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Bees scream with their bodies, not their mouths. When giant hornets approach and threaten their colony, Asian honey bees lift their bellies high and run with their wings trembling. The noise can sound eerily like a human scream.
In an article published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open ScienceResearchers identify the Asian honey bee’s unique acoustic signal, called an antipredator tube. Researchers colloquially call this the “bee cry.”
“It’s like a scream,” said Hongmei Li-Byarlay, an entomologist at Central State University in Ohio who was not involved in the new research. Dr. Li-Byarlay added that colleagues who have observed the sounds before have compared the noise to “crying.”
The bees make this sound because their nest is threatened by the Vespa soror wasp, which hunts in swarms and can send out a hive in a matter of hours.
Heather Mattila, a behavioral ecologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and one of the study’s authors, first heard the bee’s cry in Vietnam in 2013. He was studying how Asian honeybees were infected. animal manure around their burrows to fend off V. soror and, more commonly known, Vespa mandarinia. murder hornet. Lien Thi Phuong Nguyen, a wasp researcher at the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology in Hanoi and author of the new paper, said the behavior shows the highly developed social organization of bees.
Dr. Mattila noticed the beehives exploding loudly as the V. soror wasp approached. When he plugged a tape recorder into the entrance of a hive surrounded by hornets, he heard a cacophony of sound.
Working on European honey bees for 24 years, Dr. While Mattila recognized some of the sounds that bees are known to make—hisses, beeps, and horns—he had never heard anything so loud and crazy.
The researchers placed recording devices inside the hives and video cameras outside the entrances to record the honeybee sounds. The buzzing, helicopter sounds of bees often suffocated the bees, so the bees also recorded the responsive hives on paper coated with wasp pheromones.
Dr. Mattila brought the recordings back to the United States, and Hannah Kernen, now a research technician at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, assisted with the analysis of the recordings.
Ms. Kernen and Dr. As Mattila studied over 30 hours of bee noise, which included about 25,000 acoustic signal samples, they made sure they were listening to a new sound. frequencies and high sound levels.
For months, researchers compared video recordings inside the hive with recordings outside the entrance to see if they could isolate a moment when the new sound was heard for the first time in both videos and fixed on a single bee.
Dr. Mattila listened to these recordings for hours throughout the night. “Even though the records were from years ago and the bees were already dead, I would shudder and start to worry about them,” he said. “There’s something very human and recognizable about the voices.”
One day, at 2:30, a sleepless Dr. Mattila finally saw a cry and a video capturing the bee behind him: a fussy worker bee approaching a wasp-scented piece of paper. He was raising his abdomen, revealing the Nasonov gland, a thin white stripe at its posterior end that could secrete pheromones.
The researchers listened to the sound inside the hive over the same time period and looked at spectrograms, which are visualizations of sound frequencies that show similar sounds occurring inside and outside the hive. This confirmed that bees screaming outside the hive made the same sounds as bees screaming inside the hive.
Dr. “It was an Eureka moment, and I’ve only had a few of those,” Mattila said.
The researchers suggest that the anti-predator pipe noise acts as an alarm signal, as the production of screams peaks when V. soror wasps are flying outside the colony’s entrance. The data are correlated, so the exact function of the scream is still unknown.
Ebi Antony George, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who was not involved in the research, said the study showed more “how complex the organization of collective defensive behavior is” in Asian honeybees than previously thought. Much less is known about Asian honeybees than about European honeybees, he added. Asian honey bees are mostly studied in the wild, often nesting in hard-to-reach spots and fleeing the hive if under stress.
Autumn has arrived in Vietnam as giant hornets raise new queens and males and increase their group raids on honey bee hives. Pandemic, Dr. It prevented Mattila and other researchers from returning there; but now he knows that somewhere in the world, the hives come to life with the sound of the cries of bees.
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