Bees sting. It’s part of their nature, says Richard Jones. And although honey marketeers might rather gloss over this painful honeybee characteristic, even they have to admit that the sting in the tail has played an important role in bee romanticisation over the centuries, to the point where they now have almost a cult following.
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Bees need their stings to protect their large colonies from all manner of raiders — badgers, bears, wasps, and other colonies of bees. Honey is their winter insurance, a concentrated energy-rich foodstuff to see them through a period where there are no flowers, no nectar, so no food.
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When humans started getting a taste for the stuff, they too were simply predators — destroying the wild bee colonies to get at the honeycombs. But with a shift to fixed agriculture some 12,000-10,000 years ago, hunting/gathering became old hat, and honeybees started to be kept in permanent fashion by humans.
But the bees still stung. Harvesting the honey was a painful and potentially dangerous, business. So as with their other domesticated animals, humans started to selectively breed bees to fit their own agenda. This effectively meant more honey from more docile bees.
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This reached its zenith in the 19th century with the development of wooden hives with removable wooden frames for the combs, and an understanding of genetics that could bring about increased yields from rather passive bees which were easy to contain, control and ship about. And all worked well enough until cracks started to show in the increasingly narrow genetic make up of the world’s dominant bee strains.
Diseases, parasites and pests ran rife. At the beginning of the 20th century the Isle of Wight disease (a mite infestation in the honeybee breathing tubes) is reckoned to have destroyed the entire population of the then standard British ‘black’ bees (Apis mellifera subspecies mellifera), which were then commercially replaced with the orange and brown bees from eastern Europe (subspecies carnica) and Italy (subspecies ligustica) that we have today.
Other debilitating hive pests included moths, beetles, mites, and various bacterial and fungal diseases. Domesticated honeybees were good at producing honey in the good times, but good housekeeping had been bred out of them because this was linked to aggression.
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What are Africanised bees?
During the 1950s a South American beekeeper was trying to breed a strain of honeybees that did better in the tropical climate of Brazil, than did the mollycoddled descendants of the European bees that had dominated the trade the world over. In an attempt to get some wild nous back into his honeybee stocks, he was crossing them with an African subspecies (scutellata) which was more aggressive, but better suited to the tropical conditions. Their aggression was linked to their defensive nature which did not just mean fighting off nest intruders, but also cleanliness in the hive, resistance to pests and diseases by quickly and efficiently clearing out any problem parts of the combs.
And it may well have worked, but any prospective results were soon eclipsed when the test colonies were accidentally released from strict quarantine in 1957 and they escaped. They quickly interbred with the local bees and a new much more aggressive bee strain resulted. Its sting was no worse than ‘ordinary’ honeybees, but it more vigorously and persistently attacked anyone who came near, often pursuing them many hundreds of metres from the colony, and stinging in far greater numbers, resulting in badly injured victims and even some deaths. The epithet ‘killer’ became a tabloid trope, and panic ensued.
During the 1970s they spread through the Amazon basin by interbreeding with local honeybees. In 1982 they were in Central America, and had reached Mexico and the southern USA by 1985. They continued to spread and currently occur in about the southern half of the USA.
Because they are more ‘wild’ and less domesticated that the standard European stocks, they swarm more often and abscond from the beekeeper hives to establish feral colonies. Removal of these has become a mainstay of US pest control companies, previously more used to getting rid of unwanted wasp nests from people’s porches.
What do Africanised bees look like?
Africanised bees look no different from the other honeybees. Any minor differences in body size and wing length are only apparent when large numbers of specimens are collected, measured and statistically compared. It is really only their behaviour which identifies them.
Why are Africanised bees called 'killer bees'?
They are more likely to swarm, and the swarm is more likely to travel further away from the nest it budded from. They are more likely to nest in ground hollows, rather than hollow trees. They have a larger ‘alarm radius’ around the nest, and a higher proportion of guard bees to do the defending once the alarm is raised.
\They have become the dominant bee in South American hives, and many beekeepers rate their honey production higher than the traditional bees they have replaced. They are better at resisting pests and diseases, including Varroa mites and the mysterious colony collapse disorder.
Estimates suggest there are still about 2 or 3 deaths a year.
So, do Africanised honeybees deserve their ‘killer’ name. I’d say no, not really. But, like all honeybees, they should still be treated with respect.
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