Making Friends with Bees

As the threats in pollinating have been widely increasing, scientists must prevent the honeybees from extinction. However, taming the bees is one of the most difficult process because this animal is considered as one of the volatile animal. Their adaptation characteristics has led them to be an aggressive animal if they are threatened. Fortunately, scientists have been capable to understand that this aggressive animal could become our partners in the future.

Bee stands on flower (image is downloaded from beneficialbugs.org)

Bees are one of the animals which have been considered as aggressive living thing. Their volatile instinct helps them to survive from any kind of predators. They will sacrifice themselves in order to protect their colony which is the source of honeybees and this becomes one of the most consumable food for either human or others land mammals. Unfortunately, if the willingness of committing suicide among bees increases in order to protect their nest, bees will fight their life until death and this will make the agent of pollinating is extinction.

Technically speaking, to get the honeybees naturally from the nests, we must ensure that the bees do not consider us as their predators.

Understanding the behavior of bees for friendship process

As a colony, bees comprise level of social status. In the hive – the term for honey bee colony/ nest – there are queen bee, drones or male bees, and bee workers. These social statuses have put bees in roles and regulations. One of it is the protective behavior for their nests and queen. They are more likely to be protective, aggressive and volatile if there is stimulus or threats. However, the scientists Queen Mary University of London, UK have found interesting results about this protective behavior. They proposed that bees misbehave in order to do communicating on their social learning process.
By paraphrasing the sentence written on their paper, (Dawson, Chittka and Leadbeater 2016), “the bees are able to identify the visual appearances of the predators, scent of a plant or flower.” The process of recognizing pattern of threats either from predators or non-predators are the evidence that bees memorize the physical forms. In other words, it is not only about their instinct but also it is about the ability of transducing dangerous signal into social adaptive. As they live as a colony in the hive, delivering related information is occurred among them.

The experiment was set up by using four groups of bees which are experimental group 1, control group 1, experimental group 2, and control group 2. The experimental groups were experienced to a colored light which are Blue and Green and they are also given alarm volatiles gathered from stressed conspecifics. Whereas the control groups are the same the experimental only without alarm volatiles. The assumption is the experimental groups will realize the dangerous pattern from the alarm volatiles so that the groups will move slower as if danger waits them. The result showed that the experimental groups took longer time to go inside the vial because they can sense danger.

How do we make friend with honeybees?

As we explained above that the bees have such a recognition pattern in sensing danger. Throughout the experiments that the scientists have conducted, the bees were stimulated by giving them lights as influencers. The experiments could answer something that triggers the “red alert button” for the bees. More interestingly, the use of lights as the stimuli are important because many insects including bees are influenced by phototactic. By understanding the signal, we could design a system which can be supported by the bees so they will consider us “friends-bees”.

On the other hand, the physics has taught us about seeing which is based on dispersion and reflection of the polychromatic wave. In my opinion, the experiments could give us a clue what colours the bees are passion or attracted. By quoting the exact sentence from the paper, “The basic model incorporated the colour of the light … (since we found that light colour had an influence on latency in Phase 1) …”. Interestingly, the idea that bees can memorize physical pattern shows interesting point which means memorizing is one of the stimuli in surviving. To be summarized, the study has shown that the bees will consider the danger if they had experienced to learn the danger.

Reference:
Erika H. Dawson, Lars Chittka, Ellouise Leadbeater. Alarm substances induce associative social learning in honeybees, Apis mellifera. 2016. Animal Behaviour. 122 pg (17-22).
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.08.006