When I read something like this, I have two reactions. First, amazement at nature. Second, wondering how soon the miliary will figure out a way to make use of it. You know they’ll at least try.
Bees carefully cook invaders to death – Honeybees that defend their colonies by killing wasps with body heat come within 5°C of cooking themselves in the process.
“I’ve seen a single wasp overwhelm a colony of 6,000 bees” of a species that doesn’t make heat balls, says Seeley. The invader wasp stands at the nest’s entrance as one guard bee after another comes out to defend its home. “The wasp cuts the guard into pieces … and waits for the next one,” says Seeley. When all the defenders are dead, “the wasps strip-mine out the larvae,” he reports.
However, a few honeybee species can defend themselves by surrounding an invader. Within 5 minutes, the center of a typical bee ball had reached 45°C.
Holy crap.
Thats insanity
I doubt the weapons application. If the heat ball effect was lethal for mammals, Hugh Hefner would have died very young.
Take Care –
ZC
They do it vibrating their body. I saw that on the National Geographic channel. Unfortuantly it was on in the same room as the breakfest at the hotel I was staying at. Not the best time to learn about it or have up close pictures but cool non the less.
45C is 104 degrees fahrenheit.
Maybe someone can ask the dolphins the military let loose.
That was a great read! Keep up the good science and tech posts! Less poly-sci please… 🙂
I don’t know if the military would like it. A group of men hugging and vibrating together in an attempt to kill sounds a little bit homo-erotic and we know how the military feels about that kind of stuff 🙂
This phenomenom was covered in the journal Nature and a New York Times “Science Times” article back in 1995. That research was even more interesting, noting beserker behavior on the part of predatory giant hornets where 20-30 of them can wipe out 30,000 bees in a few hours and the hornet’s pherome marking that is a prelude to such attacks triggering the ‘ball of bees’ counter attack. Interesting stuff!
References:
“Unusual thermal defence by a honeybee against mass attack by hornets”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v377/n6547/abs/377334a0.html
“Honeybees Vanquish a Goliath Hornet With Thermal Warfare”:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60610FB3C5E0C738DDDA90994DD494D81&oref=login
I remeber seeing this on Discovery channel once, and they had thermal imaging, it was incredible. The bees act as if nothing is happening as the wasp enters the nest, then all at once they surround it, the temperature rise is incredible. Mother Nature rocks.
45C is NOT 104F. 45C is 113F.
45*1.8 + 32 = 113F