SOCIAL DISTANCING

During the pandemic we followed advice to stay socially distant (unless we worked in Government, or were ambushed by cake). We did this to protect ourselves and those we care about from harm. It was logical, but hard and much maligned by folks with an axe to grind.

It may help our collective recovery process to know that, according to timely research, we were not alone. Honey bees, it seems, instinctively become socially distant in the face of comparable illnesses or the arrival of parasites.

Bee scientists from the UK and Italy (UCL and the University of Sassari) recently published a paper that observes that, if a hive is colonised by the parasitic Varroa Mite, for example, bees respond by expanding their normal personal space to avoid becoming the next host and, by extension, a threat to their colony.

Also Interesting, is a sensible contingency that bees immediately invoke by moving their essential Waggle Dances (no dances, no feedback, no food) to the outer the frames of the comb, thereby avoiding the more heavily congested centre of the hive. And, somewhat reminiscent of our human experience during Covid 19, researchers found that younger and older bees began to shun contact.

A co-author of the paper, Dr Alessandro Cini observed that “honeybees appear to have evolved to balance the risks and benefits by adopting social distancing.” Luckily for bees, perhaps, no government ministers are known to have friends from school with a new PPE business that could make masks quite small enough to fit?