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INSECTS DON’T COME much cuter than the humble honeybee. Those fetching stripes, the “waggle” dance they do to tell each other where they’ve found nom-noms, that thing where they smear buffalo (trâu) crap (phân) all over their hives.

Excuse me—the more scientific term (thuật ngữ khoa học) is dung (phân). But whatever you call it, the fact remains that the Asian honeybee species Apis cerana flies around collecting bird and water buffalo poo not with its hind legs, like it does with pollen (phấn hoa), but with its mouth. Back at the colony, it applies the dung as “spots” around the entrance to the hive. That might seem like bad housekeeping, but scientists just showed that there’s a brilliant method to this scatological (sự quan tâm quá mức đến các vật bẩn thỉu, sự thiên về sự tục tĩu) madness: Heavily spotted colonies repel (đẩy lùi) the bees’ archenemy (kẻ thù không đội trời chung), the giant hornet Vespa soror, a close cousin of the infamous Vespa mandarina or Asian giant hornet (colloquially dubbed the “murder hornet”) that’s invaded the US.

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