A new study from the Seoul National University has shown that bumblebees invade birds' nests and acquire them by scaring the birds away with their warning buzz.
A new study done by Piotr Jablonski and his colleagues from the Laboratory of Behavioral Ecology and Evolution at Seoul National University in South Korea, has shown how these bees invade birds' nest and "scare" them with their warning buzz sound.
Generally a prey dissuades a predator by giving warning signals, which may be poisonous, visual or auditory. The bees dissuade their predators (in this case the birds) by sending a warning buzz and taking over their freshly built nests, according to the press release.
For this study, researchers conducted experiments to demonstrate how the bees' warning buzz sound can scare away birds from their own nest. They built a device, which can produce the buzzing sound of a bumblebee and hid it inside a freshly built bird nest. A dead bumblebee was glued on one side of a toothpick and the other end was glued to a flat miniature speaker, which produced the buzzing sound. Researchers also placed small cameras inside the nestbox to catch the action.
The researchers observed a surprising reaction by the birds when the buzzing sound from the device was played. The birds were distressed with the sound and often flew out of the nest. For the control researchers played songs of the common birds, which did not seem to distress the birds much compared to the bumblebees' buzz.
Hence, the authors conclude that the buzz helps the bumblebees to drive the birds away from their own nests.
"The bumblebees' buzz appears to help them oust birds from their freshly built nests," the authors wrote in the press release. "We have provided evidence that a warning signal, known to help deter predatory attacks on a potentially harmful prey, may also help the prey to win ecological competition with its predators."
Recently in April, several protests were carried out to ban or restrict the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, which kill honeybees in a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder. Another research conducted by the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley, showed that paved roads and solid constructions have added to the decline of bumblebees in agricultural landscapes.
In this study, researchers also found that bumblebees were found in up to 21 percent of newly built nests of birds but nestboxes without fresh moss and feathers were not touched.
The findings of the study are published online in Springer's journal, Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology.
