In her biweekly column, Allie Skalnik brings home lessons and stories from her travels abroad to Australia.

Dear Stanford,

I departed from the sparkling shores of Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef and have spent the last two weeks learning about terrestrial ecology since I last wrote. I went from snorkeling daily to not being allowed to swim in the ocean just in case a curious tiger shark came to eat. The adorable dingo has become another constant concern because it looks exactly like a domesticated dog, but has been known to attack people who don’t treat them like the wild animals they are.

K’gari, the world’s largest sand island – the place I called home for a week – is known to Australia’s Bing Overseas Studies Program (BOSP) students as “the island that tries to kill you”. Really, though, it’s just an island you have to tread carefully, yet another example of the wild areas humans have expanded us into, bringing us into contact with increasingly dangerous creatures.

By far the most violent creature we learned about in this course is completely harmless to humans: the stingless bee. Surprisingly, 70% of the world’s bees look nothing like the European bees we know so well in the US. Instead, they are solitary bees that often live in holes in the ground and are stingless.

The sting of the European bee is a holdover from the ancestor of bees, wasps that used their sting not for defense but for hunting. Bees can be thought of as vegetarian wasps, most of which now have no sting because they don’t need it.

Some stingless bees live in hives as opposed to being solitary, however, a female “queen” as the only breeding individual in the colony and her hive sisters perform tasks set by their caste level.

When a new queen is born and sets out to establish her colony, hives don’t always go through the laborious process of moving every piece of separate material from the old hive to the new one. This process of providing for the daughter colony can take months and is incredibly laborious, and many worker bees die in the process. It may be more advantageous to attack another hive and steal their home. After all, everything is already set up; all that’s left to do is fight for it.

Before all this happens, the attacking colony enlarges the victim’s hive. Do they have a considerable advantage? War is also a laborious process, and the attacking colony might prefer to win.

If the attacking colonies can take their target, the war begins. Opposing colonies swarm and attack each other. Each stingless bee finds an opposing bee and flies straight at each other, fights and falls to the ground. They break each other’s limbs and fight to the death. Every battle ends with both bees dead, which is why that assessment of their opponent’s numbers is so important. If the bees defending the hive are killed, the attacking colony continues within the colony, and the fight-to-the-death process continues until every adult bee in the original colony is dead or the attackers are all dead.

Victory doesn’t always last long – the winning colony is often greatly diminished in numbers, now even more susceptible to the next colony that comes along and wants a new home.

The world of stingless bee hives is more brutal and violent than I could have ever imagined. It is also extraordinarily impressive that such complex social interactions, self-sacrifice for the sake of continuing the colony, exist in nature. The world of bees is definitely more interesting and bewildering, I dare say, than anyone gives it credit for.

And on that happy note! my best,

Allie