When Vespa soror – giant hornets found in parts of Asia – attack a honeybee hive, they kill as many bees as possible, decapitating them and scouring the hive to harvest their young.
To protect their hives from such a catastrophe, some species of honeybees have developed an arsenal of defensive techniques. They may forage for other animals’ feces and place it at their nest’s entrance to repel predators, a tactic called “fecal spotting.” Or, in a technique known as “balling,” a cluster of honeybees may engulf a hornet, vibrate their flight muscles and produce enough heat to kill the enemy.
Now, a new study published in Royal Society Open Science says honeybees have another defense: screaming.
More precisely, the bees in the study produced a noise known as an “antipredator pipe” – not something that comes out of their mouths, but rather a sound they produce by vibrating their wings, raising their abdomens and exposing a gland used to release a certain kind of pheromone. To human ears, the result is a high-pitched whine. To bees, the frantic vibrating is likely a “rallying call for collective defense” against the hornets, the study says. So while the piping sound is not technically a “scream” – a sound produced by vocal cords – it serves a similar function and shares “acoustic traits with alarm shrieks, fear screams and panic calls of primates, birds and meerkats,” the study says. Plus, Mattila acknowledged that screaming is a useful metaphor – and it’s close enough that she and her team referred to the high-pitched vibrations as “screams” as they studied the bees. Giant hornets have received much attention in the United States after the first “murder hornets” were spotted in 2019 in Washington state. With large mandibles capable of dismembering and masticating honeybees en masse – and stingers that can puncture beekeeping suits. The noises may come in the form of hisses, quick bursts of vibration or the loud, high-pitched whine that had not been previously studied.
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