Worker honey bees in action Ali McAfee
BRING out your dead! Honeybees pick up dead or diseased nestmates and drag them out of the hive. Removing corpses protects against infection, which can spread like wildfire in densely packed hives.
“The honeybees work together to fight off disease,” says at the University of British Columbia, Canada. But not all hives remove their corpses. McAfee and her colleagues have been figuring out why this is.
In , they discovered two pheromones, called oleic acid and beta-ocimene, which are only released by dead bee larvae. When they wafted…
