Evolution and Learning

"Eopithecus" <[email hidden]> wrote in message

Quoted message said:

I recently watched a program about insect defense ability. The segment I wish to ask about
involved Japanese Honey Bees reacting in defense to a wasp predator. The Bees in order to kill the
wasp formed a living ball of bees around the wasp and then vibrated till the temperature inside
the ball of bees was too high for the wasp, therby killing the wasp. My question is how would this
type of learning evolve? The Bees would have to refrain from stinging the wasp because it would
kill them also. An individual bee can't form a ball nor vibrate all alone effectively. So you have
to have a colony of bees working in concert to form a ball and vibrating, using friction to raise
the temperature. This seems like incredibly complex behavior for an insect. Any Ideas most
welcome.

Bees use lots of tricks that give the impression of intelligent collective behaviour, even though
real understanding (whatever that means) isn't there. For instance, the amount of time a bee has to
wait to be unloaded after a foraging trip tells it how much nectar is coming into the hive, and thus
whether her source is worth signalling.

Bees would develop the habit of clustering to keep warm, and would also develop the habit of mobbing
large predators. With these two behaviours in place, you could develop a gene for "join a cluster
when you see it", and "leave the cluster when the temperature reaches a certain level" and "leave
the cluster when the predator goes/dies". Then it's only an inch away from, "if the predator is a
wasp, leave the cluster when the temperature reaches a very high level".

Of course this can be criticised as yet another just so story. However I bet that if you did
experiments with bees, temperatures and clusters you would find some similar simple mechanism
governing when a bee joins a cluster.

On Sat, 6 Dec 2003 23:40:55 +0000 (UTC), [email hidden]

(Eopithecus) said:

I recently watched a program about insect defense ability. The segment I wish to ask about involved
Japanese Honey Bees reacting in defense to a wasp predator. The Bees in order to kill the wasp
formed a living ball of bees around the wasp and then vibrated till the temperature inside the ball
of bees was too high for the wasp, therby killing the wasp. My question is how would this type of
learning evolve? The Bees would have to refrain from stinging the wasp because it would kill them
also. An individual bee can't form a ball nor vibrate all alone effectively. So you have to have a
colony of bees working in concert to form a ball and vibrating, using friction to raise the
temperature. This seems like incredibly complex behavior for an insect. Any Ideas most welcome.

This interesting behavior was described by M Ono et al in Masato Ono, Takeshi Igarashi, Eishi Ohno &
Masami Sasaki Unusual thermal defence by a honeybee against mass attack by hornets Nature 377, 334 -
336 (1995); doi:10.1038/377334a0

nature.comDynaPage.tafOpen ↗

When a bee colony is under attack, it is not unusual for a large number of defenders to mob the
attacker. When a bee colony is chilled, it is not unusual for large numbers of bees to generate
sufficient heat to warm the hive. Incidentally, it is not "friction" that produces the heat, but
rather the metabolic activity of the insects. One could imagine that mobs of defenders swarmed over
the invading hornets to defend the colony and only gradually "discovered" that the mass attack
without stinging was sufficient to kill the attackers.

Incidentally, the hornets also shows very unusual behavior, attacking the hive en masse, not
individually. The letter to Nature cited above says "These findings suggest that aspects of the
interaction between
V. mandarinia japonica and A. cerana japonica are specifically coevolved. " (The wasp is Vespa
mandarinia, the bee is Apis cerana).

Social insects often display complex behaviors en mass that would be ineffective performed by
individuals alone.

Eopithecus said:

I recently watched a program about insect defense ability. The segment I wish to ask about
involved Japanese Honey Bees reacting in defense to a wasp predator. The Bees in order to kill the
wasp formed a living ball of bees around the wasp and then vibrated till the temperature inside
the ball of bees was too high for the wasp, therby killing the wasp. My question is how would this
type of learning evolve? The Bees would have to refrain from stinging the wasp because it would
kill them also.

Actually, bees are able to sting other insects (including other bees) with impunity. The stinger
slides in and out between the exoskeletal plates completely intact. Only when stinging something
with skin does the stinger get ripped out and the insect die.

That's how newly-hatched princess-bees kill all their unhatched competitors, for instance.

--
"It all seemed much less impractical in my dream." - John D. Salt

Malcolm:

Thanks for responding. I can see a way for a random mutation to form a ball or cluster might aid in
survivability during a wasp attack. I just hadn't thought in the terms of genetics immitating
intelligence. You have given me some new questions to ponder.

Eopithecus