Who doesn't like bees? I mean besides those people who if stung, will go into anaphylaxis shock, with death soon to follow. Epinephrine injectors will aid in stopping the effects of the sting but only if you can afford them. Okay we’ll try again. Who doesn't like honey? I mean except children under a year of age who can develop infant botulism and die. Oh I give up. Regardless of the cons, Bees are fascinating creatures and they were the first to give us a taste of the sweet life.
Bees are as much a domesticated animal as cows. They provide us with not only the sweetener, honey but are even more invaluable to us because they pollinate a great number of the foods we eat. In a world without bees we would not only lose honey we wouldn’t have apples, apricots, cherries, coffee, potatoes, pumpkins, cashews, carrots, melons, cabbage, broccoli, (some might not miss this one) and well the list goes on and on. Not to mention the clover and alfalfa, which many domesticated animals feed on.
The oldest ancestor of the bee is believed to be around 130 million years old and is an offshoot of the wasp family. The oldest bee we’ve actually discovered is encased in amber (insects make poor fossils) from around 80 million years ago.
The bees most of us see outside are immature females called worker bees. They’re called this because in their eusocial world, they do all the heavy lifting for the hive. Everything in fact but producing new bees and providing the queen with the means to produce new bees. Male drones provide that particular service and with the onset of winter are literally shown the hive door to suffer their fate on their own. In a pinch, when a queen dies, a worker bee can be fed the compound known as royal jelly and in turn blossom into a queen herself.
The worker bees can only sting once, so if they don’t see you as a direct threat to the hive they will leave you alone. Once they do sting something, they leave their stinger in the victim and they die. A vastly different outcome from their more aggressive colleagues, the wasp. Wasps not only don’t die, they will sting you again and again.
But what about the Africanized bee? In 1950’s Brazil, the smaller African Bees (they’re more aggressive so they isolated them) were crossbred with European Bees (the norm in the Americas) in an attempt to generate more honey. However someone screwed up (imagine that) and they escaped heading North. They reached Texas in the 1990’s. Their venom is no worse than their larger cousins but they’re easily ticked (a Napoleon complex perhaps?) and will swarm with many bees attacking at once. They have killed over a thousand people (horses and cattle too) and acquired the moniker of Killer Bees. So be careful.
Lastly, Colony Collapse Disorder, is the name given to the plague on Bees (including those who travel with commercial beekeepers to help farmers) in both the United States and Europe. Worker bees disappear leaving only the queen and immature bees. The insect world equivalent of going out for cigarettes and not returning. This is not the first time this phenomenon has taken place. It has occurred at other times in history but this doesn’t make it any less disturbing.
There are several suspects including mites, global warming, and stress from travel, but the largest suspect is pesticides containing neonicotinoids. What leads people to believe pesticides may be responsible, is that there are many more cases of collapse, in areas where the pesticide is used the most. However in recent years the problem seems to be easing somewhat, but we and the bees are not out of the woods yet. Let us hope things are looking up, as it will be a sad and unsavory day if their demise ever comes to pass.