My son befriended one of the leading African elephant researchers who is now one of the big wigs at Disney's Animal Kingdom. When we met him, he explained how researchers used this knowledge to teach African villages how to become beekeepers. Elephants would often trample their crops or other areas of the village, so they taught them how to keep bees around the perimeter of the village. The elephants stay away and the villagers are able to use the honey, etc. as a trade. The net result was fewer elephants were being killed and the villagers gained a new skill.
> Random bee fact: each workerbee trip returns ~40mg nectar to the hive.
And it takes them approximately 1 hour and 1,000 flower visits in order to collect enough nectar or pollen to fill up for the return trip. It is so taxing that the muscles in their wings wear out after around 2 weeks.
It depends. Winter worker bees live several months. Summer worker bees live only a few weeks. (I'm referring to honeybees here, not other types of bees.)
Winter bees have to live longer because the colony has to "hibernate" through the cold winter months, doing nothing but keeping warm, then in the spring it needs enough bees to reboot the cycle. On the other hand winter bees don't have to forage. Summer bees live less because a) they don't fatten up, b) they fly a lot.
It depends as much on weather as on forage availability. If there's no nectar flow during the winter, then they'll just not spend so much effort on foraging, maybe? I'm not sure. Where I am it's hot much of the year, but winters are not a walk in the park for the bees, so they definitely hibernate. (They don't sleep all winter, just they don't go out on cold days, but since it's Texas there are sufficiently warm winter days they will go out on those days, mainly to poop.)
San Diego native here. California bees are incredibly docile and produce honey year-round. They produce more slowly in the winter due to availability but they don't hunker down+expel male drones like in harsher climates.
If you take a California queen to a state like CO they tend to do poorly the first year. They're not used to things like other hives raiding honey stores in winter. It's pretty fascinating!
> It is so taxing that the muscles in their wings wear out after around 2 weeks.
Wow. I know a lot about bees (and kept bees with my father for several years), but never thought about this and of course didn't know the details of the wear effect on wings.
I believe (but might be wrong as I’ve read a bunch of books this year on bees - it’s my first year beekeeping!) that the source for this info is this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29499054
The thorax/wings have a "stroke" limit, and are not repairable after the final instar (i.e. once they begin flying, nothing gets repaired). It's not just flightmiles, any wing usage rolls the lifetime odometer (e.g. fanning, flying, dancing).
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Add Dr. Thomas Seely's "Honeybee Democracy" to your reading list.
I wonder how hard it is to keep your bees from getting "africanized". Sure good if elephants don't spoil your harvest, but you'd like to not get killed tending to it either.
More than once I had flies flying full speed into my nose and get trapped there! If I was an elephant with a nose bigger than a Henry hover sucking stinging flies I would be scared too!
Came here to say this. If you had a super long, very sensitive, trunk with a huge bee attracting hole at one end that bees could fly into and then sting inside, you'd be scared of them too .....
"Of course, a bee’s stinger can’t penetrate the thick hide of an elephant. But when bees swarm—and African bees swarm aggressively—hundreds of bees might sting an elephant in its most sensitive areas, like the trunk, the mouth, and eyes. And it hurts."
But when bees swarm—and African bees swarm aggressively—hundreds of bees might sting an elephant in its most sensitive areas, like the trunk, the mouth, and eyes.
It would be nice if they could form a mutual relationship with honey badgers that don't care how many times they're stung.
Except therein lies the problem, honey badgers don't care about anything.
my grandfather who happily let his cheese age on the countertop until larvae appeared because it improved the taste would not be shocked at all by that.
The cheese itself was a camembert. It doesn't seem to be strictly a personal habit since others from my grandfather's generation (born in 1920s) in the village (small village in Picardie) did the same according to my mother. I've also seen it as a child when I came to visit. The larvae (asticots) look similar to photos of Casgiu merzu from Corsica
I never tried it though. Even though I'm typically open to trying new things and really liked Escamoles in mexico, this was beyond what I could stand to try.
Just a few days ago, a 27-year old elephant died at the St. Louis Zoo when a dog got loose outside his enclosure. The elephant was inside but heard the alarms of the other elephants which caused it to panic and have heart failure.
There’s a brief mention of a study that found that “merely playing recordings of angry bees through speakers in the field was enough to cause the elephants to flee” but it seems like that would be a far cheaper solution than putting actual beehives all over the border.
Unlike loudspeakers, beehives do in fact grow on trees; this may make them cheaper for small farmers in Africa, even if speakers and a suitable power supply may be trivially cheap for us.
Sure it may. But it also saddles them with a bunch of beehives that they have to maintain in perpetuity. It’s cute to think that a “natural” solution like “learn beekeeping” can solve this problem, but that warm and fuzzy feeling is for you, not the farmers in question. Practically speaking, a battery powered speaker is not going to have a higher opportunity cost for these farmers than a beehive.
Well, the test involved playing recordings of human voices, lions, hunting sounds, or control sounds at animals gathered at a watering hole and measured their responses.
Do elephants ever get anaphylactic shock from bee stings, or have allergy to bee stings (ie a much more severe reaction). Perhaps it's a cargo-cult type learning?
