Honeybees shown to speak directly to hornets
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - 08:32
in Biology & Nature
(PhysOrg.com) -- Most higher order animals have some means for “speaking” with enemies or predators. Dogs and cats growl and hiss for example when threatened to let others know not to mess with them. Lower order organisms on the other hand, don’t generally have such a direct means for such communication, thus when an example is found, it’s generally unique. That’s certainly the case for Apis cerana, an Asian honeybee, as a team of international researchers has found. This species of bee has figured out a way to speak very clearly to their gravest threat, as the researchers describe in their paper published in Animal Behavior, by banding together and shaking their abdomens.