The Sting of the Wild

by Justin O. Schmidt

  I don’t remember my first honey bee sting. After the bumble bee sting, I returned mostly to climbing trees, playing in the nearby brook, exploring the local woods, and, a favorite, roaming through the meadows and abandoned old fields. I never really thought of honey bees. I was much much more interested in butterflies and other colorful insects that visited the flowers. My dad, a practical man of many interests and talents, took up beekeeping for fun. First, he had only a couple of colonies, then half a dozen or so, and finally about 40. Naturally, my brother, sister, and I enjoyed the honey and helping during honey-extracting time. First, my brother, who was two years older than I, got a hive of his own. Not to be outdone, I got my first two hives the next year. Those were good times. I was in the 4-H beekeeping club, earned a Boy Scout merit badge in beekeeping, and my sister was the Honey Princess (then called First Runner Up) in the National Honey Queen contest. My brother got progressively larger swellings after being stung, and after a sting to a hand caused swelling past his elbow (we chided him that he was Popeye, the Sailor Man), he gave up beekeeping. I must have been stung during this time, but I cannot remember. Perhaps joy overcomes pain.

  Honey bees went into space with NASA—not just once, but twice, first in March 1982, then in April 1984. The second time, the bees built in that zero-gravity environment a normal honeycomb that appeared like combs built under normal gravity here on Earth. They also stored nectar and laid eggs in the comb, as normally expected. The fascinating biology of honey bees is what interested NASA in sending bees into space. Honey bees represent a pinnacle of social evolution within insects in which they live in large colonies of 15,000 to 30,000 individuals (with a range from 1,000 to about 60,000) comprised mostly of non-reproductive worker bees plus a few males, unflatteringly called “drones,” and a single egg-laying queen. Colonies are perennial and reproduce by swarming, in which a portion of the workers and a queen leave the parental nest and form a new colony in a different location. Queens, as needed to replace an old queen, or to leave with swarms, are reared in special peanut-shaped cells and fed a special creamy white diet called royal jelly. Unlike most wasps that are carnivores, honey bees are strict vegetarians (vegans, if you wish) that feed on pollen and nectar from flowers, plus sugary liquids from other sources, including honeydew-producing insects.

  A unique feature of honey bees is their use of hexagonal cells of honeycomb constructed only of the beeswax they secrete from wax glands on their abdomens. The elegant design of these combs with their mathematical simplicity and economy of material has, over the years, attracted the attention of scientists, including Aristotle and Charles Darwin. Exactly how bees measure and coordinate the nearly perfect geometrical construction of the comb has been a source of human intrigue, including by NASA. NASA’s question was, “Can bees make a perfectly oriented honeycomb in the absence of gravity to guide the construction?” The answer was yes.

  Honeycombs are all-purpose housing, storage vessels, and behavioral platforms for the bees. Nectar is a sticky liquid that readily adheres to, or is absorbed into, materials, including most paper. The waxen cells of honeycombs are perfect for storing nectar, which can neither penetrate nor flow along the wax surface. Honeycomb cells are also ideal for storing forager-collected pollen for future consumption. Worker and male bees are reared in honeycomb cells. The queen lays an egg in a cell, the egg hatches into a larva, the larva is fed by specialist nurse worker bees, the mature larva pupates in the cell, and, finally, the young adult bee emerges from the cell. The cell is then cleaned and either another cycle is repeated, the cell is used for storage of nectar or pollen, or it is left in reserve for future use. In addition to the basic uses of the honeycomb, it serves as a communication platform and business conference-room table for recruiting other workers to newly discovered flowers or sugar sources.

