After a beewolf digs her burrow, and before she adds an egg, she presses her antennae against the soil and squeezes a white paste out of them, like toothpaste from a tube. She then shakes her head from side to side to daub this secretion against the burrow’s ceiling. The paste is an exit sign: it tells the young beewolf where to start digging when it is ready to leave the burrow. But when Kaltenpoth examined the paste under a microscope, he was stunned to see that it also swarmed with bacteria. A wasp that secretes microbes from its antennae? No one had heard of such a thing. Stranger still,
...more
beewolf
