4 ms·
As eusocial creatures, the bees don't precisely "learn" this sort of thing, or pass information on by "teaching" other bees to coordinate this sort of behavior.
by tritium 11y ago
As eusocial creatures, the bees don't precisely "learn" this sort of thing, or pass information on by "teaching" other bees to coordinate this sort of behavior.
It's an instinctive reaction, deeply ingrained in the surviving lineage of the bees that react like that, because all of the others were culled against, and eaten voraciously.
With bees, the only creature that should be regarded as having any degree of agency is the queen, and all others are to be regarded as appendages. Flying, autonomous phantom limbs.
The behavior of the collective is guided by pheremones, and when sensed, the subjects of the queen must react reflexively to the varying scents of the hive. Failing to react appropriately to the ambient chemical signals of the hive, for bees, is like being born physically deformed or mentally handicapped for humans, and the unfit would not survive in the wild. The queen's colony must hold her aloft, as assuredly as our own legs must carry us over terrain, and our hands must pick food up and place it in our mouths.
This highly specific reaction to the giant wasps probably emerges the same way aversion or attraction to flavors and smells arise. Those that cannot taste a fatal poison, will mistakenly eat it and not reject tainted food.
The way these bees react to the hornets, without the use of stinging, and instead restraining their predator cooperatively, is probably driven by the smell of the hornets. I can't really fathom how a reaction like that works, but the hornet species must have killed so many bees, single-handedly, that they selectively bred the survivors capable of stopping them, sort of the same way we're inadvertently creating antibiotic resistant viruses.