People think that bees are mostly hardworking creatures. They have a ha
People think that bees are mostly hardworking creatures. They have a hard time visiting flowers, giving people a sense of hard work and sweetness. However, recent studies have found that bees not only collect fragrant and sweet nectar, but also collect foul-smelling feces in some special cases!
Although human beings are not in a hurry to avoid excrement, in the world of bees, these excrement balls are like Spring Festival couplets at the door, which can drive away the annual beast of bees-wasps.
An Asian bee (Oriental bee) is biting a piece of feces. The original literature research team found in Vietnam that when the hive is threatened by wasps (note 1), the worker bees of Apis orientalis collect fresh feces, chew the feces into small balls and stick them at the entrance of the hive to resist the wasps (note 1).
Asian bee researchers whose doorsteps are covered with dung balls said that they had found many balls of unknown substances stuck at the entrance of the hive in many cooperative beekeeping farms before, but they never knew where these balls came from or what they were used for.
It was not until a beekeeper said that he saw these balls with his own eyes that the news aroused great interest of the research team and began to study.
Bees are actively collecting feces in the dunghill. First of all, the research team washed the feces particles with beehives in beekeeping places with water. 10 days later, they found that on average, about 74% of the hives had fecal particles again, and the research team named this phenomenon "fecal spots".
Fecal spots at the entrance to the hive. Original documents Then they found that all these places with feces are the sources for bees to collect feces, regardless of poultry farms, buffalo farms or human toilets.
When bees arrive at places with feces, they will take them away with their mouths (not as elegant as picking pollen with their feet, but with their mouths, which is really admirable! ) and chew into small balls and stick them near the entrance of the hive.
Worker bees are trying to take away chicken droppings with their mouthparts. Shadow/original literature enemy attack! Somebody, poop! When the research team knows the source of fecal spots, they want to know more about the use of fecal spots.
The researchers found that when the wasp approached the hive, if there were no dung spots in the hive, the worker bees would immediately collect the dung and stick it at the entrance of the hive. Even if the hive already has fecal spots, the number of fecal spots will increase.
So the researchers began to think, will fecal spots be one of the ways bees use to resist the yellow striped wasp?
Bees put droppings in their hives. Before the wasp attacks the hive, the sentry of the wasp will touch special chemicals near the entrance of the hive to mark the attack route for other wasps, and then a large number of wasps will invade the hive and destroy the entrance of the hive.
Therefore, the researchers applied this chemical to the entrance of the hive without feces spots to see if bees would collect feces.
The results show that fecal spots will appear immediately in the hive, and the number of fecal spots in the hive with fecal spots will increase, which is consistent with the results of real wasp visits.
Hurry up and poop! The wasp is coming! Shadow/Original Literature The deadly enemies of the yellow striped wasp and the Asian bee are the natural enemies of the bee. They have huge bodies, powerful jaws, reusable poison needles and an exoskeleton as hard as armor. When bees confront them head-on, they are petite and weak, like lambs to be slaughtered.
The yellow striped wasp's jaw is like a guillotine, which can easily tear and dismember bees, and their hard exoskeleton also makes the bee's poison needle useless.
This is a hive without fecal spots, and yellow striped wasps are biting and destroying the entrance of the hive. Shadow/Original Literature A yellow striped wasp can destroy thousands of bees, and a group of yellow striped wasps can easily disintegrate all the defense forces in the hive and seize the control of the hive in a few hours.
Next, the wasps with yellow stripes will begin to enjoy their trophies-high-protein bee larvae, and transport these trophies back to the hive to raise more wasps with yellow stripes.
Win with wisdom! Three ingenious strategies for bees to defend against the enemy Although the attack power of bees is not enough to confront the wasp, they are not just waiting to be slaughtered. They also developed some strategies against the enemy.
First of all, because the wasp is large, it needs to destroy the entrance of the hive before it can enter the slaughter. Therefore, bees usually design the entrance of the hive to be more concealed and firm, thus reducing the chance that the hive will be destroyed and invaded by wasps.
The entrance to the hive was vandalized by the yellow wasp. Another defense strategy in the original literature is mainly used by Asian bees. Because Asian bees are under great pressure from wasps, when wasps with yellow stripes appear, bees will warn the bees in the hive, and then the army of bees will rush to the entrance of the hive to prevent wasps with yellow stripes from destroying the hive. Furthermore, a large group of bees will cling to the yellow striped wasp and vibrate their bodies quickly to generate heat, thus making the yellow striped wasp heat.
This study shows that in addition to the above two defense methods, bees will also use feces against wasps with yellow stripes.
In the face of a hive with a lot of fecal spots, wasps have less contact time and will not bite the entrance of the hive. The host of this study said: Although there are many cases in nature in which feces are used to repel enemies, it is quite surprising to find that bees also use this method.
The follow-up observation of this study found that the frequency of being attacked by wasps with fecal spots would be greatly reduced, which significantly reduced the probability that the entrance of the hive was chewed by wasps with yellow stripes.
Therefore, fecal spot is really one of the effective strategies for bees to resist wasps with yellow stripes.
Unsolved mystery: Why are yellow-striped wasps afraid of poop? The research team currently speculates that there are two possibilities for feces to fight against yellow striped wasps:
The beehive is full of poop. Why don't wasps dare to come? We need further research to solve this question! The original literature, but no matter what speculation, still needs a lot of in-depth research to understand the defense mechanism of fecal spots.
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