Today's task is from the August 20th entry. I have to RUN A READER SURVEY ON MY BLOG.

I'm mainly interested in your opinion on the content. I know many of you will want to say there aren't enough pictures or video, but I'm addressing this in my imminent new project.

In particular, I want to know which posts worked and which didn't. Which bits did you think were funny, what do you think about the serious bits, when was I trying to be funny but sucked? Be blunt.

Also, tell me how you got here. Did you come through a comment I left on another blog? Did you Google something I'd tagged? Was it a post somewhere else?

So, let's see if we can make this the longest comments stream in the history of this blog. Yes that's right, I'm looking for eight of you to say something.

Honey bees have many natural enemies, but probably the worst are hornets, who invade their nests, kill them and haul their bodies home to feed their young. You might think this was a high risk strategy for the hornet, but fortunately for them their skin (chitin) is so thick bee stings bounce off them like British shells off a Tiger tank. Once a hornet exits a bee's nest, it tags it with a pheromone which attracts the attention of its friends. Packs of vicious gangland hornets turn up, and make repeated round trips to slaughter bees and lug the fresh corpses back home for butchery, dismemberment and dinner. It's kind of like if Dennis Nilsen ran Parcelforce.

So you'd expect bees to have evolved some kind of defence, and damn their little hairy knees if they haven't come up with something brilliant. They mob hornets, packing them in tightly with their bodies, and vibrate. The resulting friction generates so much heat the hornets are frottaged to death. I never knew a bit of rubbing could be so dangerous, and I can think of a few people who need to watch their step on club night.

The method works fine in the temperate zone, but your equatorial hornet is too tolerant of heat for this to work. In these areas, bees use a similar strategy, but focus on the hornet's abdomen. Although insects breathe through their skin, and have no lungs, hornets need to be able to move their abdomens to do this, and by smothering their tummies the bees are able to suffocate and kill them.

Thanks to the Neurophilosophy blog for this story, which is here. There's also a short video, for those of you who like a little bee on hornet action.