A Slap of a Honeybee’s Wings Sends Ant Invaders Flying Away

Asian honeybees have an impressive playbook of tactics to defend their hives: hypnotic shimmering waves to warn off predatory hornets; defensive balls to roast intruders alive with their body heat; and, of course, their once-in-a-lifetime use of a stinger.

Add another weapon to the honeybee arsenal: wings. Scientists in Japan have learned that Asian honeybee guards use their wings to slap pesky ants into next week. Slow-motion video published with a study in the journal Ecology last week shows what happens when ants try to sneak into the hive’s entrance: The guard bee angles up to the ant like a tennis player setting up a mean backhand, then wing-smacks the ant so hard it tumbles end-over-end through the air as it plummets to the ground.

Researchers say wing-slapping seems to be a low-energy way for Asian honeybees to send petty thieves packing — while Japanese ants don’t often kill honeybees, they can drain the nest’s food reserves and gobble up the bees’ protein-rich eggs.

To see how the strategy works, a team of researchers at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies trained slow-motion cameras on guard bees as they were confronted with various ant species invading their hive.

The replays revealed the bees’ wing-slaps sent smaller ant species sailing about half the time. When a wing slap doesn’t connect, the ants will occasionally try to bite the guard bee but generally “just freeze,” said Kiyohito Morii, an author of the study and a behavioral ecologist at the Japanese institute. The wing-slap may be too fast for the ant to even perceive it, added Yoshiko Sakamoto, another study author and a senior researcher at the same institution.