Fun with Science Club®


			Do giant honeybees know which tree to call home? Carrie Straight 06.01.01 Scientists discovered that many animals have site fidelity, which means that they nest or stay in a certain area. In some species, scientists discovered site fidelity by moving animals away from their homes and observing them returning to the area. Other animals return to the same area to nest after migration, like migratory birds returning to the same tree to nest after spending the winter on a different continent. Two groups of scientists believed that giant honeybees (Apis dorsata) might be faithful to certain nesting sites. The giant honeybee is migratory, moving around to find flowers, but people noticed that the bees used the same trees. These bees use different trees, and the life of a worker bee is not that long. Therefore, scientists don’t know how the bees would know which tree they are supposed to be faithful to. The worker bees would never have seen the next nest tree. These scientists predicted that the knowledge of which trees the bees nest in is either coded in their DNA or the bees use some cue to tell them which nest site is the right one. In one study, the scientists found 2 bee trees in Malaysia. Two bee colonies lived in one tree, and three colonies lived in the other tree. In another study, the scientists found bee colonies in houses in India. The scientists collected some bees from each colony. They took DNA samples from each bee and analyzed it. Using the DNA samples, the scientists could tell if the bees were relatives of the ones there the year before. They discovered that at least one colony returned to the same tree with the same queen and that three colonies returned in later years to the house colonies. They also showed that a queen could live at least three years (the same queen returned to a nest site three years apart). In two cases, daughters of the queens returned to the tree. Since in these later two cases none of the bees were in the tree the year before, there must be some information to help the bees find the right trees or houses.

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			Neumann, Peter, Nikolaus Koeniger, Gudrun Koeniger, Salim Tingek, Per Kryger, and Robin F. A. Moritz. 2000. Home-site fidelity in migratory honeybees. Nature 406: 474-475. Paar, J., B. P. Oldroyd, and G. Kastberger. 2000. Giant honeybees return to their nest sites. Nature 406: 475.