How bees put brains together to cook hornets

The Japanese honeybee and the giant hornet are waging an epic war. The hornets, which can grow up to 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) long, attack the nests of the bees, and the honeybees will surround a hornet and "cook" it.

The honeybees' stingers can't penetrate a hornet's thick outer skin, so the bees swarm around an attacker instead, forming a spherical bee ball, and use their vibrating flight muscles to create heat. The mass of bees will heat the area up to 116 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius), enough to kill the hornet.

Scientists discovered these bee balls in 2005 and have been studying them ever since. Now researchers have figured out the bee-brain mechanism that regulates the thermo-balling behavior in Japanese honeybees but not in their relatives, the European honeybees.