Ants Bring Flower Petals To Cover Dead Bumblebee In What Looks Like ‘Funeral’

The video has been taken down from Facebook for some reason, but there are many copies all over the internet. “Saw this outside of my work by the garden. There was a dead bumblebee, and we were watching the ants bring flower petals and leaving them around the bumblebee,” a Facebook user wrote in a post accompanying the video, according to reshareworthy. (1)

Bumblebee Funeral

So, what exactly are we looking at in this video? Are the ants conducting a bumblebee funeral or it is something more sinister? We’re a few months from Halloween but could the ants be performing some sort of spooky ritual? If we’re really honest with ourselves, we’re probably applying a lot more human attributes than the situation warrants.

Ant Behavior

“It’s a great video,” behavioral ecologist Mark Elgar from the University of Melbourne told ScienceAlert. He went on to say “I’ll use it for teaching first-year biology next year to illustrate the power of suggestion. The caption tells us that the ants are burying the bee in flower petals – how wonderful is that?” (2)

Ant Nest

Unfortunately, though, Elgar quickly shatters our imaginations of ants performing a funeral. He says that even though “thinking outside of the box is always really helpful, what the person is suggesting is that the ants are behaving in a completely different way in anticipation of something that hasn’t formed part of their experience.” Basically, humans have funerals. Ants do not. If they don’t even know what a funeral is, how can they be planning for one? “That’s a big ask for an ant.” Elgar says. As he notes, “concealing them with the odor of petals, it’s a possibility, but it would really have to form part of the ants’ repertoire.” Rather, he suggests that the truth is quite a bit more boring than we hope for. “My guess is that the bee is sitting over the top of the ants’ nest entrance, and that is why there is a number of petals sitting around the bee, including more ants arriving with petals,” says Elgar. (2)

Harvester Ants

David Notton, Senior Curator of Hymenoptera (the order of insects that includes ants, bees, and wasps) at the Natural History Museum, London, agrees with Elgar’s suggestion.

“[It’s] hard to say as the locality and type of ant is not clear, but most probably they are harvester ants (vegetarian) taking petals back to their nest as food, and a dead bee has somehow ended up on top of the nest entrance,” he told IFLScience. “That is to say the bee may be more of an obstacle for the ants if it is preventing them from taking food down their burrow.” (3)

Trash Heap for Ants

Thomas O’Shea-Wheller, a postdoctoral researcher of entomology at Louisiana State University, had two further theories.

“I think it is one of two things; either a ‘rubbish mound’ for the ants, upon which they are stacking various decomposing items (including a bumblebee and petals). Or, a food store upon which they are storing items that they have foraged for,” he told IFLScience. “Either way, the key point is that they seem to be treating the bee and petals as the same kind of resource, or waste product, thus the appearance of a ‘bee funeral’.” (3)

Personally, I’m happy to keep imagining that these ants were mourning the death of a friendly bumblebee. We need to ensure that we help bees whenever possible as they are a vital part of our ecosystem. A few tips for supporting bees are: