Little things, like taking a shortcut through the park on your way to work each day can make a big difference

to your mental health. Find your little big thing

little big thing at every mind matters. This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

If there's one thing we know about viruses, it's that they love to spread.

The novel coronavirus is happy to use us humans as its host.

Other viruses, fancy honey bees.

But like us, bees fight back.

In the case of one particular virus, called Israeli acute paralysis virus,

a study shows that honey bees actually use a form of social distancing

to prevent transmitting the infection within their own colony.

Of course, not to be outdone, the virus manipulates the bees in a way that spreads the

infection to the colony next door.

The studies in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Honey bees live in large communities that contain tens of thousands of related individuals in close quarters.

So researchers got to wondering,

how can bees keep infections from spreading like wildfire?

While a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana,

Tim Gernot, developed an automated system for continuously tracking the behavior of thousands of individual bees,

and he watched what happened when he introduced infected bees into the hive.

Entomologist Adam Dozle, who worked with Gerdont, describes what they saw.

We found in this study that within their own colony context, when they are interacting with

their nest mates, usually their sisters.

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