by Jeannete Brauchli
(used with permission)
June 1
It's so cozy in here, this room I'm in. It's just large enough to comfortably hold me, has a floor, but no ceiling. Its six walls, made of wax, connect to form a hexagon. There is another chamber identical to mine, behind each of my six walls. This means I have six neighbors another reason it is cozy in here.
I've just been laid by the queen. I am pearly white in color, sausage-shaped and slightly curved. I am somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0 millimeters long, and my shell is soft. Although you wouldn't know it from looking at me, I am an Africanized honey bee, scientifically known as Apis mellifera scutellata.
You'd probably get bored watching me at this point. I just lie here. I don't even eat. I'll use this opportunity to tell you about the goings on around here.
Our home is quite an engineering feat. Because our rooms are hexagon-shaped, we use less wax and propolis (wax mixed with resin) than we would, if it were any other shape that we can think of. About 15,000 bees live here.
We live somewhere in southern Arizona. We built this hive when our great-great-grandmother left, with a swarm of worker bees, from her old residence. I guess her hive was overpopulated.
What makes a hive overpopulated? Overpopulation occurs when the worker bees are unable to get their ration of the "queen substance." You see, the queen secretes a substance called trans-9-keto-decenoic acid. I'll just call it the queen substance. Every bee in the colony needs to receive a tiny bit of the substance every day, or their ovaries will start to develop. Now, if there are too many bees, there will not be enough queen substance to go around. That's how workers know it's time to rear a new queen. After the new queen emerges and mates, the old queen and a large group of worker bees will swarm, that is, leave to find a new home.
There are other reasons to leave a hive, by the way. Absconding is what we do when we abandon a hive. We do this when honey badgers, or honey-eating bears, or Army ants try to steal our honey. We don't like threats that come within about a half-mile radius of our nest.
June 2
Let me tell you a little more about us.
Africanized bees only recently arrived in Arizona. We were brought to the Western hemispherein 1956, when the Brazilian government asked Dr. Warwick Kerr, a geneticist, to create a bee that could survive Brazil's tropical climate. The gentle European honey bee had not been able to successfully withstand heat and predation. It was hoped that we, having proved ourselves successful for millions of years in the tropics, could be bred with the European bee. The goal was to create a bee which was gentle, yet successful in the tropics. Anyway, some of us got loose and set up housekeeping in the tropics of Brazil. We've been spreading ever since.
We love the heat. We know how to survive in it. That's why there are so many feral (or wild or unmanaged) Africanized bee populations in the tropics. European bees, on the other hand, love the temperate climate. They build large nests and store lots of honey, which they use throughout the winter. They are mild-mannered, because they haven't been preyed upon, like we have, throughout the ages.
Our preferred habitat is one that never gets too cold. We are very content to gather pollen during rainy weather. You see, in the tropics, flowers bloom during the wet season. If it gets too cold, we have a hard time surviving because, unlike temperate bees, we don't store lots of extra honey for winter. Because of our love of warm weather, we haven't spread south far beyond Argentina and it is estimated that we won't migrate further north than the northern United States.
June 4
I'm a fertilized egg. This means I'm female. If I hadn't been fertilized, I'd be a drone egg. Drones are the males. The queen lays fertilized eggs when the opening of the hexagon chamber is a certain size.
She will lay an unfertilized egg if the opening is a little wider. From what I've heard, she prefers
to lay fertilized eggs. Nevertheless, she is very good at doing what the worker bees want her to
do.
Since I've been an egg now for a few days, I'm going to hatch and enter the larvae stage.
June 5
This is a great stage. Above me, young worker bees, or nurse bees, bustle about feeding me. They are feeding me a yummy concoction called "bee milk" or "royal jelly." Bee milk is made by the nurse bees of two ingredients: two parts of a colorless liquid, originating in the hypopharyngeal glands and one part of a white, thicker liquid, produced by the mandibular glands.
As a larvae, I'm white and legless. I can move a little, but not much. I have 13 body segments. I now have a pair of small tubercles on the front of my head which will be my antennae. I have no eyes yet. My job right now is to eat and eat and eat. I will shed my skin four or five times as I increase in size. Although I eat like crazy, I will not be able to defecate until my midgut and hindgut connect. When this happens, it will be time for me to spin a cocoon.
June 7
Today is the third day I've been eating. The white, thick liquid has been replaced by a mixture of pollen and honey. I've been eating the diet of a worker bee larvae. If I were destined to be the queen, I'd be on a different track altogether. For instance, instead of two parts colorless and one part white, I would have been fed a diet of equal parts of each. Also, my diet would not have changed on the third day.
The queen's diet is very rich. It helps her to grow larger than us, and will provide her with the strength she will need to lay 1000 or more eggs a day. Every day of her two year or more life.
June 11
I'm ready to spin my cocoon now. I will produce silk in a gland just below my mouth. The silk I produce is colorless and quickly hardens when it hits the air. After some hours, my cocoon will become pink and then reddish-brown. My cocoon will have two layers: a coarser and darker outer layer and a pale and fine inner layer. While in my cocoon, my body straightens and becomes more wrinkled-looking. I'm not eating at this stage of the game. The nurse bees will put a wax ceiling over me now. The cocoon stage of my life is called prepupal.
