King David exclaimed by the Holy Spirit in the eighth psalm, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”
Many have certainly had that thought when beholding the beauty of the stars, the might of the sea, or the wonder of the forests.
But what about honeybees?
Giant honeybees, despite their name, are of small account when considered one by one.
But as a hive, they display the incredible behavior of rippling across their nests by flashing their abdomens upward in a coordinated way, according to a 2022 report from ScienceNews.
🔥 Giant Honeybees form shimmering waves, the behavior is likely in order to deter bee predators (such as hornets) – Thailand pic.twitter.com/OthdXk6C48
— NatureIsAmazing (@OurNatureRocks) February 4, 2024
A study in the Journal of Experimental Biology indicated at the time that the shimmering is most powerful when bees are shown a dark object moving across a lighter background.
Sajesh Vijayan, a behavioral ecologist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram, ran the experiment with different backgrounds and pieces of circular cardboard.
The shimmering reaction was indeed strongest when a black piece of cardboard, rather than a gray one, was moved across a lighter backdrop, but there was no shimmer when the light piece showed up on a dark backdrop.
Do you think this effect was created by evolution or by God himself?
That may indicate the behavior comes in response to predators like hornets crossing the bright sky.
Sajesh said the setup with the strongest reaction “resembles a natural predator or a natural condition.”
“These are open-nesting colonies, so they are always exposed to a bright sky,” he noted.
Giant honeybees indeed make open nests that are not covered by other natural materials.
Kavitha Kannan, a neurobiologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, told ScienceNews that the pattern of behavior “is intriguing, as this is possibly one way in which a species of animal communicates with another to warn that they are capable of defending themselves.”
Sajesh added that the shimmering behavior, interestingly, may be limited to hornets.
“It has not really been reported in cases of birds attacking or birds flying past these colonies,” he reported.
But birds instead “elicit a mass stinging response.”
That may be because the bees jump into stinging mode since the birds appear larger in their sights.
More research has confirmed the shimmering behavior, and another area of study has been regarding the way in which the honeybees coordinate.
One 2009 study published in Springer Nature found that the parts of the nest where the shimmering was triggered “were primarily arranged in the close periphery of the mouth zone of the nest, around those parts where the main locomotory activity occurs.”
That supports the theory that “groups of specialized bees initiate the shimmering.”
Looking beyond the science of the unique behavior, the shimmering is simply magnificent to behold.
Scientists are only scratching the surface of this coordinated movement and the thousands, if not millions, of other interesting facets of the animal kingdom, not to mention the rest of creation, filled with wonders great and small.
“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”
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