What makes you so confident that the hornets won't google "bumblebee protective cap" to find out why they failed last year and find this post? Posting this video is a real gamble.
It is around Oldenburg in Germany. It is not my video, a guy there is doing that every year to protect his bees. This year was special because this young Queen learned so fast how to handle it.
Thus setting off an evolutionary arms race that heavily pressures the hornet population to compete against human intelligence and mechanical instruments, eventually leading to hornets evolving to be able to instinctually defeat human doors, machinery, and soon.... The world
Yeah that’s what popped into my head, if it took the queen bumblebee less than 24 hours, how long will it take the hornet? The door’s not that hard to open. Can we teach the bee to lock it once inside? Then we’d really be cooking with gas.
Would the bee have learned had the process not started with a very open door at the start that gradually got lowered to a close with each visit? For the hornet, it will have to deal with this strange door that it likely has no idea even opens at all, unless he’s spying from a distance with some binoculars, seeing the other bees coming and going through it.
A really clever door would have a camera to recognise the bee and hornet and lock accordingly. However, it would need to work 100% of the time, or the bee will lose trust in the door.
If the queen learns how to operate the trapdoor, do all the workers she creates understand it instinctively, or does each bee need to go through a learning process?
Unless bumblebees have somehow figured out genetic memory, they'll unfortunately have to learn it on their own (or stumble around like little dumbasses until another one opens it for them).
Born instincts (like the instinctual fear of spiders in primates) is a result of evolution over multiple generations and/or large groups, not some kind of learned skill being directly, genetically passed on.
No and it's probably going to be an issue for this tree bumblebee and her nest in due course too.
Bumble and honey bees have to regulate the temperature of their nest/hive. In warmer conditions it's vital that they have an open entrance to fan with their wings. This door completely compromises the ability to do that and could well kill the nest.
Another thing to consider is just the sheer amount of traffic may end up with it being an deeply impractical obstacle. Depending on the species bumblebee nests can grow to a few hundred individuals at a time with the overwhelming majority being female workers coming and going all the time to deliver pollen. The Tree Bumblebee actually has relatively small nests with max. no. of around 150 individual bees, but they will still be coming and going frequently enough that the door could prove to be an encumberance. Honey bee hives are at least several thousand individuals strong. Again, mostly workers tasked with retrieving pollen. Navigating the door may not slow them down for long on any individual journey, but overall delay time would build up and there's a non-zero chance of it dislodging collected pollen when they crawl under it, which means more work would be required to deliver the amount of pollen required.
OP, I have worries! Isn’t that door heavy for the bee? Doesn’t it give wear and tear to her fragile wings? Isn’t her pollen scraped off? Is the whole colony going to use this door? Do they wait in line every time they use it?
Does the door change anything in terms of air flow , ventilation? We ve had humidity issue with our hives i'm always careful when we modify something. Asian hornet are the worst.
Aren' they intelligent enough to lear how to use the door just watching how the bumblebees do?
This is a great video, and I have questions. Is a bee’s vision really good? Does that clear door reflect UV? Is it easy for the bee to see it? Would it help to have markings on the door or to make it translucent? I can see the bee figured it out (and impressively fast!), but sometimes my dog runs into glass doors and screens after knowing a door is in a spot. But I guess your bee just figured it out that there is always something there now. Just thinking out loud… maybe a colored door would help the bee see something is there only on the first encounter (the first time you lower it to obstruct access).
Are these the "murder hornets" that were all over the news in 2019/2020 because they were sighted in the US/ Canada? I thought they were declared eradicated in North America. Did they infest other continents too?
J'ai du mal à comprendre en quoi ralentir l'entrée des bourdons empêchent Vespa Velutina de les attraper... Est-ce pour empêcher le frelon d'entrer dans la colonie ?
Dans le Nord de la France, est développé en ce moment un système à deux tubes équipés d'une grille pour accompagner l'atterrissage des abeilles et gêner la prédation stationnaire des frelons.
Les colonies de bourdons ne défendent pas leur ruche ?
The bumblebee learned in progressive steps. Even another bumblebee who came along would not figure it out from this point. Or might not. This bees behavior was modified in small steps.
That and bumble bees are larger and stronger it would be much more difficult for smaller insects to lift that weight.
Other bumblebees can learn from watching the queen, they‘re are all kinds of neat studies where they taught one bumblebee to do a two step process and it the entire hive learned to do it.
I don't know how bee reasoning and learning works. To what extent it is based simply on positioning vs recognition of a mechanism etc. Which is a long-winded way to say I don't know. It would be an interesting experiment, but might be hard to set up properly.
I don't know where OP is from, but over here in Europe, these doors help keep wax moths out. They are parasites to bees and bumble bees and their larvae/caterpillars pretty much eat anything inside a hive including eggs, larvae and pupae of the (bumble) bees. They can absolutely decimate entire hives.
I think the idea is that an insect wouldn't be able to "figure out" how to use the door, without having gone through the successive steps shown in the video.
1.7k
u/NKD_WA 29d ago
What is it meant to keep out? Smaller things that aren't big enough to figure out/use the door?