A few days later
Amazingly, I have shed my skin again. I am now officially a pupae. I have what I'll call a rough version of wings, legs and antennae. I'm still not eating, nor am I even moving, really. Externally, it appears that nothing is going on. But don't be deceived! Drastic changes are taking place internally. Underneath my pupal skin, my eyes are getting darker, and my tissues and organs are being changed all around. I'm quietly turning into an adult. As soon as my adult cuticle underneath hardens, I will shed my pupal skin, and with it, my childhood.
June 18
I've shed my pupal skin. This morning I pumped my wings to expand them. Today, I will wander around eating nectar and pollen. By tomorrow, my exoskeleton should be firmed up and I can look for work.
June 19
Work! Oh, yes, work! That's what we worker bees love to do. I've done enough for myself, growing up and all. Now it's time to get to work. I will spend three weeks being a house bee. As a house bee, I will nurse larvae, build new comb, tend the queen, clean the interior of the hive and receive nectar brought in by the foragers. The foragers regurgitate the nectar, then I suck it into my honey stomach with my tongue. I turn the nectar into honey by opening and closing my mouth to evaporate water from the nectar it takes about 20 minutes and then I place the nectar in a cell.
If, per chance, I can't find a cell to place it in, then I've got a problem. Actually, we've evolved a way to handle such a problem: I will digest it. My digesting the nectar causes me to secrete more wax and voila! I'm able to construct more cells.
June 22
Bees could easily be accused of being champions of supply-side economics. When foragers bring back more pollen that we in the hive need, they find it difficult to dump their loads. I've noticed that when this happens, they don't bring back as much pollen. When we're in short supply, we eagerly greet them and relieve them of their loads. Our reception of them seems to influence what they bring for us the next time.
June 24
I just realized that I haven't described how I look as an adult. I, like other insects, have a head, thorax and abdomen. I have three sets of legs and one set of wings protruding from the thorax. My hind legs have special pockets in them for carrying pollen back to the hive. I have wax glands and a stinger in my abdomen. Ages ago, the stinger was not used as a defense weapon. It was originally used for laying eggs. That's probably why the guys, the drones, don't have stingers. I have a nice, long, tongue for sucking up nectar.
If I were a queen or a drone, I'd look a little different. Queens have a longer abdomen and shorter tongue, since her job is to lay eggs, rather than forage. Drone tongues are shorter too. Drones don't have long or pointy abdomens theirs are rounded. Drones have huge eyes, which enable them to spot the queen on her virgin flight. Their tongues are short, like the queen's.
June 26
I see that in my last entry, I told you about the drone's big eyes. It's about time I tell you about the reproductive castes, or the queens and the drones.
The queens are the only female bees that can mate and lay eggs. After the queen emerges from her cell for the first time in her life, she makes her mating flight. She flies to a certain area, where the drones hang out, and then they catch her if they can.
The drone's role is very limited. His only job is to find a queen to mate with. He will have been produced by the hive before the mating season (in summer), He doesn't even live in the hive. He sleeps outside at night, hanging from leaves or hiding in flowers that close at night. We females huddle together in the hive at night.
Anyway, the queen takes off for her mating flight about an hour after the drones have congregated. Now, what I'm going to tell you will sound appalling, and is the main reason I'm glad I'm not a drone. A drone who has successfully mated with the queen will lose his genitals. In other words, they will be left in the queen's vagina. When this happens, even humans can hear an audible popping sound. It is really quite dramatic. Oh well, I guess we all give our lives dramatically. A queen may be mated ten or more drones. Then she returns to the hive, and the worker bees help her to remove the drones' body parts.
I guess I'm also glad I'm not a queen. All she does is lay eggs all day. Some authors say 1,000 and more. That's more than her body weight in eggs! We have to feed her constantly, or she wouldn't be able to keep it up. Her one flight supplies her with enough sperm to fertilize eggs for the rest of her life.
July 1
Let me tell you about our enemies: the bee-eaters, the honeyguides, the hornets and the mites.
The bee-eaters are scary. They are birds and catch us by the wings. They go and sit on a branch somewhere and eat us after they have disabled us by rubbing our abdomens against the branch so that our stingers won't work. I sure hope this is not how I go.
Then there are the honeyguides. These birds lead honeybadgers, or baboons, or the biggest baboons of all humans to our nest. Then they sit there and watch, just watch, for an hour or so, while whoever they brought tears apart our hive and steals our honey, pollen and young. Then, as if to add insult to injury, they come over and eat our beeswax!
Hornets are just plain nasty. You think we are aggressive take a look at them! They show up at our doorstep. Since they are carnivorous, they are more interested in us and our young than in our honey. Twenty of them can wipe out 5,000 of us. They kill us with their strong jaws (rather than use their stings) and then take our dead to their own nest.
