Vespa mandarinia, also known as "murder hornets," are a menace to bees. They "can brutally attack and wipe out entire honeybee colonies in hours," reports Smithsonian Magazine. "Once the hornets infiltrate a nest, they remove the hive's brood and take bee larvae and pupae back to their nests to feed their own young."
In this video, you can see a pair of murder hornets raiding a beehive. The frenzied bees' buzzing sounds like a screech.
The scream is called an antipredator pipe, and it's similar to the shrieks and panic calls that mammals, like primates and meerkats, use when they are afraid, according to a new study published in Royal Society Open Science this week.
"Our study showed that the bees didn't make the sound if there weren't any hornets. It was made very infrequently in response to smaller hornets, a bit more often if the bees smelled a giant hornet (but didn't see one), and they made them by far the most when a giant hornet was directly outside of their nest," the study's first author Heather Mattila, a biology professor at Wellesley College, tells CNN in an email.
