bees
razib | July 5, 2009Many of you might have seen this video of Japanese bees defending their nest against giant hornets:
The Japanese bees swarm and bake the giant hornets. But Ed Young reports that there is more to this story.
edyong | July 5, 2009
Earlier today, I published a post on how Japanese honeybees defend themselves from hornets with a mass defence that relies on heat and carbon dioxide. This article was originally written two years ago, and describes the slightly different tactic of Cyprian honeybees.
When Oriental hornets attack, Cyprian honeybees mob them in a huge ball that targets the breathing apparatus in the hornet's abdomen. The hornets can't breathe without expanding their abdomens and with sheer numbers, the bees strangle the hornets to death.
Hornets are giant wasps that pack a powerful sting. To most people,…
edyong | July 5, 2009Rising temperatures and high carbon dioxide emissions are the means through which humans are inadvertently causing the decline of several species. But one animal actively uses both heat and carbon dioxide as murderous weapons - the unassuming honeybee.
With their stings and numbers, bees already seem to be well-defended but they are completely outgunned by giant hornets (right). These two-inch long monsters are three times longer than several times heavier than tiny honeybees and raiding parties can decimate entire hives. European bees mount little in the way of an effective defence, but…
edyong | June 18, 2009
Social insects like ants, bees and wasps are some of the most successful animals on the planet. By acting as large super-organisms, they can achieve things that larger singular creatures cannot.
Their astounding selflessness is driven by an unusual way of handing down their genes, which means that females actually have more genes in common with their sisters than they do with their own daughters. And that makes them more likely to put the good of their colony sisters over their own reproductive legacy.
The more related the workers are to each other, the more willing they will be to co-…
edyong | June 1, 2009Chimps are known to make a variety of tools to aid their quest for food, including fishing sticks to probe for termites, hammers to crack nuts and even spears to impale bushbabies. But a taste for honey has driven one group of chimps in Gabon's Loango National Park to take tool-making to a new level.
To fulfil their sweet tooth, the chimps need to infiltrate and steal from bee nests, either in trees or underground. To do that, they use a toolkit of up to five different implements: thin perforators to probe for the nests; blunt, heavy pounders to break inside; lever-like enlargers to widen…
stoat | May 31, 2009The good beekeper keeps a close eye on his or her bees, carefully checks the weight of the hive during the winter to make sure they aren't starving, and pays particular attention during May for 'tis the season to be swarming. It will come as no great surprise to my readers that I don't fit this category: my bees mostly look after themseleves at the bottom of the garden with minimal attention from me. But come the end of the Rape season, which is just about now, the honey has to be taken off before it sets solid in the hives. So I borrowed my jacket back off Nikola and set to removing the…
edyong | May 14, 2009Many plants depend so heavily on visits from bees that they go to great lengths to attract them, using brightly coloured flowers baited with sweet nectar. But some of their tricks are much subtler and are designed not to attract six-legged visitors, but to make their stay more convenient.
The majority of flowering plants have evolved special conical cells that line the surface of their petals and are found nowhere else. These cells provide the flower with a rougher texture that is indistinguishable to human fingers, but that provide just enough purchase for the claws of landing insects.…
awild | April 29, 2009Seriously, is there a name for the disorder whereby people think everything with wings is a honeybee?
stoat | March 15, 2009 Although I can't really be sure if they are new this year or overwintered. See one of them has orange legs - this is a good sign - bringing pollen back in.
Today was a lovely warm still sunny day in Cambridge and environs, and at this time of year a middle-aged mans thoughts turn to the jungle at the end of the garden, and how he really ought to make some effort to tame it. So I boldly set out and hacked a path through; it is now possible to get down to Bin Brook for the first time in... quite a while. The Cambridge Preservation Society have been busy tidying up on the other side (the lane…
awild | March 5, 2009This photo was ultimately rejected for a journal cover (it was the wrong shape!) but I shot it to accompany a research article that used museum specimens of midwestern bumblebees to compare current levels of genetic diversity with previous decades. Since this image won't appear in print anytime soon, I thought I'd share it here instead.
photo details: Canon 35mm f2.0 prime lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 200, 1/125 sec, f/5, indirect strobe
awild | February 8, 2009From David Attenborough's brilliant Life in the Undergrowth:
Incidentally, Ed Yong's interview with Sir David is worth reading.
edyong | January 17, 2009
Bee hives, with their regularly arranged honeycombs and permanently busy workers may seem like the picture of order. But look closer, and hives are often abuzz with secret codes, eavesdropping spies and deadly alliances.
