蜜蜂依靠植物花粉作为富含蛋白质的食物来源。有些甚至愿意从其他蜜蜂那里偷东西来得到它。
在美国，偷花粉现象以前就有过。但现在，意大利的研究人员也观察到蜜蜂从大黄蜂的背上抢走花粉。这些观察结果发表在12月21日的《蜜蜂学》杂志上，是迄今为止关于蜜蜂对蜜蜂盗窃的最广泛的文献之一。
2019年夏天，在意大利北部利古利亚地区的安托拉山旅行中，居住在米兰的独立博物学家Tiziano Londei和Giuliana Marzi录制了他们认为是蜜蜂(Apis mellifera)试图将大黄蜂从毛蓟(Cirsium eriophorum)的花上推下来的视频。然而，仔细看一下视频就会发现，这不是一起竞争性骚扰案件，而是一起全面的抢劫。
当红尾大黄蜂(Bombus lapidarius)在花周围搜寻花蜜和花粉时，一些花粉粒粘在它们毛茸茸的身体上(SN: 9/6/17)。Londei和Marzi目睹了蜜蜂无耻地为自己采摘花粉。小偷倾向于以雄性大黄蜂为目标，而不是雌性大黄蜂，因为雄性大黄蜂似乎对偷窃行为不那么在意(尽管雌性也没有做出攻击性反应)。
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“Honeybees are well-known as pollen pigs,” says Avery Russell, a biologist at Missouri State University in Springfield who was not involved in the study. So stealing pollen from the bodies of bumblebees, he says,?“doesn’t seem like a far stretch.”
To see how common the criminality is, the researchers went back to the scene twice in the following three years and also observed bees at two other sites about 25 kilometers away. Honeybees at these other sites were not seen stealing from bumblebees, but bees at the first site continued their larcenous ways year after year. For instance, honeybees collected pollen from only three of the 31 flowers the researchers observed in 2021, but stole from 28 of the available 66 bumblebees.
Scrutinizing the differences between these sites, the researchers suspect honeybees resort to theft in areas where pollen is hard for them to get from flowers (the honeybees struggled to collect pollen from the woolly thistle), but where there are plenty of other bees around.
Pollen stealing by honeybees has previously been observed only in North America, first in Kansas and then later in California and Indiana. Discovering the behavior in Italy suggests this may be a global crime spree. Russell says it would be nice to next learn whether pollen theft negatively impacts bumblebees, or the flowers they pollinate. He’s also curious if other bee species ever steal pollen, too. “We do notice that in the hive, bumblebees will nibble on each other’s pollen baskets,” he says.
?
Reference
