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Float like a butterfly, bite like a bee. Strange though it may sound, a team of biologists has discovered that the humble honeybee has an additional weapon to the sting in its tail: for those targets that are too small to be stung, the honeybee can deliver a paralysing bite. All the more intriguing, the 2-heptanone (2-H) the honeybee emits when it employs its mandibles could be used as a local anaesthetic in human and veterinary medicine.
Biologists have mused over the bite of the honeybee before, suggesting that it might use 2-H as an alarm pheromone, calling on soldier and guard bees to attack any intruders, or as a way of chemically-tagging areas for foraging bees to revisit. The study, conducted by a team of biologists from Greek and French universities, discovered that 2-H actually acts as an anaesthetic in small arthropods, such as wax moth larva and varroa mites, which can infiltrate beehives and eat wax and pollen. As the invaders are too small for the honeybee to use its sting, it delivers a bite that can paralyse them for up to nine minutes, allowing them to be ejected from the hive.
Alexandros Papachristoforou, working at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, was amazed that the bite of the honeybee had gone unnoticed for so long. "Beekeepers will be very surprised by our discovery and it is likely to cause a radical rethink of some long-held beliefs", he said. "It will probably stimulate honeybee research in many new directions. For instance, many beekeepers have spoken of the 'grooming' behaviour of honeybees in helping to control varroa populations. This grooming behaviour can now be interpreted as biting behaviour."
The low toxicity of the honeybee's 2-H bite has led Vita Europe -- a UK-based honeybee health specialist that partnered the research -- to patent its use in local anaesthetics. Should the company find a pharmaceutical partner to develop the compound, a natural anaesthetic could be produced for use in both humans and animals.
Image: Shutterstock
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