When a hive becomes queenless, it begins humming differently (demonic chords). This sound change is a good indicator (to an observant beekeeper) that it is in chaos and should be left alone. Drives mammals away — the sound is EERIE (think of a cheezy 1920's vampire movie's soundtrack).
They're fanning their wings to try to spread the [missing] queen's pheromones -- they're searching for their queen. This also serves the purpose of informing the other bees that they don't have a queen. This in turn will cause nurses to look for eggs they can raise queens from by feeding them royal jelly.
This kind of over dramatizing is tiresome. "Demonic chords" (what's a demonic chord, anyway? Are bees buzzing in a tritone? Are bee hives playing chords?), talking about it sounding like a 1920's vampire movie, etc. Sure makes it sound like nothing in the world could be more creepy.
Then you go and watch a video demonstrating this effect, and it's more like the humming/buzzing sound from the hive is... slower. That's it. It's just slower, lower frequency.
It's not that different. If you're doing a split then you can either find the queen and put it in the new hive, or you can just split the hive without looking for the queen then listen to hear which hive is queen-less -- you can hear the difference in that case. But it's not that huge a difference that if you open a hive you can instantly say "oh oh, this one is queen-less".
This makes me laugh out loud because a buddy of mine, while I was visiting family in Europe, mentioned there's a song, "how big is the heart in that bumble bee, that he can steer an ox clear out of the shade."
Bees don't just leave their queen and fly off. If there's a queen there's brood but if the queen dies the workers begin to disperse, and also start to lay (haploid) eggs that only hatch into drones which also disperse.
On the other hand, colonies will migrate if their environmental conditions are not ideal. It's a phenomenon called "swarming" and it happens all the time even with domestic livestock.
Is swarming migration? The original colony remains in place (though can fail and die due to starvation, disease etc). The new swarm could be described as migrating, I suppose, but the OG remains.
There are something like 2755 species of bees in Africa spread out over the continent. Each individual country probably hosts around 1/3rd of the total species.
So overall don't be too worried about only one species.
If you're not wearing appropriate protection then bees can kill you easy.
De minimis you need a) a smoker, b) a veil for your face, head, and neck, c) a long sleeve shirt and long pants both made of fabric they can't easily sting through, and d) preferably tall boots with the pants legs cinched over them so they can't sting your ankles. You need gloves too if you don't know what you're doing. That's if you're beekeeping, but if you're not and you happen upon a beehive you may be in serious trouble.
Bees fly faster than you can run. They fly farther than you can run when panicking from tens of stings. When they give chase they're committed to dying for the colony, so they will sting. So don't approach beehives if you're not prepped for it. Bees will warn you before they attack, unless they're already attacking someone else, in which case they'll just attack you without warning.
But if you’re careful you can go without PPE, and I have done so for years. The heat and discomfort of a suit and the additional crushed bees from clumsiness is not for me.
I don’t have Africanised bees, just nice suburban ones.
Normally the bees in the hives used to pollinate blueberries don’t give a damn about me while I’m out doing my agronomy job.
However I’ve found that when there are moving clouds that cause conditions to suddenly shift from shaded to full sun, the abrupt temperature/light increase seems to cause what I presume are guard bees to become upset, resulting in me suddenly getting stung. If the full sun condition is constant then no issues.
I definitely prefer the alfalfa leafcutting bee “hives”, used on alfalfa, they are so much more chill. Technically they are “solitary bees” but are gregarious and happy enough to form a sort of colony close together to others, which allows for having boxes of them. They lack both nest guarding instincts and a venomous stinger. Special bees are used for alfalfa because they don’t mind the alfalfa flowers mechanically slapping them with pollen in their face when opening the flowers. Regular honeybees don’t like that and will learn to chew through the base of the flower to get the nectar.
I would always wear a veil -- doesn't have to be a full suit. Heck, I'd never wear a full suit as that's a recipe for heat stroke here in Texas. But I have a very airy top-half only suit and that's OK. I also wear an ice pack vest during the hot Texas summer months.
And I would always have smoke except when there is a burn ban in effect. Smoke can make all the difference.
If you're allergic then one sting can kill you. If you're not allergic then 200 hundred stings can kill you. There can be a quarter million bees in a large colony.
Hundreds, even thousands of stings is a pretty common thing to happen to -for example- tree trimmers who find themselves disturbing a colony in the same tree.
Even if you're not allergic, a few stings in the wrong place can still kill you, e.g. if your entire neck swells up that it constricts your airways. If you get more than a couple stings to the face or neck I'd recommend you make a dash to the ER and chill out there for a while just in case.
We have three hives in our yard. My dog still gets a kick out of snapping at bees no matter how many times he's stung. He probably gets stung 5-10 times per year while I have only been stung once in 3 years of having the hives in the yard.
My dog is the same way. I thought maybe she was uniquely dumb, but I guess not. She snaps at bees, and once in a while she actually catches one. And judging from her immediate reaction, it isn't too pleasant. But a few minutes later she's snapping at the next one.
