Honey and Venom

by Andrew Coté

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, Norm, Ben, and I had just wrapped up ten days of theoretical classroom work aimed at educating farmers on how to manage honey bees. We had been staying in a local hotel that provided one meal per day, and had heard one of our translators boast that “we have more than forty types of bananas in Uganda!” It was a fine brag and I had no idea if it was true, but we had indeed discovered that bananas were in some shape or form part of just about every Ugandan meal. Too bad for us, because when it comes to honey bees, bananas smell like death.

  Honey bees have an advanced and complex pheromonal communication system rivaled by few other creatures. They possess varied scents secreted by the three castes of honey bee (queen, drone, and worker) that relay messages or encourage responses from the others in the colony. One of the two primary alarm pheromones, released via the Koschevnikov gland, located near the sting shaft, is made up of dozens of different compounds and is released when a bee stings another creature. This scent is emitted in order to communicate to nearby bees that there is danger in the area, raising an alarm to send any and all resources to join the fight to ward off or put down the threat. And this scent happens to smell like bananas.

  So prior to visiting an apiary with about ten colonies of bees—which, in the case of this particular apiary in the mountains of western Uganda, meant as many as one million flying, stinging insects—to eat bananas is to smell like bananas is to invite honey bees to attack. For that reason, bananas should be avoided.

  When a honey bee stings any mammal, she is essentially giving her life to defend her extended family, the colony, which may be why most people believe that honey bees can sting only once. But this is true only some of the time. Honey bees can sting other honey bees because of where they sting, in the membrane at the base of the wings, which lacks the tissue to pull the sting structure from the base of the stinging bee. If the recipient of her sting is a human or other mammal, more than likely the honey bee’s stinger will imbed into her victim, with the barbs along her shaft gripping the flesh of the recipient. As the bee alights after plunging her stinger into the meat of her enemy, part of her abdomen and other bits will be torn off and left behind, and the bee will indeed die. If her victim is another insect, however, the honey bee may just live to sting another day.

  So the punctured beekeeper may take some solace in knowing that, at the very least, the source of his or her pain is dead, or will soon be. (The honey bee, by the way, is the only type of bee to die as a result of stinging.) The pinprick of pain that a human experiences is barely felt in most instances, but the venom that’s pumped into the flesh is a complicated mix of proteins that are a toxin.

  So that banana-like alarm pheromone encourages other honey bees to sting again—and again and again—in the same area. That’s why, on the morning that we were finally ready to take our students to the feral hives we planned to reclaim, I said no to banana mash for breakfast and yes to goat on a stick, as charred and as questionable as it looked. And that’s why I belabored the point to my students: “Eating bananas on a day when visiting beehives is a bad idea,” I told them repeatedly, and then some more.

  Our students were from a few different villages in the general area. Many of them were widows whose husbands had died from HIV/AIDS, malaria, or one of the many conflicts in the region. For this series, Bees Without Borders had been invited by two nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, set up for the betterment of the extended community. Our mission was to help farmers increase their crop yields through pollination and to teach them to cultivate honey as a cash crop that they could store and sell potentially even years in the future, if need be for whatever reason. Our by-now-beloved students found it particularly funny when I stole a line I use when hawking honey at the farmers’ market—I told them that unlike marriage or children, honey never spoils.

  In any case, we would be introducing beekeeping skills to some, and elevating those skills in others—although as it turned out, more the former than the latter. And it wasn’t just aspiring beekeepers who attended. Since our classes included modest meals prepared by locals who were hired for that purpose, many people came for the free lunches. They were most welcome. Others were probably there to stare at the trio of mzungu (white people) who were daft enough to leave their comfortable homes in the United States and appear in this place. For still others it was likely just something different to do. No matter what their primary goal was, we enjoyed the lively company of our students. And lively they were.

  From the very first day, they asked question after question about life in the United States. After a while we started to dedicate a short period of time at the end of each session to answering these non-bee-related questions.

  “Have you met Obama?”

  “Is everyone in America rich?”

  “Are all Americans beautiful?”

  From magazines and television, our students seemed convinced that there was no poverty in America and that everyone was good-looking. We assured them that we knew many people in America who were poor and unattractive, pointing to Ben as a perfect example of both.

  The classes, though long, were popular. Some people walked for hours every day in order to attend the lectures. There were two interpreters present who worked hard to keep the information flowing, the questions and answers moving back and forth smoothly. The local NGOs were represented as well.

  Sessions were held in a cinder-block building with holes in the walls for windows. A sheet of warped plywood painted black served as a blackboard. Desks and chairs, clearly meant for children, were occupied by adults. The hardworking women present were all barefoot, all garbed in colorful clothing made from the same few bolts of fabric. Several had babies swathed around their bodies, and at least two dozen small children, dressed in rags or otherwise undressed, played in the grass outside. The little ones peered into windows, climbed trees, or chased one another, all the while chattering and laughing ceaselessly. It was wonderful background music. Mothers nursed babies during the lectures.

