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When threatened by giant hornets, Asian honeybees use their wings to make a noise that sounds like a cry for help.
Bees do not scream with their mouths, but with their bodies. When giant hornets draw near and threaten their colony, Asian honeybees co*ck their abdomens into the air and run while vibrating their wings. The noise can sound eerily like a human scream.
In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers describe the Asian honeybee’s unique acoustic signal, which is called an antipredator pipe. The researchers colloquially refer to it as a “bee scream.”
“It’s like a shriek,” said Hongmei Li-Byarlay, an entomologist at Central State University in Ohio, who was not involved with the new research. Dr. Li-Byarlay added that her colleagues who have observed the sounds before compared the noise to “crying.”
The bees make this sound as their nests are threatened by the Vespa soror hornet, which hunts in packs and can dispatch a bee hive in a matter of hours.
Heather Mattila, a behavioral ecologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and an author on the study, first heard the bee scream in Vietnam in 2013. She was studying how Asian honeybees smear animal dung around their nests to ward off V. soror and Vespa mandarinia, more famously known as the murder hornet. The behavior showed the bees’ highly evolved social organization, said Lien Thi Phuong Nguyen, a wasp researcher at the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology in Hanoi and an author on the new paper.
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