This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Jason Goldman.

And they'll basically crush or pop the head off of any worker who tries to attack them.

If you're a honeybee, a hornet attack could be the last thing you ever experience.

It's a gory, violent process, and honey bees have had to adapt to stay alive.

You've probably heard of those murder hornets that recently turned up in North America.

This is not a story about those.

This research takes us east to meet their cousins.

Wellesley College biologist Heather Madala went to Vietnam

to understand how Asian honey bees defend themselves from the Hornets there.

And in Vietnam that's the giant hornet of esposaur.

Typically, when a hornet invades an Asian honeybee hive, hundreds of bees surround

the intruder and create what's called a heatball. With the hornet caught in the center,

the heat goes up and the oxygen goes down. The bees literally cook and choke the hornet to death. But Vespasaurer has figured out a way to avoid this trap.

Giant hornets will hunt honey bees on their own and grab them one by one. But what is really lethal to honey bees is when they flip into a multiple

hornet attack strategy. And when they do this, they essentially want to kill all the adult defenders so that the colony is no longer

protected. But in the face of this deadly bum rush, Asian honeybees have resorted to the scatological.

And a lot of the beekeepers hadn't noticed them,

or if they had, they didn't know what they were.

But there was a handful of beekeepers who had seen these spots.

Those spots, it turned out, were poop.

The Hive's decision to dip into the dung pile

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