Apis mellifera, the fancy latin term for our Western or European honeybees, are a gentle sort, given a worse than reputable reputation due to the confusion between them and aggressive hymenoptera such as Africanized bees (nearly unheard of inhabiting our Northern climates) or yellow jackets, which are definitely not even bees. Because of movies like, "Attack of the Killer Bees" or experience being bitten and stung by other flying insects, honeybees have taken the brunt of this confusion, much to my saddened disdain. In one search in my research this morning to accompany my explanation of swarming behaviors, I was shocked and disgusted to see at the top of Google's search results in the colored box of paid subscribers, ads toting services to rid fearful folks of these benevolent creatures with web addresses like "stopbuggingmenow.com." Ick!!! The poor babes. :(...........
I just had a similar interaction with a friend's 14 year old daughter who claims that she, "hates bees!" I tried my best to gently enlighten her that not all "bees" are created equal and what she lumped together into the category of bees were most likely the all too familiar yellow jackets, which actually are quite aggressive and vicious. These predators are the ones buzzing around your food in late summer, taking chunks out of your skin and even robbing honeybees for honey, biting off the heads of the wee pupae and newly emerging young honeybees. I have just recently learned that it is during the early Spring when only the yellow jacket queens are out and about and if you're able to set up a purchased or easy DIY yellow jacket trap early on, you can decrease their numbers significantly before the others have been laid and hatched. Apparently they prefer meat early in the season, then sweet (such as orange soda) later on. I have yet to make one of these simple contraptions with a plastic bottle, but it is on my list of things to do and I'd better hurry it up!
How to Make Your Own Yellow Jacket Trap
The above link should help, but I would suggest either the meat or the orange soda for bait since the sugar solution is more likely to also trap honeybees and we need as many of them as we can get!!!
Why? Think on this: over 1/3 (I think possibly even more) of the foods that you and I consume are made possible by the pollination of honeybees.
Now that we're clear on the difference between various flying insects in the order of hymenoptera, let's return to our original topic of swarms, shall we?
Honeybees operate under something likened to "collective consciousness," perhaps a deeper reason why I've become so enamored with them. They have a "hive mentality," so very unlike we humans who often struggle just to work together, even among our family and friends at times. Where we tend to think like, "everyone for themselves," and strive to "get ahead," in this "dog eat dog," world, the honeybee knows instinctively that it is part of a unified group, working together toward the same goal and that it cannot survive alone for long.
At the center of their organizational excellence, is the infamous "Queen Bee," who they follow, feed exclusively a special food called "royal jelly,"during her development and onward, which is what allows her to become sexual mature and able to reproduce. The worker bees (females) all come from fertilized eggs, while the drones (males) are from unfertilized eggs. These poor buggers are haploid and contain only 1/2 a full set of chromosomes (as opposed to we diploid humans & most other animals), rendering them sex slaves, in essence. They are unable to do much of anything other than provide sperm for the queens, meaning they actually get the boot at the end of the season for overwintering time when workers cannot spare extra food stores or energy feeding and cleaning up after them. They have no defenses, or stinger, and their numbers are generally much fewer. In fact, if the number of drones exceeds 15% in relation to workers, they either get stung and killed, or forced out, as they are too much of a tax on the hive.
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| A honeybee drone Notice how large his eyes are to assist in locating the queen during the marriage flight. Their abdomens are also square and blunt on the end, a cute, harmless little bugger! ;) |
The Queen is not the dictatorial version of Alice in Wonderland's Red Queen, ordering, "Off with their heads!" She instead emits her own unique queen pheromone, which apparently smells akin to lemongrass. The scent, however, is not activated until she becomes a mated queen. Despite the queen cell being altogether different from worker and drone cells (resembling a peanut that hangs off in a vertical fashion from the bottom edge of the frame) , and the feeding her exclusively royal jelly, when she hatches, she is not acknowledged as the queen and is mostly ignored by the fellow females until after being mated. She is more active and makes a strange, "Eh, eh, eh, egh, EGH!" sound (a.k.a. "piping") while still a virgin queen. It's almost as if she gets more pent up as she readies herself for the marriage flight. Hardly like a marriage at all, this copulating process is pretty brutal as far as the drones are concerned, but hey, once they mate, their purpose in life has been served.
