October 24, 2024
3 min read
These Hornets Can Thrive on Just Alcohol without Getting Buzzed
Social wasps can hold their liquor
Three hornets feed on a ripe fig, which could provide naturally occurring ethanol.
An alcohol-only diet would throw most species for a loop, but new research suggests that hornets can live—apparently unimpaired—with an 80 percent ethanol sugar solution as their sole food source.
Fruit flies, tree shrews and many other animals naturally consume alcohol in fruits that ferment; this happens when yeast or certain bacteria are around to break down sugars in ripe fruit, creating small amounts of ethanol. Most animal species show signs of impairment or toxicity after consuming this substance at concentrations above 4 percent. But animal nutrition researcher Sofia Bouchebti, now at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, suspected that hornets and wasps might tolerate alcohol better—or even use it as a food source. After all, these insects’ gut is known to host yeast that converts fruit sugar to alcohol. When hornets or wasps pollinate and feed, some of this yeast rubs off onto plants and their fruits—playing a key role in the fermentation process.
Bouchebti turned her attention to the hornet Vespa orientalis, a type of social wasp. In a study this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, she and her colleagues at Tel Aviv University fed both hornets and honeybees sugar solutions containing 0 to 80 percent ethanol with a trackable carbon isotope. The researchers found that hornets’ exhaled breath contained up to 300 percent more labeled carbon than the honeybees’, suggesting the hornets’ bodies broke down the alcohol that much faster.
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