This is the conclusion of researchers, who have shown for the first time that wild bees use tools – admittedly very remarkable.
The life of honeybees in Vietnam is not about roses. For example, the bees have a lot to fear Vespa soror, a relative of the well-known Asian giant hornet: the largest hornaar on earth. V. soror is a hornet, also common in Asia, who seems to make it a sport to invade and rob the bee colonies. Violence is not avoided; the hornet kills the adult bees and then takes the larvae and pupae to feed to its own brood.
Poo at the door
It’s a grim story. But whoever thinks that the honeybees will give up is wrong. The bees have found a somewhat disgusting way to scare off the hornets and thus save the body, so is the leaf PLOS One to read.
In the magazine, researchers make the University of Guelph Asian honey bees are known to deliberately smear other animals’ poo around the entrance to their enclosure. And that works.
Honeybees provide the entrance to their nest with dung. Image: Heather Mattila / Wellesley College.
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Buffalo dung
Researcher Gard Otis discovered the remarkable bee habit when he noticed that dark spots were often visible around the entrance to the nests of Vietnamese bees. He made some inquiries with local beekeepers who told him that it was buffalo dung and that they suspected that the bees used the dung to keep hornets out. Otis’s interest was aroused and he decided to investigate it further through a number of experiments.
Experiments
Gard and colleagues collected manure from water buffaloes, chickens, pigs and cows and placed it in heaps near an apiary. Then they watched what happened. During one day, the dung piles were visited by about 150 bees. The bees were tagged for the researchers to track. Cameras set up at the bees’ nests saw the bees return home not much later, where the bees carefully applied the collected manure around the entrance to the nest. According to the researchers, it is the first time that wild honey bees have also been shown to use tools. And in the form of someone else’s poo (see box).
You will not hear researchers conclude very quickly that an animal uses tools. That conclusion can only be drawn if a number of criteria have been met. For example, the animal must use an object from its environment. And also clearly hold and manipulate the tool or use it to change something about his situation. According to Gard and colleagues, the Asian honey bees meet both criteria. They collect other people’s poo. And once they arrive at their nest, they form the poo with their mouth parts and then ‘stick’ it around the entrance to their nest.
Applying the manure also seemed to work. The hornets spent significantly less time at the entrance to bee nests heavily decorated with dung. They were also much less likely to attack bee nests that had been provided with a lot of fertilizer. The fact that the hornet is also the reason that the Asian honey bees are busy with the dung is further confirmed by a second experiment. The researchers collected pheromones that deposit the hornets on bee nests that they want to raid and smeared them on the entrance of bee nests. It encouraged the inhabitants of the nests to collect and apply manure.
Hornets – especially the Asian giant hornet – have been in the news regularly in recent years as they expand their habitat. For example, the Asian giant hornet can also be found in North America today. According to researchers, it is quite possible that the giant hornets will also bother American honey bees in the long term. And unlike their Vietnamese counterparts, they won’t be able to defend themselves with shit. “They have not had the opportunity to evolve a defense,” said researcher Heather Mattila.
Why the hornets in Vietnam are so disgusted with the manure-infested bee nests, the researchers are not yet fully clear. The hornets may just find it smelly (experiments have shown that the bees prefer strong smelling manure from, for example, pigs). Another possibility is that the smell of the manure may mask the odor produced by the bees themselves, making it less easy for the hornets to find the bees’ nests.
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