Bees, Bees, wonderful Bees

[Julie]

With a flick of the wing, Japanese honeybees slap away ants that try to infiltrate their hive.

Ants often invade honeybee nests, seeking to steal honey, prey on eggs or kill worker bees. In defence, bees have been known to fan their wings to blow ants away. Now, researchers have documented them making contact with their wings and physically batting ants out of the hive, a behaviour that hasn’t been studied before.

Footage from a high-speed camera shows that guard bees, positioned near a nest’s entrance, tilt their bodies towards approaching ants and flutter their wings while pivoting away. A successful hit sends the ant flying.

Many beekeepers seem unaware of this strategy, says Yoshiko Sakamoto. “I myself did not notice this behavior during my approximately 10 years of beekeeping experience,” she says.

Sakamoto, Yugo Seko and Kiyohito Morii, all at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan, introduced three local species of ants to the entrance of two Japanese honeybee (Apis cerana japonica) colonies and filmed hundreds of showdowns between the insects.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2439789-watch-bees-defend-thei...

[Julie]

Bee populations seem to be down here, too, with flowery margins that would at this time of year normally be alive with pollinators now eerily quiet. Hoverflies are depleted, moths scarce and aphids have either appeared very late or not at all. Buddleia bushes, with their fragrant mauve flowers that are usually festooned with butterflies, moths and many other insects, sit naked of their normal visitors.

There are several probable reasons for this sudden reduction compared with typical summers. The weather has not helped, with a cool and wet spring across much of the country suppressing insect numbers. But even with that factored in, this year’s sudden drop comes after many years of much longer-term decline.

When I was a child travelling in a car during the summer, journeys were accompanied by windscreen collisions with all kinds of insects – moths, beetles, butterflies, aphids, lacewings, craneflies and more. When we stopped, a clean of the front windscreen was often required, as the invertebrate debris overwhelmed the washers and wipers.

These days, drivers can cross the entire country and finish their journey with a clean screen. It’s true that cars are more streamlined and that some small flying creatures will whiz past rather than being hit, but numberplates are still as flat and as lethal as they ever were, and from those we have some data.

‘Going back further … the drop is likely to be far larger still.’ A 19th-century print of bee species.Photograph: UniversalImagesGroup/UIG/Getty Images

Surveys going back 20 years to 2004 reveal a sharp drop in the number of insects found splattered on numberplates in the UK. The scale of decline is staggering, with evidence gathered from numberplates showing a drop of 78% between then and 2023. Such findings place this year’s sudden insect decline into the context of a longer-term trend and show how erratic weather patterns are hitting already depleted populations.

article from the guardian linked