 2026 Issue

The hidden genius of bees. National Geographic stories take you on a journey that's always enlightening, often surprising and unfailingly fascinating. This month–discovering the secrets of the bees..

In this issue: Secrets of the bees: Revealing the sneaky genius of nature's brightest thinkers — New science is showing that nature’s vital pollinators are smarter than we ever imagined. Here’s why that discovery should change what we think about one of the world’s most important animals.; The wild ride of New York’s stuntiest bikers — Who says you can’t surf atop a bicycle?; Inside Mohenjo Daro, the 5,000-year-old metropolis frozen in time — At the height of the Bronze Age, the ancient city of Mohenjo Daro, in modern-day Pakistan, emerged as one of the world’s most advanced urban marvels. Can its secrets finally be unearthed?; This is the World’s Largest Overland Migration. Can it Be Saved? — Each year around this time, an unfathomable parade of antelope travels across South Sudan. Now, after decades of war, the grandeur of the once hidden migration is being revealed—as well as its fragility.; Can the Aral Sea be reborn? — A generation ago, the vanishing of the Aral Sea became global shorthand for environmental desolation. Today the region has become a test bed for a resilient future.; Why do we make robots look like humans? — Inside the enduring appeal of machines that look, move, and increasingly think like humans.; Nat Geo Explorer Cristian Lagger is exploring some of Earth’s coldest places — Thousands of feet below the surface, the Antarctic seafloor is a time machine to another realm. Here’s how one scientist brings back lessons from the deep.; Capturing one of humanity’s first voyages into the heavens — How National Geographic’s first staff artist meticulously chronicled a record-breaking ascent—with watercolor paint.; The global hunt to unlock the healing powers of … poop — Scientists have discovered that gut-born bacteria may hold the secret for treatments of everything from IBD to Parkinson’s disease. Now they just need samples from the people living in the most isolated, nonindustrialized places on Earth. It’s a messy process, for many reasons.