Bees Paint Animal Poo on Their Homes to Repel Giant Hornets

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Bees Paint Animal Poo on Their Homes to Repel Giant Hornets:

Insects don't come much cuter than the humble honey bee. Those fetching stripes, the "waggle" dance they do to tell each other where they've found nom-noms, that thing where they smear buffalo crap all over their hives.

Excuse me-the more scientific term is dung. But whatever you call it, the fact remains that the Asian honey bee species Apis cerana flies around collecting bird and water buffalo poo not with its hind legs, like it does with pollen, but with its mouth. Back at the colony, it applies the dung as "spots" around the entrance to the hive. That might seem like bad housekeeping, but scientists just showed that there's a brilliant method to this scatological madness: Heavily spotted colonies repel the bees' archenemy, the giant hornet Vespa soror, a close cousin of the infamous Vespamandarina or Asian giant hornet (colloquially dubbed the "murder hornet") that's invaded the US.

If you knew what Vespa soror was capable of, you might not be so quick to judge these bees. At nearly an inch and a half long, the hornet wields massive mandibles that quickly guillotine Asian honey bees, which are about a quarter of its size. When one of them finds a nest, it slices up any workers that mount a defense and releases pheromones that tag the colony for its compatriots to find. Soon, reinforcements swoop in, the formidable air force gnawing at the small opening of the nest to fit their outsized bodies through.

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