Ants that beat the wings of bees attempt to invade the hive.
Japanese honeybees use their wings to swat away ants that try to invade their hive.
A Japanese honeybee attacks ants that invade its hive by swatting them away with its wings.
“Wing beats: a defensive behavior of honeybees against ants”, Yugo Seko et al., Ecology, article no. e4372. Published online 8 July 2024 (Copyright: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
When hungry ants approach a hive, the residents are prepared. They sting, bite, or even buzz their wings to create air currents that ward off the intruder. But a new study shows that a species of honeybee native to Japan has developed a unique defensive strategy: swatting. These Bees swat intruding ants with their wings.It’s like a little, buzzing fighter.
The bees’ clean, precise wing beats “reminiscent of someone hitting a golf ball perfectly,” says Gro Amdam, a biologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study. “It’s beautiful.”
Beekeepers have anecdotally observed this behavior among Japanese honeybees.Apis serana japonica), but no one had done a scientific analysis. So the researchers who conducted the new study used high-speed cameras to film Japanese pavement ants (Tetramorium Tsushimae) Invading a hive. As the ants approached, the bees elegantly flapped their wings, “leaning their bodies toward the ants, then simultaneously fluttering their wings and turning their bodies,” the researchers wrote in a study published this month. ecology.
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“When I observed the wing beats with my own eyes, I couldn’t understand the details of the behavior because it was so fast,” says study co-author Kiyohito Morii, a researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies. “When I watched the high-speed camera footage, I finally realized … that the bees were aiming precisely and were hitting the ants beautifully.”
To understand how effective this defense is against different types of ants, the researchers released three common local species of ants near two honeybee colonies. “We observed a lot of interesting and amusing scenes, including wing-beating failures,” says Morii. Sometimes wing-beating fails, like a baseball player’s bat missing a ball.
The team found that the most common strategy used by bees against ants was wing-beating. The small strikes were successful in two to three attempts for two of the ant species studied (including pavement ants), but were less effective when larger, faster species were involved.
Amdam says the study raises many questions, such as how widespread this behavior is, whether it is innate or learned and spread through culture. “I think there are a lot of interesting questions that can be asked in this article, depending on what field you’re in,” she says.
Morii says wing-beating behavior may be widespread among other bee species, such as those that nest in cavities with limited entrances. But “this is just speculation, and more research is needed to verify this,” he says. “Right now, very little is known.”
