"Eopithecus"  wrote in message
> 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.
>
Bees use lots of tricks that give the impression of intelligent collective
behaviour, even though real understanding (whatever that means) isn't there.
For instance, the amount of time a bee has to wait to be unloaded after a
foraging trip tells it how much nectar is coming into the hive, and thus
whether her source is worth signalling.

Bees would develop the habit of clustering to keep warm, and would also
develop the habit of mobbing large predators. With these two behaviours in
place, you could develop a gene for "join a cluster when you see it", and
"leave the cluster when the temperature reaches a certain level"
and "leave
the cluster when the predator goes/dies". Then it's only an inch away from,
"if the predator is a wasp, leave the cluster when the temperature reaches a
very high level".

Of course this can be criticised as yet another just so story. However I bet
that if you did experiments with bees, temperatures and clusters you would
find some similar simple mechanism governing when a bee joins a cluster.
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 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 12/7/03 8:36:51 PM