Hygiene measures, social distancing… Bees have astonishing methods to defend against diseases and stop them from spreading.
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00:00Living in groups does make it easier for diseases to spread through populations, and humans
00:10are not the only species battling this problem.
00:28One thing that honeybees do is they collect antimicrobial resins from trees and they use
00:34this to coat the inside of the hive, kind of like an antimicrobial layer, and they pay
00:39special attention to the entrance.
00:42The reason for this, we think, is because that means that returning foragers, which
00:47have been out in the environment and contacting pathogens, potentially through interacting
00:53with other bees that are all foraging on the same flowers, or picking up viruses, for
01:00example, that are left behind by bees on those flowers, they're exposed to all these different
01:06pathogens and then they come back into the hive.
01:09And if there's this sort of antimicrobial doormat that they have to walk over as they
01:15re-enter, then it's kind of like washing your hands when you come back home or using
01:24that hand sanitizer when you go into a supermarket.
01:27It's just limiting the number of pathogens that you can transmit.
01:39In honeybee colonies, also different groups of workers do different jobs.
01:44Young bees generally work inside the hive, so they stay home, they tend to the brood,
01:50do things like cleaning the nest and feeding the queen, whereas the older bees are the
01:55ones that go out and forage, which is a much riskier job because it means that they have
02:00more chances to get exposed to different pathogens from interacting with bees at flowers and
02:07that kind of thing.
02:09So by having the younger bees stay at home and do the nursing tasks, and having the older
02:15bees do the riskier jobs of going outside and collecting food, then that sort of creates
02:21a social buffer around the vulnerable larvae and the queen by having only the nurses tend
02:30to them.
02:31It really limits the interactions that foragers have with these vulnerable individuals.
02:38That's kind of like social distancing.
02:46Workers will actually seek out and remove diseased larvae and pupae from the hive.
02:52We call this hygienic behavior.
02:54Hygienic workers know who's starting to get sick because they smell differently.
02:59The workers can detect the initial stages of disease by sensing a change in the odorants
03:04that the larva is giving off.
03:06So the idea is that by quickly detecting and removing diseased brood before that pathogen
03:13they have becomes infectious, then they can reduce the disease transmission inside the
03:19colony.
03:20And it's kind of like quarantine or social distancing in the sense that the goal is to
03:27limit contact between the diseased brood and the healthy workers, but instead of caring
03:34for the sick brood and trying to bring them back to health, they essentially ostracize
03:40them and leave them outside of the hive to die.
03:43So that's what's happening with hygienic behavior.
03:46It's pretty extreme in terms of a disease fighting strategy.
03:52The sick brood are being sacrificed for the greater good of the colony if it means that
03:57it keeps everybody else healthy.
04:04For more information visit www.FEMA.gov