Honeybees attacked by parasites segregate activities into specific regions of their hives to stop the spread
is unlikely to have been the first species to keep apart for mutual protection. A recent study by Michelina Pusceddu of the University of Sassari, in Italy, and six colleagues found that honeybees in hives infected by parasites implement their own form of lockdowns. They achieve a degree of compliance that human public-health officials would envy.
Bees live in ordered communities that depend on social interactions. Their hives are split into sections. The periphery is mainly used to store food, whereas the core contains a nursery made up of “brood cells”, where larvae grow into adults. Individual bees also have well-defined roles. Queens lay eggs; drones fertilise queens; and young workers tend to look after the brood, before becoming foragers who leave the hive to search for food as they age.
Although the best-known threat to bees is the Asian giant hornet, which can swiftly decapitate all bees in a hive, vastly more bees succumb each year to the ominously named. A parasitic mite, it attaches itself to bees’ bodies and helps itself to their stored energy resources.depends on contact between the hive’s inner and outer parts. It enters a colony by hitchhiking on foragers, but needs to reach the nursery near the centre to reproduce.
Such changes probably come at a cost, just as lockdowns in human colonies do. Limiting where waggle dances are performed could reduce awareness of where to find food, and focusing allogrooming efforts in brood cells may worsen forager bees’ hygiene. Nonetheless, natural selection appears to have favoured this trade-off. It might behove sceptics of lockdowns by humans to take note.”, by M. Pusceddu et al.
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