When ants try to invade their nest, Japanese honeybees flutter their wings and tilt their bodies to beat away their enemies
Ants often invade honeybee nests, seeking to steal honey, prey on eggs or kill worker bees. In defence, bees have been known to fan their wings to blow ants away. Now, researchers have documented making contact with their wings and physically batting ants out of the hive, a behaviour that hasn’t been studied before.
Footage from a high-speed camera shows that guard bees, positioned near a nest’s entrance, tilt their bodies towards approaching ants and flutter their wings while pivoting away. A successful hit sends the ant flying.all at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan, introduced three local species of ants to the entrance of two Japanese honeybee (Sign up to newsletter
In most of these interactions, the bees smacked at ants with their wings. But the defence didn’t always work. For Japanese queenless ants (Ants vary in their level of menace to bees: some species bite or kill workers, while others are less of a threat. Bees may have evolved to favour the fanning defence to avoid making contact with the more dangerous ants, but wing-slapping may be a more efficient option against other species, the researchers suggest.
They hope to investigate this idea by mapping bee responses against ant aggression. The team also plans to study how bees’ interactions with ants change over time and whether they improve at wing-slapping with more experience. “These defensive behaviours still hold many mysteries,” says Morii.
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