Quick! Is this honeybee Africanized? Can you even tell by just looking at a bee? Probably not. Scientists have developed a formula that uses three measurements to calculate the likelihood that a colony has been hybridized with the African subspecies. Does it work? Wikimedia Commons Photo.
White Man’s Fly.docx
You have probably heard of all the bad things happening to honeybees. There is colony collapse disorder (likely due to parasitic mites), poisoning by insecticides, Africanization, and even fungicides, which aren’t intended for insects at all. These problems and more are devastating our vital flying pollinators.
Honeybees may not buzz around the blossoms of the future. This is bad news for agriculture. Many of our fruit and vegetable crops depend on pollination by bees. It is said that a full one-third of our food requires insect pollination and without honeybees, our food supply will be severely stressed.
The species of bee we call the honeybee is actually the Western Honey Bee (Apis mellifera). But it is not native to the western hemisphere. It was imported along with European colonists to the New World. Native Americans called the honeybee “white man’s fly” because the insect often preceded the arrival of settlers to new areas of our continent.
The Western Honey Bee is a social insect meaning that it lives in colonies. A colony has three different castes: workers, drones, and the queen. The worker bees gather food (nectar and pollen), store the food, care for the queen, raise her young, and generally keep the colony clean. The queen mates with a drone in order to produce the many eggs needed to keep the colony going, but the drones do little else. This characteristic organization has made it easy for mankind to become “beekeepers.” Beekeeping has been going on for thousands of years, since the time of the building of the Egyptian pyramids, at least.
The Maya of Central America also kept bees. Their bees were the stingless Melipona beecheii and M. yucatanica species. Stingless bees are only semi-colonial and produce considerably less honey, but since nearly every family had their own colony, this was not a problem. They were kept almost like pets. Indeed, small colonies of stingless bees, up to about 600 individuals, are now being kept by people around the world. Many of these folks live in cities, but with flowers growing nearby. The pet bees produce three or four liters of honey a year which is enough for a small family.
I guess our forefathers wanted more honey than a couple of liters so they brought in the Old World honeybee. Honeybees did quite well for a time. But now colonies in this country are suffering. Although disease and parasites may contribute to the problem, it seems clear that a new class of insecticides, the neonicotinoids, is very harmful to bees. These insecticides are taken up by the plants on which they are used. They act by destroying the nervous system of insects that feed on any part of the treated plant, including pollen and nectar. Use neonicotinoids and it’s “goodbye bees” even if the target was some other insect. Fortunately, people are becoming more aware of the danger of neonicotinoids and are curtailing their use. And just this week, a court banned the use of one of these insecticides citing that the EPA had “flawed and limited” data on the chemical’s effect on bee populations.
A more painful problem afflicting American bee populations may be something else entirely. Since an accidental release of 26 colonies of African bees in Brazil in 1957, these more aggressive bees have been moving northward. African bees are closely related to European bees. In fact, they are two different subspecies of the same species, Apis mellifera. They readily hybridize. African bee drones are hardier than the European bee drones and seem to outlast them in the pursuit of unmated queens. The result is that the European queens are often mated with African drones and the offspring (the whole colony) shows characteristics of both subspecies. Unfortunately, the most alarming feature of the hybridized colony is their tendency to attack and sting intruders.
This has given the Africanized bees the nickname “killer bees.” Their venom is equal in potency to the European subspecies’ but the Africanized bees will attack in greater numbers and pursue the victim for up to a half mile. In very rare instances, multiple stings can kill a human.
Recently, the bees in the hives on our farm attacked my husband as he mowed nearby. They have been pretty docile for months but suddenly he gets stung 20 times! I wondered if these colonies had been infiltrated by African bees. The hives are regularly “requeened” with an already mated queen from a pure strain of European bees. But it had been months since this had been done. Had the hive made its own young queens recently? If so, these queens may have been mated by African or Africanized drones. The resulting worker bees in the hive could indeed have some of the African subspecies’ genes.
How could we know for sure? Scientists have developed a formula, based on three measurements, that allows you to calculate the probability that the bees in any one colony have been Africanized. It is called the Fast Africanized Bee Identification System or FABIS. To do this we needed to catch 30 bees from the colony, sacrifice them, and measure them. In the interest of preserving bees, we decided to use just one bee. Statistically, this means our calculation would not be very reliable, but we just wanted to see how the FABIS technique worked.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to measure a bee’s femur? Do you know how hard it is to even find a bee’s femur? Anyway, we weighed the bee and measured its forewing and femur length. The measurements were not nearly as precise as they should have been, but the FABIS calculation showed that there was a 90% chance that this bee was Africanized.
My husband would have told you that!
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