Bees Wage Surprisingly Violent Wars—And Females Do the Fighting

Bees Wage Surprisingly Violent Wars—And Females Do the Fighting

Scientists area unit nonplussed on why bees fight once the value to each side is thus steep.

Stingless bees in Australia lock together in a fight to the death over control of a nest.

When 2 species of Australia's stingless bees visit battle, a unprecedented quantity of mass murder ensues, consistent with a brand new study.
During this extreme warfare, thousands of employee bees from either side expire, and young from the losing facet ar dragged out of the nest to die—a antecedently unseen behavior represented within the December issue of the yankee Naturalist.

These battles decimate the ranks of employee bees, the sterile females that hives trust to gather nectar and farmers use to cross-pollinate their crops. (Read a lot of concerning pollinators in National Geographic magazine.)

What's a lot of, they are the sole ones waging war—male drones sit on the sidelines. The battles conjointly leave entire colonies at risk of parasites and unwellness as they settle into their new conquered nest.
Of course, fights inside and between bee species area unit nothing new. thief bees in South America, as an example, build their living marauding alternative colonies' food stores, Christoph Grüter, a bee life scientist at the University of urban center in Suisse, aforesaid via email. Nest takeovers also can occur.

Australia's stingless bees, however, take the fighting to an entire new level, that has at a loss scientists: Why risk such a lot of of your employees in months of fighting?

"The scale of the fighting reportable by Merce Cunningham is exceptional," aforesaid Grüter, United Nations agency wasn't concerned within the new analysis.

Tetragonula carbonaria, a stingless bee species native to Australia, gathers nectar.