  North American and Western European cultures have traditionally viewed honey bees as a source of honey for consumption and beeswax for candles and artistic uses. In most of the rest of the world, honey bees are valued for much more than for simple consumption of honey and use of beeswax. Honey bees are valued for their nutritious protein-, vitamin-, and mineral-rich bee brood and pollen, for their propolis for medicinal and sanitation uses, for bee venom for its health and curative value, and even royal jelly—that food of queens—for beauty and possibly health reasons.1 Most human hunter-gatherer societies highly value bee combs as a nutritional favorite derived from their rich abundance of bee brood, honey, and pollen.2 Propolis, a plant resin collected by foraging bees, has antimicrobial, antiviral, and antifungal properties. Traditionally, it has found use in treating mouth, gum, and throat disorders; in healing wounds; and as a local surgical anesthetic. In some eye-surgery studies, propolis was found to be three times as powerful as cocaine, an old standard, and 52 times that of procaine for anesthesia.1 Bee stings and venom have found wide use around the world for treating rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune disorders. Young, and not-so-young, women, especially in East Asia, have valued royal jelly for its alleged beauty-enhancing properties in cosmetics and nutritional supplements. Honey has traditionally played important roles in human health, especially in preventing infections in wounds, promoting wound healing, treating severe burns, and as an excellent treatment for slow-healing and ulcerative wounds. Recently, even in the United States, a wound treatment called “MediHoney” has come into use for wound treatment. MediHoney is honey from New Zealand mānuka flowers, a species shown to produce honey highly effective in treating wounds. Maybe we should expand the old saying about pigs that “we use everything except the squeal” to honey bees that “we use everything, except the buzz.”

  In North America and Europe, the term “honey bee” usually means one particular species of honey bee, the western hive bee, Apis mellifera. The western hive bee is but one species in the genus Apis, a collection of nine commonly recognized species plus numerous subspecies, or races, within these species. Most of these, including the giant honey bees, the dwarf honey bees, and the eastern hive bees, are found in southern Asia. Often three or more species live in a region where they partition resources according to their body sizes. Giant and dwarf honey bees make nests consisting of one comb that hangs in the open. The hive bees, as the name suggests, live in cavities, often in trees, thus forming hives of bees. Apis dorsata is one of the two giant honey bees famous for their impressive defensive attacks against predators. They generally build their single comb as large as 1.5 meters in length and 0.9 meters downward under high branches of tall trees. Frequently, several to as many as 156 colonies will aggregate in a single tree or adjoining trees. When threatened, giant honey bees, unlike hive bees that must exit through a restricting entrance, can simply fall off the comb and instantly mount immense stinging attacks. With an average population of 15,000–40,000 bees per colony, that makes a lot of bees on the attack. If other nearby colonies are disturbed, that attack can be multiplied by a large number. No wonder Roger Morse, one of the great bee scientists of the second half of the twentieth century, commented, “There is no question that A. dorsata is the most ferocious stinging insect on earth,” a statement few would dispute.3

  My own first experience with giant honey bees occurred in Borneo with my colleague Chris Starr and our wives. We were in the town of Kota Kinabalu, near Mt. Kinabalu, a peak nearly 4,100 meters high, towering several thousand meters above the next highest point in Borneo. One of our goals was to climb to the top of the peak, along the way surveying the stinging bees, wasps, and ants of the mountain. Before heading out, we discovered a small swarm of giant honey bees in the backyard of our rented room. We were somewhat ill clad for the operation, with only one full bee suit, one insect net with long extension handles, another net, flashlights, and two green army-type mosquito veils. The night was dark, a definite plus, and with two flashlights shining from opposite sides, I took advantage of the dark area in the middle to scrape the swarm off the mid-level branch with my fully extended net. Success. Well, except f
or the explosion. Most of the bees were in the net, but the odd hundred or so escapees were rocketing down the light beams toward the two, mostly unprotected, colleagues. Lights off. The attack shifted to me. Fortunately, my bee suit armor held and none of us was stung. Imagine if it had been a full colony of 30,000 bees, rather than a mere “docile” swarm of 1,114 workers plus an odd 171 males, lacking a queen.

