Cited research: J. Exp. Biol. doi:10.1242/jeb.035626 (2010)

When kept in the same hives, two related species of honeybee can cooperate to build a comb, despite producing different wax chemicals and comb-cell sizes.

Sarah Radloff at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, and her team filmed comb-building in pure and artificially mixed colonies of Apis cerana and Apis mellifera (pictured). They found that A. mellifera workers were more tolerant of differences in wax and cell size than A. cerana bees, and that the former seem to stimulate comb construction by the latter.

The two species share certain aspects of comb-building behaviour, suggesting that these evolved before the species split. J.F.

Credit: M.-X. YANG ET AL./COMPANY OF BIOLOGISTS