When a hungry ant approaches a honeybee hive, the residents are ready. They sting, bite or even buzz their wings to create air currents that repel the intruder. But a new study shows that honeybees from a species native to Japan have developed a unique defensive strategy: slapping. These bees actually smack invading ants with their wings, like tiny buzzing brawlers.
A bee’s neat, precise wing-slap “reminds you of someone that really delivers a perfect hit on the golf ball,” says Gro Amdam, a biologist at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the study. “That’s really beautiful.”
Beekeepers had anecdotally observed this behavior among Japanese honeybees (Apis cerana japonica), but no one had done a scientific analysis. So the researchers who conducted the new study used a high-speed camera to film Japanese pavement ants (Tetramorium tsushimae) invading a hive. When the ants approached, the honeybees elegantly wing-slapped them by “tilting their bodies toward the ants, then flapping their wings while simultaneously turning their bodies,” the researchers wrote in the study, published this month in Ecology.
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“When I observed wing-slapping with the naked eye, I couldn’t understand the details of the behavior because it was so quick,” says study co-author Kiyohito Morii, a researcher at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan. “By watching the high-speed camera footage, I finally understood that ... the bees were precisely aiming and spectacularly slapping the ants.”
To understand how effective this defense is against different kinds of ants, the researchers released ants from three common local species near two honeybee colonies. “We observed many interesting and amusing scenes, including some where wing-slapping failed,” Morii says. Sometimes, just like a baseball player’s bat misses the ball, a wing-slap simply doesn’t connect.
The team found that wing-slapping was the honeybees’ most common strategy against ants. The petite blows were successful in one of every two or three attempts against two of the studied ant species (including the pavement ants) but less effective when a bigger, faster species was involved.
Amdam says that the study raises many questions, such as how widespread this behavior is and whether it is innate or learned and spread through culture. “I think that depending on which field you’re in, you can see many interesting questions in this article,” she says.
Morii says that wing-slapping might be widespread among other honeybee species, such as those that nest in cavities with limited entrances. But “this is just speculation, and we’ll need more surveys to verify it,” he says. “At this point, little is known.”