DAWSON’S BATTLING BEES

Doc40 has always paid attention to bees. We’ve run posts on their diseases, their increasingly odd behaviour, their abuse by the agribusiness, and even their mysterious disappearances. This story and video from Valerie, however, is something else again. Male bees fighting to the death to get laid. (Of course, they are Australian.)

"It is rare for any species of animal to regularly kill its own in combat. However, male Dawson's bees, one of the world's largest bee species, are so aggressive that they kill each other en masse in a bid to mate with females. The bees enter a frenzy of fighting, and by the time their deadly combat is over, every male bee is either killed or has perished.
The extreme behaviour, which can lead to even females being killed, is caught on film by a BBC natural history crew. Dawson's bees (Amegilla dawsoni ) are large burrowing bees that nest in the baked soil of the Australian outback." (Click here for the rest of the story and mindboggling video.)

The secret word is Buzzkill