51¶¯Âþ

BUTTERING up the guards for a packet of cigarettes is part of prison life, and not just for humans. Take hive beetles, which invade honeybees’ hives. The bees deal with the beetles by shutting them in cells made of plant resin (51¶¯Âþ, 19 May 2001, p 18). But Randall Hepburn at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, noticed that the imprisoned beetles could survive for a couple of months, far longer than they should have been able to last without food. He and his colleagues set up an experiment in which hive beetles were imprisoned by worker bees fed on dyed sugar solution. After 24 hours, 20 of the 50 beetles also contained the dye, proving that they somehow persuaded their captors to feed them (Naturwissenschaften, DOI 10.1007/s00114-002-0326-y).