  Giant honey bees’ fame is not limited just to bee scientists and the people living among them; it cuts a much wider and more colorful swath. Public complacency about Southeast Asia was shattered September 13, 1981, in a speech by then Secretary of State Alexander Haig, best known for his ill-conceived speech March 30, 1981, just after President Ronald Reagan was shot, in which he claimed, “I am in control here.” In his September speech at a Berlin press conference, Haig stated, “the Soviet Union and its allies have been using lethal chemical weapons in Laos, Kampuchea and Afghanistan.” The lethal chemical weapons fell from the sky in the form of a “yellow rain.” The alleged chemical weapons were trichothecene fungal toxins in this yellow rain that poured from the sky onto the Hmong peoples of highland areas of Laos. The rain was alleged to be retaliation for their assistance to the U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. The evidence was a single reported analysis from a Minnesota laboratory of minute quantities of three fungal toxins in samples of yellow rain spots. Never mind that the U.S. Army had analyzed more than 50 samples and turned up nothing. It turned out that the Minnesota lab had inadvertently contaminated the samples with the toxins, which they routinely analyzed in the lab. This mistake was not understood until several years later. In the meantime, a flurry of articles and papers riveted the attention of the public and the scientific communities in local newspapers throughout the nation and in the most prestigious journals of Nature and Science. Matthew Meselson of Harvard University teamed up with Tom Seeley, then at Yale University, to go to Southeast Asia and study yellow rain directly. Their findings: yellow rain was nothing more than giant honey bee poop. Giant honey bees take daily cleansing flights in which thousands of bees simultaneously leave their combs high in the forest and fly a short distance and defecate, raining yellow droplets that form yellow spots on anything below, including people. Tom and Matthew directly observed these flights, collected samples, and analyzed them in their labs. Both the spots they collected and those provided by the army contained no toxins, only pollen, not a surprising discovery, given that honey bees eat pollen.4 Despite having no valid evidence of chemical warfare agents in the yellow rain, officials continued to generate wild scenarios to explain their toxic arguments. For these explanations to have been plausible, we would have had to credit the USSR with amazing cleverness and talent beyond our imagination. The final nail in the government’s case was delivered in a 1987 report in the journal Foreign Policy titled “Yellow Rain: The Story Collapses.” Nevertheless, no apologies were issued, and, as of 2012, an army manual still listed yellow rain as a potential weapon.

  Eastern hive bees living in Japan, often simply called Japanese honey bees, have their own fascinating stories of warfare to tell. These honey bees, Apis cerana, are much smaller than giant honey bees and substantially smaller than the familiar western honey bees that live in white hive boxes throughout North America and Europe. Their war was not against the United States, the Soviet Union, or the Hmong people but against giant Japanese hornets, Vespa mandarinia. This behemoth of a wasp is the largest stinging insect on Earth, weighing 2 grams to 3.5 grams. These huge hornets, with their orange blocky heads and powerful stings, are fond of preying on other hornets, wasps, and honey bees. Giant hornets are the “meat heads” of the insect world. Their huge heads are mainly composed of muscles to power giant cutting and crushing jaws. These jaws are used to dispatch prey quickly with crushing bites. Prey wasps have only marginal abilities to defend against a giant hornet attack and often will abandon their nest. Western honey bees, A. mellifera, are pathetically helpless when giant hornets confront them. As few as 10 hornets make quick work of thousands of defending bees, simply crushing them at a rate of one every couple of seconds.

  When giant hornets attack honey bees, the goal is not the adult bees—they are crunchy, full of chemicals, and have little meat relative to shell—but the succulent bee larvae and pupae. After slaughtering the defending adult bees, the hornets invade the colony, feasting on the bee brood and honey with impunity.5 The smaller native Japanese honey bee is dwarfed in size by giant hornets, but size is not everything. Japanese honey bees have their own magical solution.

