Bee-Cause

Bee-Cause

    They arrived unintentionally, at least for me.  Where once there were the occasional twittering of hummingbirds at the feeders, there was now silence.  Hummingbirds were still there, but suddenly there was something blocking the feeding holes, something rather large and rather dark, and all around were hummingbirds floating off in the distance, as if waiting for an opening, that is until they realized that it was futile.  The bees had arrived.  As you've possibly read in my earlier post, I am allergic to bees (deathly so if stung in the throat, which is why I carry an Epipen), swelling as if I had reacted to a rattlesnake bite; this happens with everything from mosquitoes to spiders, my body now reacting with force as if this one tiny bite would be my downfall.  At times, I can appear as a series of welts appearing as if I should be taken in for child (or in my case, elderly) abuse, the itching fading soon enough until I brush against the bite or give in and begin to scratch in which case all of the venom and redness and swelling comes roaring back, four days of rest not being enough.  But suddenly here they were, the bees, swirling by the thousands as if dehydrated and starving and vibrating with such intensity on the hummingbird feeders that one couldn't help but be fascinated...and now I had to move them.

    They're quite fascinating to watch up close, those bees.  And unlike mosquitoes, their quite passive for the most part (if one just lets them be); in my case, the buzzing close to my eyes or throat meant only a slow dodge of my head or an even slower wave of my hand, as if the bees (and occasional wasps who were outnumbered 100 to 1) didn't want to bite the hand that fed them.  And feed them I did, refilling the sugar water and even placing a plate of honey outside, all after moving the feeders and plate to a distant corner of the deck.  By the end of the day, everything food- and carbohydrate-wise was gone.  But as it turns out, all of this desire to help --and this feeling that I was indeed helping-- was probably not as beneficial as I thought.  Good intentions had gone wrong for as I looked into the matter (wondering why bees would suddenly appear and were they indeed starving or was it just the record heat we were having and they were dehydrated or what?), I discovered that putting honey, even organic honey, could possibly introduce disease into a hive; unless it is the hive's own honey (which is their food for the coming months), it is rather like giving someone a blood transfusion...the wrong blood type could mean disaster.

Bee with pollen; photo by Sam Droege, USGS -- from National Geographic

    I rather enjoy honey, even if most ancient practices said to consider it as beneficial only if used externally, mainly as a poultice for wounds and such.  Internally, it can prove less so (and possibly lethal if given to babies).  Compared to granulated sugar, honey was only slightly better said the website Buzz on Bees, at least for humans; for the bees, honey is their survival. We don't really need honey, but the bees do.  But from the same website came these interesting tidbits: Foraging bees have to fly about 55,000 miles to produce a pound of honey, visiting around 2 million flowers...Honey bees fly up to 15 mph and beat their wings 200 times per second or 12,000 beats per minute...Each honey bee makes about 1 twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its life time...Honey bees are descendents of wasps...The honey bee queen should certainly live 2 years, but may even live 3 or 4 years, whilst drones live for 4 – 6 months, and worker honey bees raised in the Spring may only live 6 or 7 weeks (those raised in the autumn may, like drones, live 4 – 6 months)...A honey bee queen may lay as many as 1000 eggs per day as she establishes her colony...The honey bee is also known as Apis mellifera.  Apis is a very old word probably with Egyptian roots, but is also related to the Greek word for 'swarm'.  Mellifera means 'honey-bearing' in Latin.

     The bees now around my deck were likely moving or establishing a new nest, said the site, and would probably be gone in a few days.  But in this case, they were likely happy to have found a source of food to tide them over (the hummingbirds and my wife, not so happy).  So in came the feeders (now the bees were not so happy); but within a day or two, they were all gone and had likely discovered other feeders or had simply moved on.  Of course, none of this matched the actual swarm we had had some years ago, a cluster that steadily grew until it was over two feet in length and appeared as a darkened blob in the tree (in that case, we had called a beekeeper who eagerly came out and captured the swarm for his collection of hives).  Said The Washington Post: Swarms rarely stay in one place for more than a day or so, says (bee expert Thomas) Seeley, so chances are the bees will take off on their own if left alone.  “A lot of people think that cluster of bees is a bunch of bees building a nest, and it’s not,” he says. “It’s just a temporary assemblage.”...Beekeeper Toni Burnham, founder of the D.C. Beekeepers Alliance and president of the Maryland State Beekeepers Association, Inc., says some exterminators will refuse to destroy honeybees... Burnham says collecting swarms can help beekeepers by bolstering the genetic pool on their bee farms.  A swarm that’s found in an urban setting, where there aren’t too many bee farms around, likely came from a feral colony — a colony that isn’t being managed by beekeepers and essentially lives in the wild.  In order to survive long enough to produce a swarm in the first place, a feral bee colony must be pretty hardy, she says.  “We’re in a day and age where we’re trying to find bees that know how to cope with pests and disease, that know how to cope with profound changes in climate.  The genes really, really matter,” Burnham says. “When you have a swarm, you have bees of an unknown background.  One thing you do know is that they came from a strong colony, a colony that had existed for a long time.”

    So what to do, or rather what was the right thing to do?  I felt terrible about removing the sugar water (which was only a temporary fix, but like hummingbirds, bees need the carbohydrates especially in the hot weather), but then the hummingbirds (which have to drink 3/4 of their body weight each night just to stay alive since they burn so much energy) also needed the sugar water (proper mix is 1 part sugar to 4 parts water).  The issue was common to so many of us, a desire to help but not knowing enough about the subject and perhaps doing more harm than good.  Or helping and discovering that helping one thing proves harmful to another.  What proved interesting to me as I began to read up on bees (admittedly superficially, although I occasionally read more such as reading the recent book Sting which I wrote about earlier) was how little I knew about them.  And what was it that drew me to them even as I knew that I could get stung and dangerously so?  How did their vision work, their hive-mindset work, their division of labor work, their genetic determination (worker-drone-queen) work, their attraction to smell and color work? 

    Surprisingly, many of these questions came up as I read about LED lighting; my thoughts being simply in noticing the transition to LED lighting in my environment, from street lights to cars, and from my own home lighting to my television.  The lower cost (both in energy and in purchasing) and the lower heat output were enticing; but that was about all that I knew about LEDs...not that there were other spectrums, waves of LED light that disinfected water and caused infant sea turtles to stay away from a road.  Said Fortune: LEDs have matured a lot from the cold, blue diodes of the 1980s. “With LEDs, the great promise is control,” says Travis Longcore, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California who studies the effect of light on insects. “It’s control on illumination, on timing, on spectrum.” ...The effort is all about finding the perfect light to attract—and distract—insects.  LED lighting may be prove to be the latest effort in controlling the Zika virus by attracting and trapping the mosquitoes that carry it.  

    With every issue there are two and perhaps even more sides.  Watching the bees arrive and depart were a treat for me, knowing that many such bees were still around and that perhaps for a day or two I had helped them along their journey.  Same with the giving food to the homeless or filling the birdbath or caring for the feral cats which my wife feeds.  Are we doing good or unintentionally doing harm?  Perhaps it is as simple as the recent ad being posted for the athletes now participating the Rio Olympics, that we all carry a tiny bit of gold in us...but much of it is in our hearts, and that might just be enough.