#honeybees

Honeybees in clover. In Field and Forest. 1928.

Internet Archive

From the article:

Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in pollen. In controlled trials, colonies fed this specially designed diet produced up to 15 times more young, showing a dramatic boost in reproduction and overall health. As climate change and modern agriculture reduce the availability of natural pollen, this innovation could offer a practical way to support struggling bee populations.

Northern paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus) have been found to process the faces of other wasps as a whole, rather than just a collection of individual parts. This is called holistic processing, and it's the same way humans typically process each other's faces. This has been tested in a couple of other Polistes species and they did not process faces in the same way. This is very cool for Northern paper wasps! But crucially, processing each others' faces this way does not mean they process human faces the same. Recognising one another aids them due to their specific social dynamics, but recognising humans wouldn't present the same evolutionary pressures. In one study, their holistic processsing didn't even extend to another paper wasp species, but recognition of human faces has not been tested in paper wasps so we can't say one way or the other even if it looks unlikely

However, it has been tested in other species! Common yellowjackets (Vespula vulgaris) and Western honeybees (Apis mellifera) were capable of discriminating between human faces (although they had to be taught to do so as they probably don't do so naturally) and it seems they also have some capacity for holistic processing. Nevertheless, I feel like I see paper wasps brought up more often than yellowjackets when this fact comes up

There's a lot that still needs studying on this topic, and what we do have points to some really interesting hymenopteran abilities that are not found in many other animals, but it does frustrate me seeing these things exaggerated and overgeneralised to all wasps/Hymenoptera and then presented as facts when there simply isn't evidence for that yet. I love wasps and I typically see this brought up to endear people to them, which I respect, but spreading misinformation for a 'good cause' is still unhelpful

References

Tibbetts et al. (2021) 'Individual recognition is associated with holistic face processing in Polistes paper wasps in a species-specific way'

Sheehan and Tibbetts (2011) 'Specialized Face Learning Is Associated with Individual Recognition in Paper Wasps'

Avarguès-Weber et al. (2017) 'Recognition of human face images by the free flying wasp Vespula vulgaris'

Dyer, Neumeyer and Chittka (2005) 'Honeybee (Apis mellifera) vision can discriminate between and recognise images of human faces'

"Saints of No God" watercolor on paper. 2024.

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