Mobs of honeybees kill hornets by asphyxio-balling (2007)

If these things make it out of the region (To the Americas), we're in trouble. A handful of them can decimate a honeybee hive in a matter of hours. Western honeybee's have no chance.

Completely off-topic, but a relationship like this makes you really wonder how we got to where we are today, and if we aren't literally the only life in the universe. The fact these honeybees figured out they could swarm these hornets and kill them is almost unfathomable. And then to pass on the knowledge to others? Mother nature is frigging amazing.

tritium• 11 years ago

As eusocial creatures, the bees don't precisely "learn" this sort of thing, or pass information on by "teaching" other bees to coordinate this sort of behavior.

It's an instinctive reaction, deeply ingrained in the surviving lineage of the bees that react like that, because all of the others were culled against, and eaten voraciously.

With bees, the only creature that should be regarded as having any degree of agency is the queen, and all others are to be regarded as appendages. Flying, autonomous phantom limbs.

The behavior of the collective is guided by pheremones, and when sensed, the subjects of the queen must react reflexively to the varying scents of the hive. Failing to react appropriately to the ambient chemical signals of the hive, for bees, is like being born physically deformed or mentally handicapped for humans, and the unfit would not survive in the wild. The queen's colony must hold her aloft, as assuredly as our own legs must carry us over terrain, and our hands must pick food up and place it in our mouths.

This highly specific reaction to the giant wasps probably emerges the same way aversion or attraction to flavors and smells arise. Those that cannot taste a fatal poison, will mistakenly eat it and not reject tainted food.

The way these bees react to the hornets, without the use of stinging, and instead restraining their predator cooperatively, is probably driven by the smell of the hornets. I can't really fathom how a reaction like that works, but the hornet species must have killed so many bees, single-handedly, that they selectively bred the survivors capable of stopping them, sort of the same way we're inadvertently creating antibiotic resistant viruses.

roflmyeggo• 11 years ago

Amazing how quick the honey bees respond in unison to attack the hornet.

Even more amazing that the honey bee can withstand temperatures up to 118 degrees F, just 3 degrees higher than the hornet, and yet they still manage to use heat as a means of attack.

cperciva• 11 years ago

It wouldn't matter even if the bees could only survive lower temperatures than the hornet -- bees are expendable if it allows the hive to survive.

Mobs of honeybees kill hornets by asphyxio-balling (2007)

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