African honeybees are victimised by the parasitic small hive beetle. The beetles move through beehives eating combs, stealing honey and generally making a mess. But at worst, they are a minor pest, for the bees have a way of dealing with them.
They imprison the intruders in the bowels of the hive and carefully remove any eggs they find. In turn, the beetle sometimes fools…
edyong | December 22, 2008The relationship between bees and plants is one of the most well-known in the natural world. Almost everyone knows that bees carry pollen from plant to plant and receive a rewarding sip of sugary nectar in return. Surely there are few sides to this most familiar of alliances left to discover?
Not so. Jurgen Tautz and Michael Rostas from the University of Wuerzburg have found that bees provide another service to flowers, besides acting as a pollen vehicle - they deliver a protection service for their very buzzing scares away hungry caterpillars.
In their University's botanical garden, they…
stoat | October 18, 2008 In theory I have a blog about bees, called with a stunning lack of originality williams bees. However, its moribund, and I can't be bothered to maintain more than one blog, so for the record: I'm down to one hive now, the one pictured, except I've cut the nettles back a little. Spring brought a reasonable crop, mostly rape of course; also at least one swarm, which went to Nikola. Summer was disappointing in England, in general quite wet, and come the autumn my harvest was essentially nil. I could have spun off a few frames, maybe six; but I preferred to leave them the honey to overwinter…
stoat | September 20, 2008I've just opened up the hive for the annual end-of-summer honey extraction and anti-varroa treatment. This year its apiguard, which is a bit tedious because you have to do it in two goes at 2 week intervals. But the disappointment was the honey harvest: zero. They did have some honey, maybe six frames worth, but I chose to leave it in there for them overwinter rather than trouble to fed them. Other local beekeepers report similar. It was a wet summer, though as far as I was concerned a very pleasant one.
Now its autumn, and the first novices of the season are out on the river.
edyong | September 10, 2008The forests of east Asia are home to giant honeybees. Each one is about an inch in length and together, they can build nests that measure a few metres across. The bees have an aggressive temperament and a reputation for being among the most dangerous of stinging insects. Within mere seconds, they can mobilise a swarm of aggressive defenders to repel marauding birds or mammals. But against wasps, they use a subtler and altogether more surprising defence - they do a Mexican wave.
Wasps, and hornets in particular, are major predators of bees and the largest ones can make even the giant bees…
awild | May 31, 2008
30 years ago, biologists thought they'd solved one of Darwin's thorniest problems, the evolution of sterile social insects:
No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,âcases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could possibly have originated...I will not here enter on these several cases, but will confine myself to one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory. I allude to the neuters or sterile females in insect-communities: for these neuters often differ widely in…
awild | May 22, 2008
Spring is swarm season for honeybees, and the feral population in Tucson is booming. We've got not one but two new colonies nesting in dead trees in our yard. I didn't do anything to attract them, they just moved in on their own.
My feelings about honey bees are mixed.
On one hand, I have many fond memories of working as a beekeeper back when I was in Peace Corps. There's something exhilarating about opening a hive, feeling the vibration of thousands of little wings, the scent of honey and wax thick in the air. Bees are charismatic creatures, and although I worked with them pretty…
zooillogix | March 3, 2008A few weeks back we brought you a story on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a system developed to compare the relative intensity of Hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants) stings. The index was developed through personal "research" conducted unintentionally by Dr. Justin Schmidt, an entomologist who has devoted his life to these ornery critters.
As the Index combines all the things Zooillogix readers love (i.e. science and non-life threatening personal injury) the response to the post was strong. Therefore in collaboration with Shelley Batts, formerly of Retrospectacle and now the brand new…