bees

It’s now thought that honey bees “shimmer” in order to protect themselves from hornets: What this essentially does it make is extremely difficult for hornets to swoop in and land on their massive huddle to prey on individual bees. Kastberger and his colleagues noted in their research that shimmering can create what they described as a “shelter zone” of over a foot and a half of space between the bees and hornets or wasps. Catie Keck, “Honey Bees’ Oddly Hypnotizing ‘Shimmering’ Is Actually a Clever Defense” at Gizmodo Shimmering beats defending themselves by stinging because the bee that stings dies. Odd that bees could teach themselves this alternative purely by accident… See also: J. Scott Turner and the giant crawling Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Genetics isn’t as important as once thought for the evolution of altruistic social behavior in some organisms, a new insight into a decade-long debate. This is the first empirical evidence that suggests social behavior in eusocial species — organisms that are highly organized, with divisions of infertile workers — is only mildly attributed to how related these organisms are to each other. In evolutionary biology, fitness refers to an organism’s reproductive success and propagation of its genes. When researchers at Hokkaido University studied the foraging and nesting behaviors of the eusocial species Lasioglossum baleicum, commonly known as the sweat bee, they found that the fitness was more a result of the bees’ cooperative behaviour than it was a Read More ›