By: David P. Everson
There are in the world of insects many unique methods of defense that God has created for them. Several of those defense systems are simple and straightforward. Others are complex and very elaborate. Among those insects that have a very intricate and well-designed defense system is the Japanese honeybee.
The Japanese honeybee is very similar to our common honeybees. It is a very active insect with a complex social behavior and some amazing abilities that God has designed into it. One way that this honeybee is very different is how it defends itself from one of its most potent predators, the giant Japanese hornet. To understand how this honeybee protects itself from the hornet, we need to look into how the hornet lives.
The giant hornet is a large, vicious predator. It is about three times the size of a honeybee and up to 20 times the weight. The hornets eat insects. The most normal prey for the hornet is slow moving insects such as the gold beetle and large caterpillars. However, as these food sources run out at the end of the year and as the hornets need to reach maximum size to survive winter, they turn to other less vulnerable food sources, such as the honeybee. As the hornets begin to send out scouts to locate food sources, they need to leave markers where the hive can find the food, since they do not have the waggle dance as the honeybee does. When a scout finds a hive or honeybees, it will mark the hive with a very strong chemical called a pheromone. Then, this chemical will serve as the signal beacon for the remainder of the hornets to allow them to raid the beehive. The honeybees do not take being targeted for death lying down because they also can smell the pheromone.
Since a single hornet can kill up to 40 bees a minute with its powerful jaws, so a group of 20 hornets can wipe out an entire colony of 30,000 bees in about three hours. Therefore, the bees take the impending attack by hornets very seriously; the honeybees get everything ready they can to fight off the danger.
When the honeybees detect the pheromones, they send out about 100 guard cells to get ready for the attack to come. As the hornets approach, the guards rush back into the hive. The hornets rush inward where they find an entire hive of thousands of worker bees lying in ambush. The workers swarm the hornets with up to 500 bees to each hornet, producing a dense ball; since their stings have no effect on the hornets, another plan must be executed, and God has given them one. When the hornet has been surrounded by the bees, the honeybees begin to vibrate their wing muscles inside their thoraxes; this raises their body temperature. This extra body heat causes the temperature inside the hornet-covered bee ball to rise to 116 degrees. This does not hurt the honeybees since they can withstand temperatures up to 122 degrees, but a hornet can only tolerate 114 degrees. So, after baking for fifteen minutes in the bee-covered ball, the hornet dies. If the bees (which don’t eat hornets) succeed in killing the first “recruiter” hornets, they stave off a swarming attack. If they fail, the bees abandon their nest and stream off into a new one.
Evolutionists who examine this defensive ability call it “an excellent example of prey-predator coevolution.” Biologists Masato Ono of Tokyo says, “This predaceous pressure has led to the evolution of an effective defensive strategy in the Japanese honeybee.”
These scientists accept that by some as yet unexplained amazing mechanism called natural selection that it is possible for such a complex defensive strategy to come about. The convolutions and pure blind luck that they must believe is immense. How much simpler and more logical is the belief that an all-powerful God created these abilities instantly when He spoke them into existence. Let us never doubt His power and majesty.
[Editor’s Note: Evolution fails on every front to accurately represent the existence of anything and especially living things with complex characteristics essential for their survival. On the same basis of giraffes supposedly evolved over a great length of time to grow long necks so they could feed from trees and survive, both giraffes and Japanese honeybees would have died and become extinct long before they attained the characteristics evolutionists attribute to them as a result of macroevolution. The obvious (Romans 1:18–20) escapes some of the brightest minds because they can neither bring themselves to acknowledge the existence of God nor submit themselves to the Word of God. It is wholly unacceptable for them to recognize the existence of Almighty God and His impact on their lives because of the Holy Scriptures. Yet, the occasion will come when no one can deny Divinity (Romans 14:11; Philippians 2:10). ~ Louis Rushmore, Editor]
