Honeybees defend their nest by swatting at invading ants.

Honeybees use their wings to swat at ants trying to invade their hive

By Gennaro Toma

When hungry ants approach a beehive, the hive’s inhabitants are ready: They sting, bite, and buzz their wings to create air currents to scare the intruders away. But a new study shows that native Japanese honeybees have developed a unique defense strategy: swatting. Like little buzzing brawlers, these bees swat invading ants with their wings.

The neat, precise bee wing beats “remind me of someone hitting a golf ball perfectly,” says Arizona State University biologist Gro Amdam, who was not involved in the study. “It’s really beautiful.”

Beekeepers have observed this behavior anecdotally among Japanese honeybees (Honeybees), but no one had done a scientific analysis. So in the new study, researchers used high-speed cameras to record the movements of road ants in Japan.Tsushima long-tailed tit When an ant approached, the bee “tilted its body toward the ant and simultaneously rotated its body and flapped its wings,” gracefully sending the ant flying, the researchers wrote in a paper published this month. Ecology.

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“When we observed the wing-beating behavior with the naked eye, it was so fast that we couldn’t understand the details of the behavior,” said Kiyoto Morii, a researcher at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan and co-author of the study. “After watching the high-speed camera footage, we finally realized that the bees were aiming precisely and swatting the ants with great force.”

To understand how effective this defense was against different kinds of ants, the researchers released three common local ant species near two honeybee colonies. “We observed a lot of interesting and amusing scenes, such as when the wing-beating action went wrong,” Morii says. Just like a baseball player’s bat can miss the ball, a wing-beating action can go awry.

The team found that the honeybees’ most common strategy against ants was to beat their wings — a small blow that was successful about once every two or three tries against the two ant species they studied (including the swarm ant), but was less effective against larger, more agile ants.

Amdam says the study raises a lot of questions, including how widespread this behavior is and whether it’s innate or learned through culture. “I think this article raises a lot of interesting questions depending on what field you’re in,” she says.

Morii says the wing-beating behavior may be widespread in other honeybee species, such as those that build nests in cavities with limited access. But “this is just a guess, and more research is needed to confirm it,” Morii says. “At this point, we know very little.”