Mites are not so dramatic. They get into our breathing tubes and suck body fluids. We don't always die immediately, but those of us who are infected live shortened lives.
July 4
I'm a forager now. This means I can go in and out of the hive. Other worker bees, younger than me, are the nursemaids now. At this particular moment, I'm dancing! I'm so excited! I just found an incredible supply of nectar 120 feet southwest of here. I've got to tell the others so we can harvest the nectar before it's too late. We've got two special ways of communicating the location of a food supply: the round dance and the waggle dance. When I dance I communicate the sweetness of the food supply, it's distance from the hive, and direction.
I have two main jobs now: defense and foraging. Foraging is my primary occupation. I will defend when and if needed. But let's not talk about that now.
I suck delicious nectar from flowers and bring it back to the hive for the house bees to make into honey. By the way, in case you were wondering, or in case you want to impress your biology teacher with your knowledge on this subject, our relationship with flowers is mutualistic. We use them and they use us. We take their nectar and pollen. Flowers use us to help them with their sex life. Some are unable to reproduce unless we act like mailmen picking up some pollen here, and dropping if off there.
July 6
Did I ever tell you how bees evolved? Well, let me tell you. It has been suggested that bees, that's us, and wasps evolved from a common ancestor called Psenulus. Psenulus fed on sweet-tasting aphids. (Yuck! How carnivorous!) Anyway, some lines of Psenulus took the evolutionary step of also gathering nectar and pollen, which were also sweet. These creatures eventually became full-fledged bees when they reached a point where it was less trouble to gather only nectar and pollen.
Bees started out in tropical Asia. They nested in the open (external to cavities). Then a group of bees, Apis mellifera, started nesting in cavities. These cavity-nesters migrated to Africa some millions of years ago. Those are our ancestors. Some bees moved north to Europe. The European races learned to live in cooler climates, by building larger nests and storing more honey. They also developed better dispositions than we have, probably because they haven't had the same problems we've had, keeping creatures out of our hive.
July 7
I guess it's about time I told you about our other job, defense. I don't know if you are aware of this, but we are VERY defensive. We have good reason, though. For centuries and centuries eons really the Africanized honey bee has been bothered. We're bothered by the honey badger, by Army ants, by people, by you-name-it. It seems everyone wants our honey. We have responded in a couple of ways: by building our nests smaller and smaller (so that there will be less honey to steal from any one hive) and by stinging. First, let me explain the stinging process to you. This process is the same for Africanized honey bees and European honey bees.
When a bee stings, she thrusts her stinger from her abdomen into the offending victim. Since there are barbs at the end of it, she can never have it back. It is her ultimate sacrifice for the hive, because when she pulls her abdomen away, her stinger is gone forever, and she dies. She leaves two things besides the stinger itself: a poison sac and alarm odors. The poison in the sac is released into her victim, and the alarm odors mark her victim as a dangerous person. When other Africanized bees from the hive smell the alarm odor, they go crazy. Dangerous people are dangerous people: there are no "ifs," "ands" or "buts" in the matter.
Now what makes us Africanized bees "meaner" than European bees, in this regard, are two things. First, we Africanized bees produce a greater amount of alarm odor. Second, we are particularly sensitive to the smell of alarm odors. Because of these two things, we go absolutely crazy when a bee from our hive stings someone. That's why you hear those accounts of us putting 800 or more stingers in one person.
July 8
Before my time is up, which will be soon, I want to say a word about how Apis mellifera scutellata should be managed. First of all, we are aggressive. We can't help ourselves. We evolved that way. We are not all bad. In fact, we are very important to humans because we do pollinate flowers. In fact, bee for bee, we are more efficient pollinators than the European honey bee. People in the United States are afraid of us because they haven't yet learned how to live with us. After all, we've only just arrived here. People do coexist with us. Africans have coexisted with us for millions of years. To put things into perspective, you're three times more likely to be struck by lightning than to be stung to death by us, according to a newspaper article I read the other day. Mark Winston, who wrote the book Killer Bees, had four good suggestions for coexisting with us. I'll share my version of them with you.
First, he suggests quarantines. Managed colonies of bees are often moved about the country for pollination purposes. This activity should be carefully regulated.
Second, he suggests mandatory requeening. This means that every year, the old queen should be removed by the beekeeper and a new queen should be introduced. This will ensure that the bloodlines are more European than African. (It's hard not to take this personally, but I guess he's worried about our bad tempers.) The worker bees will end up at least 50 percent European, and the drones, who spring from unfertilized eggs, will be 100 percent European.
Third, he suggests that hobby beekeepers receive a higher level of training than they currently do.
Fourth, he suggests that the public be educated, and that public health departments be equipped to deal with the hazards of having us around.
July 9
I just wanted to add a couple of things before I go. We are not endangered, not threatened, and not at risk. Quite the opposite. We are probably here to stay, because we are very at home in the tropics of the western hemisphere.
Nobody is sure what kind of impact we'll have on the environment. Neither are we. In fact it may be a hundred years before anyone knows.
July 10
It's time for me to say good-bye. I'm exhausted. By the way, I've lived a very long life.