In her biweekly column, Allie Skalnik brings lessons and stories from her travels abroad in Australia back home.
Dear Stanford,
We’ve departed from the glistening shores of Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef and spent the last two weeks learning about terrestrial ecology since I last wrote. We went from snorkeling daily to being banned from swimming in the ocean, just in case a curious tiger shark came chomping. The adorable dingo became another constant concern, as they look exactly like a domesticated dog, but they are known to attack humans who don’t treat them like the wild animals they are.
K’gari, the largest sand island in the world — the place we called home for a week’s time — is known to Bing Overseas Studies Program (BOSP) Australia students as “the island trying to kill you.” Really, though, it’s just an island you need to tread carefully on, yet another example of wild areas humans have extended ourselves into, causing us to come in contact with more and more dangerous creatures.
Far and above the most violent creature we learned about in this course is entirely harmless to humans: stingless bees. Surprisingly, 70% of bees in the world are not anything like the European honey bee we know so well in the U.S. Instead, they are solitary bees, often living in holes in the ground, and they are stingless.
The stinger of the European honey bee is a holdover from the ancestor of bees, wasps that used their stinger not as defense but to hunt. Bees can be thought of as vegetarian wasps, most of which now have no stinger because they have no need for it.
Some stingless bees do live in hives as opposed to being solitary, however, with one female “queen” as the only reproducing individual of the colony and her sisters in the hive carrying out set tasks based on their caste level.
When a new queen is born and sets off to establish her colony, hives don’t always go through the laborious process of moving each bit of material separately from the old hive to the new one. This process of provisioning the daughter colony can take months and is incredibly laborious, and many worker bees die in the process. It can be more advantageous to attack another hive and steal their home. Everything is already set up, after all; all that’s left to do is to fight for it.
Before any of this happens, the attacking colony sizes up the victim hive. Do they have a sizable advantage? Warfare is also a laborious process, and the attacking colony could prefer to win.
If the attacking colony figures they can take their target, the war commences. The opposing colonies swarm and attack one another head on. Each stingless bee finds an opponent bee, and they fly straight at each other, grapple and fall to the ground. They rip off each other’s limbs and fight to the death. Every grapple ends in both the bees dead, which is why that evaluation of their opponent’s numbers is so important. If the bees defending the hive are killed, the attacking colony continues inside the colony, and the process of grappling to the death continues until every single adult bee in the original colony is dead, or the attackers are all dead.
Victory doesn’t always last long — the winning colony is often severely diminished in numbers, now even more susceptible to the next colony that comes along and wants a new home.
The world of stingless bee hives is more brutal and violent than I ever could have imagined. It’s also wildly impressive that such complex social interactions, selflessness for the sake of the continuation of the colony, exists in nature. The world of bees is certainly more interesting, and more baffling, dare I say, than anyone gives it credit for.
And on that cheerful note! All my best,
Allie