Honeybees depend on plant pollen as a protein-packed meals supply. And a few are even keen to thieve from different bees to get it.
Pollen stealing has been noticed sooner than, in the US. However now, researchers in Italy have additionally seen honeybees snatching pollen off the backs of bumblebees. The observations, printed December 21 in Apidologie, are a number of the maximum in depth documentation of bee-on-bee larceny to this point.
On a summer time commute in 2019 to Mount Antola, within the northern Italian area of Liguria, impartial naturalists Tiziano Londei and Giuliana Marzi, each primarily based in Milan, recorded video of what they concept have been honeybees (Apis mellifera) looking to push bumblebees off the flower of a woolly thistle (Cirsium eriophorum). A more in-depth have a look at the video, then again, printed that this wasn’t a case of aggressive harassment — it was once a full-blown theft.
As red-tailed bumblebees (Bombus lapidarius) scrounged across the flora for nectar and pollen, some pollen grains caught to their bushy our bodies (SN: 9/6/17). Londei and Marzi witnessed honeybees shamelessly snagging this pollen for themselves. The thieves tended to focus on male bumblebees rather greater than women folk, because the men gave the impression much less through the pilfering (even though even women folk didn’t react aggressively).
“Honeybees are well known as pollen pigs,” says Avery Russell, a biologist at Missouri State College in Springfield who was once now not concerned within the find out about. So stealing pollen from the our bodies of bumblebees, he says, “doesn’t look like a some distance stretch.”
To peer how commonplace the illegal activity is, the researchers went again to the scene two times within the following 3 years and likewise seen bees at two different websites about 25 kilometers away. Honeybees at those different websites weren’t noticed stealing from bumblebees, however bees on the first website online persisted their larcenous techniques 12 months after 12 months. For example, honeybees accrued pollen from best 3 of the 31 flora the researchers seen in 2021, however stole from 28 of the to be had 66 bumblebees.
Scrutinizing the variations between those websites, the researchers suspect honeybees hotel to robbery in spaces the place pollen is tricky for them to get from flora (the honeybees struggled to assemble pollen from the woolly thistle), however the place there are many different bees round.
Pollen stealing through honeybees has in the past been seen best in North The united states, first in Kansas after which later in California and Indiana. Finding the conduct in Italy suggests this can be a world crime spree. Russell says it might be great to subsequent be informed whether or not pollen robbery negatively affects bumblebees, or the flora they pollinate. He’s additionally curious if different bee species ever thieve pollen, too. “We do understand that within the hive, bumblebees will nibble on each and every different’s pollen baskets,” he says.