A Swarm

Posted on April 29, 2004 in Insects Neighborhood

On Sunday, I brought out a pair of black plastic tweezers and picked twelve bees off the floor in front of the sliding glass door. Monday’s count was 91. Tuesday brought 19 casualties. A Santa Ana blew off the mountain on Wednesday, so I didn’t attract any new apians. If there is no wind today, I will probably need the tweezers.

Nature’s come to our condominium. An Africanized honey bee queen found a crack beneath our Spanish tile eaves and set up court. We first noticed them around the hummingbird feeder. I took it in, washed it, and kept it inside on the theory that the bees had jumped from the purple plum to the feeder after the blossoms fell off the tree. On Monday, I went out to see what kept the bees buzzing outside our windows. It was then that I saw the swarm, crawling on a outer abutment like a badly made brown hairpiece. I called the Association. After some prodding from me and my neighbors — who were afraid for themselves as well as their children — they contacted a beekeeper.

It’s illegal to slay bees. Farmers and orchardists depend on them for pollination. As I write this, a disaster unfolds around the world, wherever the honey bee has been brought to colonize the Little Europes of this world. The Varroa mite sneaks into slumbering colonies and preys upon the developing bee larvae. An article at the University of Kentucky Entymology website reports:

Mites develop on the bee brood. A female mite will enter the brood cell about one day before capping and be sealed in with the larva. Eggs are laid and mite feed and develop on the maturing bee larva. By the time the adult bee emerges from the cell, several of the mites will have reached adulthood, mated, and are ready to begin searching for other bees or larvae to parasitize. There is a preference for drone brood. Inspection of the drone brood in their capped cells will often indicate whether or not a colony is infested. The dark mites are easily seen on the white pupae when the comb is broken or the pupae are pulled from their cells.

Mites spread from colony to colony by drifting workers and drones within an apiary. Honey bees can also acquire these mites when robbing smaller colonies.

Where Varroa mites infiltrate the colonies, a disaster of Biblical proportions unfolds. Fruit trees need bees to pollinate and bear the pomes we eat. When bees fail to show, growers find they must rent bees or learn to grow them themselves. The problem is global. The introduction of the European honey bee into Nepal, for example, brought the decimation of Apis laboriosa, the world’s largest honeybee. Like the immigrants who came to the Americas, European bees carried nasty diseases for which the locals had little or no resistance. New Zealand beekeepers seek permission to deploy German bees which are more resistant to Varroa than the Italian strain they employ now. In Lawrence, Kansas, only eight of the twenty hives kept by the U of K survived the winter. Farmers dread an apocalypse and some talk of switching to crops that are less dependent on bees.

I could have tried to kill these creatures in the walls of my house. But then I think of Kansas. What is a nuisance to me is gold to them. The beeman comes on Friday. If he sends them to Lawrence, he does so with my blessings. When peach and apricot season rolls around, I will think of them doing their good.