Japanese honeybees have used their wings to slap away invasive ants: the latest in a long line of ingenious ways nature has of defending itself. In a behavior that has fascinated and intrigued researchers, it is the latest in the arsenal of honeybee defense mechanisms now documented.
Indeed, ants very often raid honeybee nests for honey and eggs or even kill workers. Bees normally defend themselves by fanning their wings and creating air currents that ward off intruders. For the first time, however, researchers have recorded footage of Japanese honeybees (Apis cerana japonica) batting ants right out of their hives using their wings.
High-speed camera footage revealed how the guardian bees at the entrance to the nest lean their bodies in the direction of ants that approach and flap their wings as they turn away. A successful wing-slap sends the ant flying, a behavior that hadn’t been scientifically dissected until now.
Yoshiko Sakamoto of the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan, a lead researcher on the study, says she was floored by the finding. “I myself did not notice this behavior during my ∼10 years of beekeeping experience,” she says. Sakamoto and colleagues Yugo Seko and Kiyohito Morii brought three local ant species to the entrances of two Japanese honeybee colonies, recording hundreds of interactions.
According to Ecology, the most common strategy used by bees was wing-slapping. It works only from time to time. In Japanese queenless ants and Japanese pavement ants, wing flaps work about half to one-third of the time in successfully repelling the ants. Japanese wood ants were larger and quick, so in their case, the defense worked much less effectively.
That is equivalent to “a person who hits the golf ball just right,” said Gro Amdam, a biologist at Arizona State University, not involved in the work, on par with the precision of a wing-slap. The mechanism behind this wing-slapping method the bees use, the researchers say, involves the bees angling their bodies toward the ants and then flapping their wings while rotating their bodies.
Co-author Kiyohito Morii said that the behavior was hard to see with the naked eye, due to its speed. “By watching the footage of the high-speed camera, I finally understood that the bees were precisely aiming and spectacularly slapping the ants,” he said.
The researchers plan to study whether the bees’ responses develop over time and whether they become better at wing-slapping with experience. They also hope to be able to investigate the extent to which this behavior could be innate or learned and how common it might be across other honeybee species.
As the researchers continue to unravel the mysteries of honeybee defense strategies, one thing is clear: These tiny buzzing brawlers have more tricks up their wings than previously thought.