Honeybees Wing-Slap Ants That Try to Invade Their Hive
Japanese honeybees use their wings to slap back ants trying to invade their hive
When a hungry ant approaches a honeybee hive, the residents are ready. They sting, bite or even buzz their wings to create air currents that repel the intruder. But a new study shows that honeybees from a species native to Japan have developed a unique defensive strategy: slapping. These bees actually smack invading ants with their wings, like tiny buzzing brawlers.
A bee’s neat, precise wing-slap “reminds you of someone that really delivers a perfect hit on the golf ball,” says Gro Amdam, a biologist at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the study. “That’s really beautiful.”
Beekeepers had anecdotally observed this behavior among Japanese honeybees (Apis cerana japonica), but no one had done a scientific analysis. So the researchers who conducted the new study used a high-speed camera to film Japanese pavement ants (Tetramorium tsushimae) invading a hive. When the ants approached, the honeybees elegantly wing-slapped them by “tilting their bodies toward the ants, then flapping their wings while simultaneously turning their bodies,” the researchers wrote in the study, published this month in Ecology.
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“When I observed wing-slapping with the naked eye, I couldn’t understand the details of the behavior because it was so quick,” says study co-author Kiyohito Morii, a…
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