  The students’ enthusiasm made our task joyful. Still, it was an uphill slog. As far as we could surmise, none of the students were literate, so we used photographs, drawings, and a lot of repetition to try to make our points as we progressed through the curriculum. We let the experience be interactive. Students drew diagrams. They acted out the various roles within the beehive. They pretended they were young (under three weeks) worker bees and described their tasks: taking care of the babies, tending to the queen, rebuilding honeycomb, and performing the duties of an undertaker, to name just a few. The assessments near the end of the theoretical material showed that most of them grasped the concepts quite well, and I was excited to move on to the practical side of the training—handling the bees themselves.

  We had gone over specific safety instructions in the days leading up to our first ever apiary visit. The students, mostly women, knew to avoid drinking the night before, as we had always been taught that the scent of alcohol enraged bees; to have a good wash, and not to use any perfume, lotion, or strong-smelling shampoos. They were also told they would have to leave all babies and children behind in the classroom, where others would look after them.

  And, perhaps most important of all, they knew to avoid any type of banana until after the visit. This last point was key as we didn’t have enough veils for half of the students—there were many more than we had expected—and so people would need to take turns.

  On the day of our planned visit to the hives I walked up a hill along a path worn in the grass, as I had every other morning since we’d been there, past a small church with a dozen or so handmade signs hanging in the courtyard that proclaimed VIRGINITY IS NOBLE and SAVE YOURSELF FOR MARRIAGE. I entered the classroom to find myself inhaling the same earthy body scents as I had for the previous two weeks; clearly, not much of the bathing we’d advised had happened. More dismaying was wat
ching the students sitting in their usual seats gorging themselves on generous bowls of banana mash. And then strapping their babies to their bosoms and backs. Our repeated protests went unheeded. Still trying to find a good solution, we all set off for the walk to the apiary; it was so hot and humid that the sooner we left the better off we would be. After conferring during the hike, Norm, Ben, and I came up with a plan that we thought would allow us to proceed safely.

  I had attempted to visit the apiary prior to this group trip, but I had been unable to persuade anyone to take me; what felt to me like a necessary site survey felt like an unnecessary trek to the would-be guides. So I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. I had been told that there were ten functioning beehives in two styles—top-bar hives and Langstroth hives*2—that were located ten minutes down the road by foot. The actual beekeeper had left the area, or was unavailable, or had died—depending on which day and who I was talking to. The trip turned out to be a ninety-minute hike up and down a natural obstacle course. Having been in Uganda for a few weeks at this point, I wasn’t surprised to find that the journey was ten times the projected time and distance. The road was more like a path. Sometimes wide enough for several of us to walk abreast, and sometimes narrow, overgrown with brush to the point that we would have to hunch over to get through the thicket single file.

  Eventually, our guide directed us to walk off the trail toward the apiary. He didn’t lead, he pointed. Perhaps he alone had listened to our instructions and warnings. For whatever reason, bright fellow that he was, he wasn’t going anywhere near the bees.

  Our students, and the banana mash they consumed, gave us pause and we assessed the situation again. The honey bee has antennae that are used to smell, taste, and hear—but mostly to smell. Their antennae house an astounding number of odor receptors—drones having the highest number. Honey bees have no ears but use their antennae and their six legs to detect vibrations. Their wings stroke 11,400 times per minute, which means they fly faster than an average Ugandan runs. So, even though their thousands of lenses in their two compound eyes (which complement their other three eyes) render images blurry farther away than a couple of meters, not unlike pixels on a screen, the bees clearly interpret those pixel-like images in their brains. Thus they would have no trouble at all in locating our team and causing havoc.

  Had I not been such a willful person myself, and had we not come so far in order to assess this apiary, I probably would have voted to postpone this event. I ought to have. But again we three instructors conferred and had a frank conversation with the interpreters. We told them the three of us would put on our veils, and, along with the two beekeepers we had recruited from the nearest village, would check out the situation and return for small groups of a dozen or so at a time, in order for there to be enough protective gear. We told them to make themselves comfortable in the shade, and impressed upon the interpreters in no uncertain terms that they were all to remain where they were until we returned for them. Then we started the trudge through the bushes and small growth and brush to the apiary one hundred or so yards away.

  We arrived to find what was essentially an abandoned apiary with perhaps six live hives, two of which were hanging in the trees—a not uncommon occurrence in this vicinity, as it helps to keep the hives relatively safe from animals and insects. Several other hives were lying in half-decomposed states on the ground or half propped up on makeshift stands. It was far from ideal, but it was a start. We would work with what we had and move forward.

  We had brought a small handheld video camera with us and began to do a short interview with one of the local beekeepers there in the apiary as we like to share these journeys with other beekeepers—those who have donated to our cause, and anyone interested, really. We were completely unaware that the entire group of aforementioned banana-reeking Ugandans had ignored our directive to stay put and instead had been stealthily making their way closer and closer to us. Stealthily, but not cautiously.

