Wasp hawking induces endothermic heat production in guard bees
1Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Science, Kunming, Yunnan Province, 650223,
People's Republic of China
2Eastern Bee Research Institute of Yunnan, Agricultural University, Heilongtan, Kunming, Yunnan Province, People's
Republic of China
3Department of Zoology and Entomology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa
4Department of Statistics, Rhodes University, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa
Abstract
When vespine wasps, Vespa velutina Lepeletier (Hymenoptera: Vespidae), hawk (capture) bees at their nest entrances alerted and poised guards of Apis cerana cerana F. and Apis mellifera ligustica Spinola (Hymenoptera: Apidae) have average thoracic temperatures slightly above 24o C. Many additional worker bees of A. cerana, but not A. mellifera, are recruited to augment the guard bee cohort and begin wing-shimmering and body-rocking, and the average thoracic temperature rises to 29.8 ± 1.6o C. If the wasps persist hawking, about 30 guard bees of A. cerana that have raised their thoracic temperatures to 31.4 ± 0.9o C strike out at a wasp and form a ball around it. Within about three minutes the core temperature of the heat-balling A. cerana guard bees reaches about 46o C, which is above the lethal limit of the wasps, which are therefore killed. Although guard bees of A. mellifera do not exhibit the serial behavioural and physiological changes of A. cerana, they may also heat-ball hawking wasps. Here, the differences in the sequence of changes in the behaviour and temperature during “resting” and “heat-balling” by A. cerana and A. mellifera are reported.
Keywords: Apis cerana, Apis mellifera, Vespa velutina, temperature
Correspondence: aeastbee@public.km.yn.cn, br.hepburn@ru.ac.za, c*s.radloff@ru.ac.zaa, *Corresponding author
Received: 9 February 2009 | Accepted: 1 March 2010 | Published: 9 September 2010
Copyright: This is an open access paper. We use the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license that permits unrestricted use, provided that the paper is properly attributed.
ISSN: 1536-2442 | Volume 10, Number 142
Tan K, Li H, Yang MX, Hepburn HR, Radloff SE. 2010. Wasp hawking induces endothermic heat production in guard bees. Journal of Insect Science 10:142, available online: insectscience.org/10.142
 Figure 1 |