New Study Finds Australian Bees Bang Their Heads

Plenty of us can’t help but headbang. You put “Black Magic” or “New Millenium Cyanide Christ” on, and pretty quickly our heads are threatening to go flying off of our necks. But for Australian blue-banded bees, headbanging is more than a gut reaction to raging tunes, it’s a biological imperative.

During a recent study on the pollination of tomato plants in Australia, Harvard grad student Caitlin Switzer discovered that to shake pollen out of certain cone-shaped flowers, the blue-banded bees will bang their heads against them up to 350 times per second (I think I only went that fast once, and it was to “Oh My Fucking God”).

Thankfully, Switzer immediately recognized that these bees were heshers:

“It was pretty unexpected — it just made me think of heavy-metal bands… I had shot some video of bees at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, and when a colleague and I watched it, we said to each other, ‘Is it doing what I think it’s doing?’”

The question that next needs to be studied, of course, is what the bees are listening to. Since they’re Australian, I assume Deströyer 666 and Sadistik Exekution get played a lot, but who else? Hey, bees, send us a playlist!

You can watch a video of the headbanger bees below, set to some of the lamest “metal” ever heard. If anyone wants to recut this video with some real sick shit behind it, we’d be grateful.

Via The Harvard Gazette. Thanks for the heads up, mom.