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Wow. Just wow. I’d heard about bees playing, but I didn’t know some of the other cool things mentioned in this video, like the fact that bees can learn by watching others. 💛🐝
This is why I don’t squash insects that happen to wander into the house. This is why I am against that sort of careless killing. Because we so drastically underestimate what insects are capable of. They are living beings, quite possibly each with their own desires and fears and inner lives. Many people forget that insects are animals. Many people forget that so are we.
honestly, the things that insects are capable of will never cease to amaze me
A lot of pets will ignore you, but only a cat will follow you from room to room and check your lines of vision to make absolutely certain that you can see them ignoring you.
Okay, so this is really cool! You have this phenomenon where some plants grow edible appendages to their seeds to entice ants to carry them underground where they can safely sprout. And then you have wasps which lay their eggs on the leaves, stems, and other parts of plants and trigger the growth of galls (swellings) which both feed and protect the wasp larvae until they reach maturity.
The boy who was watching the ants noticed they were taking wasp galls underground, too. Further exploration found that the wasp larvae were unharmed inside the galls; the only thing the ants had eaten were edible appendages similar to those on the seeds they collected. The wasp larvae stayed safe inside the ant nest, feeding on their galls, until it was time to emerge and head back out to the surface.
So it turns out that the edible portions of the galls have the same sorts of fatty acids as the edible parts of the seeds. And those fatty acids are also found in dead insects. Scientists think that the wasps evolved a way to make the galls they created mimic the edible portions of the seeds to get the ants to collect the galls. This isn't the only example of wasps making use of ants as caretakers for their young, but it's a really fascinating example thereof--especially if you consider ants evolved from wasps at least 100 million years ago.