Bees on Drugs are Angrier Than Their Stressed Counterparts: How to Enrage an Insect (VIDEO)

There's more than one way to make a bee angry, and scientists have just discovered one that doesn't include putting your foot through a bee hive. They've found that by interfering with a basic metabolic pathway in the insect brain, they can cause a bee to be more or less aggressive. 

"It was a counterintuitive finding because these genes were down-regulated," said Gene Robinson, one of the researchers, in a news release. "You tend to think of aggression as requiring more energy, not less."

In order to learn a bit more about bee brains and aggression, the researchers used drugs to suppress key steps in oxidative phosphorylation in bee brains. They found that aggression increased in the drugged bees in a dose-responsive manner. However, the drugs had no effect on chronically stressed bees.

"Sometimes about chronic stress changed their response to the drug, which is a fascinating finding in and of itself," said Robinson. "We want to know just how this experience gets under their skin to affect their brain."

It's not just bees that show this response, either. Scientists found that fruit flies also became more aggressive when exposed to the drug.

"When an animal faces a threat, it has an immediate aggressive response within seconds," explains Robinson. Yet changes in brain metabolism take much longer and cannot account for this immediate response. These changes are therefore more likely to make individuals more aware of subsequent threats.

This is actually a good response in an ecological sense. When a threat comes along, it's likely to be followed by more. This means that the brain preparing itself for more threats can make an individual more ready to tackle whatever has yet to come.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Want to see the bees responding to an intruder yourself? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.