Bees Paint Animal Poo on Their Homes to Repel Giant Hornets:
Insects don't come much cuter than the humble honey bee. Those fetching stripes, the "waggle" dance they do to tell each other where they've found nom-noms, that thing where they smear buffalo crap all over their hives.
Excuse me—the more scientific term is dung. But whatever you call it, the fact remains that the Asian honey bee species Apis cerana flies around collecting bird and water buffalo poo not with its hind legs, like it does with pollen, but with its mouth. Back at the colony, it applies the dung as "spots" around the entrance to the hive. That might seem like bad housekeeping, but scientists just showed that there's a brilliant method to this scatological madness: Heavily spotted colonies repel the bees' archenemy, the giant hornet Vespa soror, a close cousin of the infamous Vespamandarina or Asian giant hornet (colloquially dubbed the "murder hornet") that's invaded the US.
If you knew what Vespa soror was capable of, you might not be so quick to judge these bees. At nearly an inch and a half long, the hornet wields massive mandibles that quickly guillotine Asian honey bees, which are about a quarter of its size. When one of them finds a nest, it slices up any workers that mount a defense and releases pheromones that tag the colony for its compatriots to find. Soon, reinforcements swoop in, the formidable air force gnawing at the small opening of the nest to fit their outsized bodies through.
Once they're in, it's like a human army breaching a castle's walls: Things are going to go downhill quick. The hornets snag the honey bee larvae and carry them off to their own nest to feed to their young. "They're hunters, so this is like a bonanza for them," says Wellesley College biologist Heather Mattila, lead author on a new paper in PLOS One describing the insect war. The bees that survive end up retreating, knowing they're now powerless to stop the looting. "The poor Asian honey bees, they are just plagued by a suite of really relentless hornets," says Mattila.
[...] Working with Asian honey bee hives in Vietnam, the team first of all had to collect dung from pigs, chickens, cows, and water buffalo. (Because: science.) They placed the material near an apiary and snagged the bees that came to collect it, painting the foragers so they could track them once they returned to their hives. Because the researchers were working with multiple hives with varying intensities of spotting around the entrances—they classified them as light, moderate, and heavy—they could actually quantify the effectiveness of the defense.
"The dung spotting around the entrances greatly reduces the time that the hornet spends landed at the entrance and really reduces the amount of time that they're chewing on those entrances," says Mattila. In fact, they found that the giant hornets spent a whopping 94 percent less time on highly spotted hives than on control hives. "They can still be outside, hunting individual bees and carrying them away, but they're not able to execute that next step, which is the really lethal step of getting into the colony," she says.
Furthermore, the team confirmed that the bees dung-spot the entrances to their hives in response to the presence of the giant hornets. When they exposed colonies to the pheromones that the giant hornet uses to mark hives for attack, the bees performed more spotting than at a control hive where the bees were not exposed to the hormone. In other words, it's not that the bees like decorating their homes with animal dung, which hornets just happen to hate—this appears to be a deliberate, reactive countermeasure, and it works very well to ward off a coordinated attack by the hornet menace.
Journal Reference:
Heather R. Mattila, Gard W. Otis, Lien T. P. Nguyen, et al. Honey bees (Apis cerana) use animal feces as a tool to defend colonies against group attack by giant hornets (Vespa soror), PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242668)
(Score: 3, Funny) by pvanhoof on Thursday December 10 2020, @02:25PM
Is soylent poo for Giant Hornets. Maybe we can extract what the Hornets dislike about the poo, extract it and then beekeepers can smear it all over their beehives.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2020, @03:56PM (2 children)
Passover ritual for the Caca-bees.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2020, @04:06PM
Don't tell Trump. He'll be smearing poo all over the the Whitehouse. Never mind, it's too late.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @12:06AM
See and I thought that the first day of Hanukkah [wikipedia.org] was a perfect time to post a sly reference to the Maccabees [wikipedia.org].
I guess some folks regard sheeps blood as being holier than animal droppings, although both materials were designed by the same deity, if you listen to what the Maccabees profess.
Don't forget, the sound of Passover is "Whoosh!".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2020, @07:19PM (1 child)
I hate how we're just going to let the invasion happen, forcing us to switch to breeds of bees that play in shit. Ew, on my food? I'm switching to maple syrup.
We could trivially stop this, but environmental fears are going to mess up the environment all across North America and South America. We just need to douse 10,000 square miles with Sevin and neonicotinoids, soaking them from weekly aircraft flights for a few months. Temporarily messing up 10,000 square miles to save 16,000,000 square miles is a very good deal, and we should take it. That's a 1600 to 1 ratio, and it's not even a nuke.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @03:14PM
That always works.
Slash and burn - see outgoing recent President for example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2020, @08:23PM
SoylentNews has used shitposting to keep Giant Hornets and Rational Discussion from breaking into it, for years now! One of the most effective Soylentil with a mouth full of shit is our own Busy Bee, Runaway1956. More of a Russian Bee, than an Asiatic Bee, but same strategy.