Both human and bumblebee cemeteries share unexpected rituals. newswise

Byline: Nikolai Hensley

Around the world and throughout history, humans have both feared and respected the end of life. Death holds a unique place in our cultural milieu, with customs varying between people and across time. Many traditions have annual celebrations of remembrance such as Dia de los Muertos or the Tomb Sweeping Festival (Qingming); Others worship Shiva or even hire professional mourners to mark the immediate demise of their loved ones. But humans aren’t the only species making new approaches to death’s door: birds and bees both have their own cultures around death, whether it’s that of humans or their own kind. In new research presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Atlanta, GA, two independent researchers are exploring just how interesting life after death can really be.

Making Mary Shelley proud, it seems urban birds are using cemeteries in the United States as new places to thrive. Sarah Foltz, an associate professor at Radford University in Virginia, is studying how birds use cemeteries as roosting sites for their daily lives. Within cities, cemeteries are almost nature-like places, visited by people but rarely disruptive, and provide essential ground to a wide range of animals in urban areas. “Cemeteries are as much places for the living as they are for the dead,” says Sarah, as she surveyed several cemeteries around Roanoke, VA to understand how different types of birds search for food. Are using headstones of. Although still ongoing, their research is discovering that our final resting places actually provide pleasant food for a variety of bird species that may utilize structures such as headstones not found in the surrounding city . Of course, not all cemeteries are the same. Cemeteries have different cultural norms and histories, such as old cemeteries littered with Victorian statues, or military cemeteries that have standardized plots and frequent maintenance. Moving forward, Radford plans to survey more types of cemeteries with such extreme differences to better understand how they differ in their ability to protect local wildlife while honoring our dead.

And it seems humans aren’t the only social species to honor their dead, at least according to new work by Stephanie Yiru Zhu, a graduate student at the University of Washington. Stephanie works with bumblebees, which are larger, hairier cousins ​​of the more familiar honeybee, and which live in much smaller colonies than their friendlier relatives. But a colony, like a city, is a defined place for residents to eat, work and pursue their lives. So what happens when a bumblebee or bumblebee larva dies? Stephanie tried to answer this question by recording videos of individual bees interacting with the dead in artificial colonies, giving her a peek inside this bustling bug metropolis, where her initial observations led to a host of The hidden world is revealed. Although we expect this from other vertebrates like elephants and whales that mourn the demise of their companions, Zhu was surprised to see how attentive even less-social insects like bumblebees are to the presence of the dead. “Invertebrates have to provide care and attention to dead bodies,” she says, after observing that worker bees remove dead larvae from the colony, moving them near their artificial sugar feeders and away from the nest. Let’s keep it. Other workers may remove up to a quarter of their dead sisters, although at this stage it is a mystery as to where. He also observed bees using their antennae to sniff out dead colony-mates and observed one bee sitting near a dead nest-mate for hours. Only time will tell how prevalent these foraging behaviors are, and what function they play in maintaining the health of the bee colony.

From humans to bees, social species mark the end of life in myriad ways. We allocate the whole of the living space to the dead and the bees, their secrets are just beginning to be revealed. But these behaviors are also a sign of something new. Sarah has seen young birds, or “babes, follow their mother,” which shows that they nest safely in our sacred grounds, paving the way for the next generation.