AFRICAN honeybees have devised a bizarre but highly effective tactic for
dealing with unwanted guests—they lock them up in prison cells inside
their hives. This penal policy keeps a lid on the parasites and, if necessary,
buys the colony time to escape.
Peter Neumann of the University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany and colleagues
studied how bees in South Africa defend themselves against the small hive beetle
Aethina tumida, which is about half the size of a bee. The beetle raids
the bees’ food reserves and eats their larvae.
The beetle is “built like a tank”, and the bees have…
