On Sat, 6 Dec 2003 23:40:55 +0000 (UTC), crotalus_no1{at}yahoo.com
(Eopithecus) wrote:

>I recently watched a program about insect defense ability. The segment
>I wish to ask about involved Japanese Honey Bees reacting in defense
>to a wasp predator. The Bees in order to kill the wasp formed a living
>ball of bees around the wasp and then vibrated till the temperature
>inside the ball of bees was too high for the wasp, therby killing the
>wasp. My question is how would this type of learning evolve? The Bees
>would have to refrain from stinging the wasp because it would kill
>them also. An individual bee can't form a ball nor vibrate all alone
>effectively. So you have to have a colony of bees working in concert
>to form a ball and vibrating, using friction to raise the temperature.
>This seems like incredibly complex behavior for an insect. Any Ideas
>most welcome.

This interesting behavior was described by M Ono et al in 
   Masato Ono, Takeshi Igarashi, Eishi Ohno & Masami Sasaki 
   Unusual thermal defence by a honeybee against mass 
      attack by hornets 
   Nature 377, 334 - 336 (1995); doi:10.1038/377334a0 

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v377/n6547/abs/377334a0.html

When a bee colony is under attack, it is not unusual for a large
number of defenders to mob the attacker.  When a bee colony is
chilled, it is not unusual for large numbers of bees to generate
sufficient heat to warm the hive.  Incidentally, it is not "friction"
that produces the heat, but rather the metabolic activity of the
insects.  One could imagine that mobs of defenders swarmed over the
invading hornets to defend the colony and only gradually "discovered"
that the mass attack without stinging was sufficient to kill the
attackers.

Incidentally, the hornets also shows very unusual behavior, attacking
the hive en masse, not individually.  The letter to Nature cited above
says "These findings suggest that aspects of the interaction between
V. mandarinia japonica and A. cerana japonica are specifically
coevolved. "  (The wasp is Vespa mandarinia, the bee is Apis cerana).

Social insects often display complex behaviors en mass that would be
ineffective performed by individuals alone.
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