Bees: Suicide Bombers or Martyrs?

Last summer, clearing brush and trimming trees near the cabin, I worked my way down a steep embankment and stepped smack-dab into a bee’s nest.  In the few seconds before I realized what the commotion was all about, the bees were all over me.

Flailing furiously but to no avail, I made a beeline for the cabin.  It turned out they’d gotten me three times – in the neck, under the arm, and on the elbow – in what was, in hindsight, a well-coordinated attack, brilliantly executed according to a strategic plan that would be the envy of any four-star general and carried out with admirable tactical precision.

Personally, however, I was having a hard time admiring this apiary reprise of Desert Storm because the pain dulled my normal powers of observation.

I realize it’s not exactly a newsflash, but bees can really put a hurt on a person.

Bees quietly collect and redistribute pollen like crazy, an activity vital to the life cycle of plants from flowers to fruit trees to farm crops.  Even so, all this salutary busy-bee activity can easily go unnoticed by humans.

A bee sting, however, is in a different category altogether – it’s not the kind of thing even the most phlegmatic individual is likely not to notice.

Although severe reactions are relatively rare, bee stings can kill a person. Still, bee sting fatalities are few and far between – perhaps a dozen or so a year in the U.S.   By comparison, 22 people died in a single week last July as a direct result of one of the worst heat waves to hit the country in decades and 33,808 people were killed in car accidents in the U.S. in 2009.

There are some 20,000 species of bees in the world, so who knows what kind of bees stung me.  The species that populates cartoons and the popular imagination, of course, are honeybees, which have a high commercial value as prolific producers of honey (and beeswax).  Most species don’t produce honey.

Africanized bees, for example, do produce honey but otherwise they’re anything but sweet.  They attack in massive swarming waves within seconds when disturbed, pursue the perpetrator for as much as 300 yards, and remain in a state of high dudgeon for many hours after a perceived threat.  If that sort of over-reaction sounds oddly familiar, you’ve probably been reading what critics of US foreign policy have been saying for the past six decades.  Every time there’s a perceived threat, they say, politicians in Washington start a war buzz – and a war – like a bunch of Africanized bees.

There were no honeybees in North America until the Europeans arrived on the scene.  Most of the honeybees we encounter here are ancestors of the ones that originated in Europe.  Unlike Africanized bees, the European honeybee’s reputation is worse than its sting.   Which is not to say it doesn’t hurt.  Or that three bee stings don’t hurt three times as much.

The three I got hurt when the stingers jabbed into my skin.  But the hurt soon turned into an itch with a capital “B”.

The fact that bees sting has given them a reputation for aggression and ferocity that invites hyperbole.  The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote, “They will kill even large animals with their stings, and a horse has been known to perish, if attacked by bees.“

Perhaps.   But the bees were certainly not to blame for the attack on me.  I invaded their space; they didn’t invade mine.  They have the right of self-defense, just like we do.

When I told an old friend of mine about my battle with the bees, he related how some years ago HE had been stung FOUR times, and by “yellow jackets” no less.  It happened while he was cutting back some shrubs in front of his house in a posh Kansas City suburb.

It turns out he doesn’t react to bee stings, so he didn’t suffer.  Nonetheless, he proudly told me how he handled the problem.  If you guessed that he carpet-bombed the entire population using an insecticide especially designed to kill wasps and bees you’d be right.

That’s how we dealt with Hitler and Hirohito in World War II.  Why not bees?   The answer, of course, is that bees aren’t “the enemy” – quite the opposite.

Our world would look a lot different without them, and not in a good way.  Say good-bye to abundant flowers, fruits, and some farm crops (although staples like wheat, corn, rice don’t need bees).  And we’d have to get used to living in a world without many, if not most, of nature’s most brilliant colors, unless, of course, you happen to live near the ocean and like to go scuba diving.

Over the last four decades, there’s been a dramatic fall in the number of feral honeybees in the U.S. and Europe accompanied by a gradual decline in the number of colonies maintained by beekeepers.   Why?  The list of causes is long, including pesticides, urbanization, tracheal and Varroa mites, and fewer commercial beekeepers.  Recently, the rate of attrition – what scientists are calling colony collapse disorder (CCD) – is widely believed to have reached new and, according to some experts, alarming proportions.

Whatever you call it, here is what’s happening:  worker bees from a beehive or European honeybee colony suddenly disappear.  While such disappearances have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, the discovery in 2006 that honeybee colonies were “collapsing” in North American and Europe came as disturbing news to anyone who contemplates the fate of Planet Earth when it has 7 billion human inhabitants.  According to current projections, we will hit the 7 billion mark by the end of this month – on or before October 31, 2011.

The good news: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that worldwide domesticated bee populations have risen 45% in recent years, thanks to expansion into South America, Asia, and Africa.

Aristotle observed that ants and bees are even more community-oriented than humans.  Bees invented the “gated community” long before humans invented suburbs – there’s no tolerance for outsiders in the closed society of the hive.  Aristotle was not a biologist and he clearly underestimated the social aspect of animal behavior among many, if not most, species, but he wasn’t entirely wrong about bees, and he was often right about humans.

Heaven knows we need more philosophy, more dedication to the public good, and less hypocrisy and partisanship in our politics.

We need Aristotle like never before.

And bees.