If ants love sugar, and bees make honey, why aren’t bee hives constantly attacked by ants?
Original Thread: r/explainlikeimfive by u/Dr_Shocktopuss
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Ants are constantly trying to attack beehives. Other bees and insects will also try to attack the beehives. This is why a large number of bees are dedicated to protecting their hives from these intruders.
If the ants do enter the hive, bees will murder the ants. Bees are much bigger and will bite an ant in two without much trouble considering there are up to tens of thousands of bees in a big hive.
A common misconception is that a bee would die after stinging a person. A bee would not die if it does sting an ant, because an ant is very tiny compared to the bee. According to this Wikipedia page here, Although it is widely believed that a worker honey bee can sting only once, this is a partial misconception: although the stinger is in fact barbed so that it lodges in the victim’s skin, tearing loose from the bee’s abdomen and leading to its death in minutes, this only happens if the skin of the victim is sufficiently thick, such as a mammal’s.
In fact, you can draw parallels to bees as the drug lords of their world. They make really desirable stuff (called honey) and have to constantly watch out for attacks, so they have tons of guys just sitting around the hive with guns.
Everyone wants their honey. But if you aren’t tricking them into joining your cartel (an apiary by a human) or grow them inside it, you’ll get a bloody mess trying to take them out.
To prevent a siege by the ants, in theory, water will be placed around the hive thus preventing small insects from reaching the stand legs and crawling up into the hive.
Even water cannot prevent such a siege. Ants have one big advantage. They can be active at a lower temperature than bees. So they can sneak into the hive during cold days and steal the honey. Hives are constantly kept at 35 C by the bees, to ensure there is no fluctuation of temperature within the hive cluster. Ants would get destroyed if they enter the hive no matter the outside temperature. However if the temperature drops below say 5 C, it may mean the heist of honey.
Conclusion: Ants do in fact love honey, but defenses and the fear of being killed by the bees keep the ants away. Under certain conditions, it is possible of an ant siege, but surely the bees would not go down without a fight.