The marriage, or mating, flight happens once the queen is fully ready and it's generally the only time, aside from swarming, when she exits the hive. Somehow, the drones are cued in to this special time and they all meet at a certain, drone congregation area, which my teacher, Jacqueline, says they have "told" her through a type of bee telepathy is called a "scarp." These areas consist of several thousand drones from surrounding colonies occurring anywhere from 30-200 meters wide and 15-40 meters above ground. For us laymen Americans, that's over 98-656 feet wide by 49-131 feet high! This happens on a warm, sunny, summer day, the drones congregating about an hour prior to the queen making her take off, straight up through the "scarp," and a conical swarm of drones following to get a chance to mate with her. Her fortunate suitors that manage to copulate with her, have a barbed phallus (as opposed to a sting), which rips off inside of her (much like a sting), and he falls from the air to his imminent death. The next drone comes along, and mid-air, removes the previous drone's phallus with his front legs allowing entry for himself to make his own contribution. This repeats with multiple drones until she has mated with 12-15 of them and accumulated a "semen soup," within her spermatheca, a little treasure receptacle which contains this mixture and miraculously can keep it preserved to lay fertilized eggs (producing workers) for the rest of her 2-7 year lifespan. Once she has carried out her own duties in this lovely, but brutal, mating ritual, she returns to the hive and it is only then, that the other female worker bees officially, "bow down," and revere her as the center of their functions. Something in her pheromones shifts and suddenly, the queen is protected and respected as the primary "mother," of the future brood and existing colony. In fact, once she goes into full on egg-laying mode, at the peak of summer, she's laying 1,500-2,000 eggs per day!!! That's up to or just over her own body weight laid each day and up to a million in her whole lifetime! An amazing feat, if you ask me.
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| A queen cell, resembling a peanut; much larger, hanging off an existing edge of comb in a vertical fashion |
When the weather perks up and has been dry and sunny for at least about three days, everyone is prepared with full bellies of honey and aware of exactly when the swarming is due to take place. Scout bees have been on the lookout for the previous few days, finding a temporary landing site and also a new, permanent home. They are ready to survive without leaving this cluster to forage for at least three days, so when temporary lit upon a branch or a fence post, they are full of honey, without a home or brood to defend and are at their most docile ever. The swarming usually occurs around high noon or shortly thereafter and begin pouring out of the original hive. The queen's brood-laying cycle is disrupted a few days before, something that also probably signals that a swarm is soon to occur. Swarms can happen for a few different reasons: one of them being a lack of space in the current hive, another can be an indication of a queen reaching the end of her life-cycle. Whatever the reason, swarming is a honeybee's natural way of reproduction and is completely normal for them. It is typical bee behavior to occasionally swarm and therefore, should really be supported and encouraged. The one colony will divide into two, and more queen cells laid in their new home if the old queen is nearing the end of her life cycle. It is really only our own selfish human agendas and the inception of commercial beekeeping which wishes to counter this notion and even goes so far as to destroy and kill new queen, swarm, or supercedure cells to prevent it. In order to keep bee populations on the rise and prevent the extreme decline they are now facing, we really need to rethink our methods of beekeeping in a much more natural and friendly manner.
I am currently on a swarm list to get called if there is a swarm in my area. I am awaiting the warmer weather so that I can inhabit my new hive with local, native bees, who will have a greater resistance to the damp, rainy and cool climate of the Pacific Northwest and are also from a diverse array of genetic stock. Most people probably don't even realize that packaged bees are available for sale, which generally get shipped by the US Postal Service, from one of just a few different suppliers. They rear them by means of artificial insemination in warmer climates like in California or in the deep South. This eliminates their natural reproductive "marriage flight," and also means that mated queens are inseminated with the semen of just one drone, as opposed to 12-15. To me, it is the business of inbreeding and takes away their right to a natural selection process that is so beautiful, unique and sadly, becoming more rare. During the mating flights, it is only the fastest, strongest, most perseverant drones who are able to mate with the queen at all. This ensures she will carry the highest quality mixture of semen with which to lay eggs with for the rest of her life. Better drones, better semen, better eggs, better bees. 'Nuf said.
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