  After detecting a scouting hornet, instead of attacking the hornet, outside bee flight action stops. The alerted, defending bees mass at the colony entrance, withdraw a bit, and form a tight cluster. By withdrawing into the hive they entice the hornet to come closer. If a hornet does come too close, a phalanx of hundreds of bees instantly attack, grabbing legs, antennae, wings, and anything suitable to spread eagle and immobilize the hornet. Here’s where the real trick comes in. They don’t try to sting the hornet, likely a futile attempt. Honey bees can thermoregulate and raise their body temperature. That is how they stay cozy in their hives during Canadian or Northern Japanese winters. Japanese honey bees apply this warming ability plus the generation of metabolic carbon dioxide to heat and poison the hornet at the center of the thick ball of bees. The bees raise the temperature to as high as 45°C to 47°C (127°F) and the CO2 level to 3.6% (about the same as human breath). That combination of temperature and CO2 kills the hornet, but doesn’t harm the bees, which can withstand up to 50°C. A few degrees difference in temperature tolerance makes all the difference in the world. The dead hornet is now discarded and the bees, having won the battle, get back to work.6,7

  Honey bees as stinging warriors also live in Africa. In this case, the bees are the familiar hive bee, Apis mellifera. Beekeeping is a time-honored activity in Africa, where bees are kept for their honey, wax, and cultural and medicinal use. African honey bees tend to be feisty and take umbrage at disturbers, a characteristic used for protective advantage in some areas of central Africa. Protection is not from people but from marauding elephants. Elephants have enormous appetites and have developed a fondness for human crops. They break fences, sometimes threaten people and livestock, and by eating the crops, leave people hungry. Elephants are called pachyderms, in reference to their thick skin (in Greek, pachy = thick and derm = skin), but they have chinks in that dermal armor. Honey bees share with farmers a dislike of elephants because elephants tend to eat the trees that bees live in. One of the impressive abilities of honey bees is the knowledge of where an attacker, whether human, bear, or elephant, is vulnerable. In the case of elephants, the vulnerable parts are the eyes and inside of the trunk. These are exactly the spots targeted in the stinging attacks by bees. The result is six tons of elephant fleeing the scene and not coming close again.8

  African farmers learned that elephants are afraid of honey bees (though not mice as portrayed in cartoons) and use this knowledge to their benefit. Beehives are strategically placed around crops to keep crops, people, and elephants safely apart. Elephants are intelligent and quickly learn to avoid getting close to beehives. In addition, elephants have learned to distinguish the voices of different categories of humans. They show little fear on hearing the voices of women or children or of adult men of the local Kamba people. In contrast, elephants show fear and often retreat on hearing voices of Masai men. Masai tribesmen tend to spear intruding elephants, whereas Kamba men do not. The ability of elephants to recognize threatening sounds has even gone high tech. Small airborne drone planes that emit the sounds of buzzing honey bees have been used to herd elephants that have wandered off their game preserves back onto their preserves.9

  Nearly everybody has heard of killer bees. Are killer bees, also referred to as Africanized bees, some exotic new species of bee? Who actually are these killer bees? Turns out killer bees are just ordinary honey bees that have an “attitude.” They do not like potential predators or intruders and exhibi
t their displeasure through massive stinging attacks. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, killer bees are not larger, or necessarily blacker, than familiar docile domestic European hive bees; in fact, they tend to be smaller. What they lack in size they make up for in behavior.

  Domestic bees are unusual among honey bees of the species Apis mellifera. Most of the numerous races of A. mellifera are defensive, with the exception of the domestic honey bees, which are more docile. They are more docile because of beekeeper breeding in which defensive colonies tended to be killed or have their queens replaced and gentle colonies were used for stock improvement. A century or so of this selective breeding has produced the docile bees kept in white boxes today. As always, some exceptions can, and do, occur with domestic bees, something not lost on beekeepers. Selection among the ancestors of killer bees was just the opposite. In their case, predators, mainly chimpanzees and humans and their ancestors, honed honey bee defenses to the maximum. Those bees that mounted extraordinary stinging defenses against honey hunters tended to survive more frequently than those mounting weaker defenses. This type of selection pressure over a million or more years resulted in the highly defensive honey bees we see today in Africa.