  Before we even had a chance to fully gather our bearings, the behavior of the bees became much more aggressive. I had been looking through the viewfinder of the camera at the two local beekeepers when I heard a commotion and turned to see my father and Ben behind me energetically trying to get the dozens of curious new beekeepers-to-be to turn around and head back to safety. But it was too late. Their scent, the rumbling and vibration of their footsteps, or maybe their voices—or who knows what combination thereof—caught the attention of the bees and irritated them, and their response was immediate and definitive. They attacked.

  The honey bee is Apis mellifera. Apis means “bee,” and mellifera means “honey bearing,” from the Latin melli for “honey” and ferre, “to bear.” (Actually, honey bees are nectar bearing and not honey bearing, but we can forgive Carl Linnaeus for making the error back in 1756.) There are currently twenty-eight different subspecies of Apis mellifera recognized in the beekeeping community. Most people have heard of Africanized bees, the so-called killer bees. Many people mistakenly consider the bees in Africa to be those Africanized bees, but that is not the case. In most of southern and eastern Africa, we deal with Apis mellifera scutellata. Though scutellata is certainly more aggressive than its cousins the ligustica—the type of bee that the majority of beekeepers in North America are likely to use—it is not a “killer bee.” It was in the 1950s in Brazil that Apis mellifera ligustica (the Italian honey bee) and Apis mellifera scutellata (an East African lowland honey bee) were combined and the so-called Africanized or “killer bee” was born. The new subspecies went on to inhabit the majority of the South American continent and earn itself its vicious reputation. But this is all one interpretation. Many scientists believe that, thanks to their usurpation behavior, the Africanized honey bee is extremely close to the African (scutellata). In either case, they were not hospitable.

  When I was at elementary school in the 1970s, it was common on the playground to hear that “the killer bees will arrive in five years!” or some such made-up time frame. Younger kids gasped as their elders, aged eight or nine, stoically shook their heads and secretly enjoyed the fear they were inspiring. While there are parts of the United States where these bees have indeed penetrated and changed the beekeeping industry somewhat, they have not yet settled into most parts of the country. This despite the seven B-list (bee-list?) films from that decade which, much like those playground fearmongers, spread the notion that killer bees would soon arrive en masse to kill us all.*3

  Still, in Uganda, those Apis mellifera scutellata were not gentle souls themselves and were certainly no slouches in the stinging department. Later Norm, Ben, and I compared notes, and we had the same impression: For whatever reasons, the group had ignored the safety instructions we thought we had impressed upon the translators (or perhaps the translators had not conveyed the instructions well, or at all) and had made its way through the brush to get a sneak preview. None, including women with babies strapped to them and a few elders, had donned the protective gear that sat in a haphazard pile back by the side of the so-called road. When the bees attacked, the crowd panicked—screaming, shouting, wildly waving their arms, and running. Unfortunately they ran in several different directions, which made it tough to lead them in an expeditious exit. Also, there is no such thing as graceful running in the sort of brush we were in. The ground was mined with holes and trip-wired with roots and vines. Since honey bees fly an average of fifteen miles per hour, and a human under ideal circumstances can run an average of about half of that, the three of us knew we were in for a bad morning. And it might have been my imagination, but these bees seemed to actually fly ahead of us, then turn around and come at us face-to-face. They were menacing.

  We three mzungu were wearing our bee jackets and veils, so we could have emerged mostly sting-free but for a few bees that would have found their mark on the tighter bits of clothing or up the pant legs. But almost immediately into the rumpus, my father tore off his jacket veil and pla
ced it over the head and body of a child. I’m not sure whether we were more inspired by his selflessness or ashamed for not having thought of it ourselves, but Ben and I quickly followed suit with our own gear while grabbing more vulnerable people and pointing them in the direction of relative safety. One of our students was thinking clearly enough to go back for the additional veils that were mind-bogglingly left behind at the path, and we stuffed heads into them as we shuffled bodies toward safer ground.

  The entire incident lasted only a few minutes before we managed to get everyone to relative safety at the original waiting point. Later we discovered that the camera I’d been using to video the interview with the local beekeeper was still running. Though the images were not distinct or steady—the camera was bouncing from a shoulder strap—the audio was compelling enough to give a clear idea of the sort of melee that had just taken place. On it my voice can be heard shouting “Cover your throat!” to my father, since I didn’t know how many stings to the throat any of us could take out there, and there is a great deal of panicked shouting. Ben had been wearing a sort of handkerchief around his neck. While at the start of the day I teased him for looking like a fop in it, the joke was on me, as it served well to cover his mouth and nose once his veil was repositioned onto a young mother. The three of us were stung the most because we were in the lead, and therefore the first victims the bees found when darting toward our group, and we were also the last to leave, as we repeatedly returned to make sure everyone had made it out. It certainly could have been worse, though it did not seem so at the time.