The team included Professor Franic Ratnieks and Dr Christoph Grueter from the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects.
The study was of a common tropical stingless bee, Tetragonisca angustula, in São Paulo State in Brazil where it is known locally as Jataí.
The Jataí guard bees are 30 per cent heavier than their forager nestmates;
- they differ slightly in shape from foragers, with disproportionately larger legs and smaller heads;
- approximately one per cent of workers bees reared in a colony are soldier-sized;
- Jataí soldiers stand on the nest entrance tube and also hover near the entrance where they provide “early warning” detection of enemy attack
Full report at LASI :
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/newsandevents/?id=11304
Videos :
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/lasi/research/recognition/tetragonisca
Research paper published at PNAS
"A morphologically specialized soldier caste improves colony defense in a neotropical eusocial bee"
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/04/1113398109.abstract?sid=2effa5ea-9d82-48c7-a28c-39db95cb53d7
