Honeybees found using tools to repel giant hornet attacks
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
The argument is that by taking animal dung and coating the entrance they are "taking something and manipulating it to shape their environment", which they think qualifies as tool use.
But we've already known for ages that bees gather sap from trees and coat the inside of their hives with it (propolis), to seal gaps and prevent bacterial growth. I cannot think of any reasonable definition of tool use that would include dung coating but exclude sap coating.
Ctrl+f of "sap" and "propolis" in the original paper gave 0 results.
Edit: Upon further reading, they seem to define a tool as a "a non-plant solid", which seems specifically tailored to make dung the first tool. The fact that they fail to mention propolis even once in the paper to highlight what they think is the important difference does not impart confidence.
>It is also the first clear-cut example of honey bees using a tool in nature (nests and the materials used to construct them are not generally considered tools [82, 83], although some authors disagree [81, 89, 91]).
... so I assume the parenthetical is intended to cover the behavior you describe, ie building a nest would not be complete without sealing it so the sap usage doesn't count.
"However, if a small lizard or mouse, for example, finds its way into the hive and dies there, bees may be unable to carry it out through the hive entrance. In that case, they would attempt instead to seal the carcass in propolis, essentially mummifying it and making it odorless and harmless."
Example picture: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-mouse-skull-that-was-e...
Edited to add: it seems an exaggerated claim to me too, but it's not just in the headline
The author goes miles deep on the subject of swarming and how a few thousand bees decide -all together- to inhabit a new home. Very meaty, with clear presentation of years of research.
So in the insect species', the eusocial behavior is genetic. Worker ants are more closely related to their sisters than they would be to their daughters, the enforcement mechanisms in their systems are done by chemical communication, the pheromones are coded by DNA and can even differ slightly in different colonies. It is very very complex. You get behaviors in colonies that are very interesting, such as farming fungus in leafcutter ants (different species farm different species of fungus and use different plant material, and in many cases the fungus species only exist within the ant colonies). It is like the genetics of the colony itself is some sort of intelligent mechanism.
This cannot really be called "intelligence". But we intuitively see a similarity with intelligence when we look at it that we cannot quite nail down.
A brain of another animal does intelligent things, but with human beings we do something more that we consider the defining feature of our intelligence: we create things, synthesize things, go into space, all sorts of things. This behavior cannot be definitively chocked up to increased complexity of neurons.
What is the commonality with all this stuff? Is there some connection between the mechanics of amino acids and intelligence? What fundamentally about the universe makes it so that intelligence occurs inside it? It's all really interesting stuff.
To me, intelligence is a system. It can be a network of neurons embodied in an individual, a colony of ants, or a group of programmers working on a startup. The system itself has inputs and outputs and needs to be viewed at that level. We can view ant colonies as a coherent system. We can view individual organisms as a coherent system.
The main difference between ants and humans is that each node in a human social system is more powerful and the bandwidth of information shared between each node is much richer.
A lot of people point out that man can send a rocket to the moon, but really, only a civilization can do that. A tribe couldn't do it in a million years. They would lack the industry and the science and the labor and resources and technology to pull it off. Those systems can be viewed as having a sort of emergent, even if ephemeral, intelligence that requires massive amounts of cooperation and coordination to pull off.
We have language, as well as writing. And opposable thumbs.
Language allows us to teach each other things, writing multiplies that immensely and keeps knowledge over time. (And now audio, video recordings... But that's extremely recent)
And we have hands that are very useful for using tools.
I don't think we're necessarily that much more intelligent than other animals.
so perhaps the problem is the current/popular understanding of what a mind is?
which tends to be linked to a central nervous system, which rules out octopuses (a class of animals which display clear and compelling examples of intelligent behavior)
or to be more general, which we tend to link to a nervous system, which rules out both eusocial colonies (as you point out) and plants (which show clear and compelling examples of changing responses to certain stimuli which if displayed by dogs would be called learning/intelligent behavior).
Indeed interesting things to ponder
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/fascinating-facts-about-dung-beetl...