Arizona's Sweet Bees

Last spring a colony of honey bees noticed our hummingbird feeder. In an ecstasy of bee joy, the tiny workers guzzled sugar water and made themselves a nuisance to the birds. Bees are harder to chase away from bird

feeders than ants, which can be easily discouraged by a film of cooking oil. In this case, coating the feeder with Mazola had no effect at all. We weren't about to spray the contraption: insecticides will injure hummingbirds, and besides, honey bees have their own special charm. Finally I hit upon a scheme that worked: lure the bees away by offering them sugar water in an open dish, much more accessible to them than a hummingbird feeder. Knowing that bees prefer yellow to birdfeeder red, I placed a small buttercupcolored bowl on the windowsill where we could watch the action.

Honey bees are attractive little animals. A smooth, thin coat of something like fur covers their bodies, and their diaphanous wings make you think of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

They have long tongues through which they sip their food-whether honey, nectar, or sugar water. Science tells us they are bred to a certain single-mindedness, but one wonders. One of the bees fell into the dish, flipped upside down, and began to drown, all six of her legs flailing in the air. Another bee took flight, made a low pass over the struggling victim, banked around, and came in again. She grabbed the drowning bee's legs with her six feet and slowly, laboriously hauled her to the side of the dish. They paused together for a moment and then flew away. Bee altruism? Heaven only knows. The way bees perceive life is so wildly different from the human way of looking at things that it would be foolhardy to imagine they have any emotion like ours. They see the world in colors invisible to humanity: what strikes us as a plain white or pale blue flower appears to them a brilliant ultraviolet target, its petals marked with rays guiding bees toward its pollen. A watered-silk sky, sunless even in daytime, shimmers with patterns of polarized light. Their complicated society, where conversation takes place in motion and scent more than sound, revolves around a queen that apparently can "decide" what sex and function her offspring will have. Arizona is in effect bee heaven. The Sonoran Desert is one of the richest places for bees on earth, because so many pollen bearing plants grow here and because the weather stays comfortable (in insect terms) the year around. Entomologist Stephen L. Buchmann, of the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, the largest U.S. Department of Agriculture bee laboratory, believes we have more of the 3,500 known species of native bees in the United States than any other region. The honey bee, though, is no native. Apis mellifera ("honey-producing bee") came to the New World from Asia via the Mediterranean and Europe. Like the human species, it is a tropical creature that managed to adapt to Ice Age conditions and then to the shifting seasons of temperate-zone climates. White settlers brought the honey bee to North America, where Native Americans regarded it as a creature of ill omen, "the white man's fly." Although beekeepers will tell you domesticated bees were introduced into Arizona in 1860 or 1870, Buchmann believes they may have come in with Jesuit or Franciscan missionaries, who needed beeswax for their votive candles. Honey bees arrived in Mexico City 400 years ago, ample time for their offspring to migrate to our region. Actually, the European immigrant is not the only nor the first "honey bee" to share its wealth with New World humans. The Mayans kept stingless bees, such as Melipona beechii, in ceramic and log hives. These royal bees of the Yucatán Peninsula produced honey that could be harvested painlessly, just by reaching into the nest. Nor is "domesticated" quite the correct term. From the honey bee's point of view, it is humans that are trained to provide convenient dwellings in return for a sucrose treat. Bees thrive in the wild without human help, and the number of feral colonies in Arizona probably exceeds by two or three times the 100,000 hives registered with the state. According to Princeton biologist James L. Gould and his partner, Carol Grant Gould, the honey bee is, in its context, as advanced an organism as a human. A billion years ago, animals divided into two groups. The first group developed 17 phyla, including the arthropods, of which insects are the dominant class. The second evolved into only four phyla, among them vertebrates, to which we belong. "Honey bees are at the top of their part of the evolutionary tree," write the Goulds, "whereas humans are the most highly evolved species on our branch. To look at honey bees, then, is to see one of the two most elegant solutions to the challenges of life on our planet."

two most elegant solutions to the challenges of life on our planet."

Their solution differs so startlingly from ours that one would scarcely be surprised to find they had developed to cope with conditions on some other world. To begin with, the honey bee's is a femaledominated society. The head honcho is a lady-the queen-and so are most of her minions. Males exist only to fertilize new queens; once their job is done, they are ejected from the hive and left to die.

In many ways, a honey bee colony functions as a single organism. Individuals live to serve the colony and depend on it for survival, and it is the colony that reproduces, not individual bees. Through its members, the colony gathers nectar to convert to honey and pollen to supply protein. The queen lays many thousands of eggs during her three-year lifetime; most develop into sterile female workers, but some are drones (males), hatched from unfertilized eggs (a genetic curiosity unique to ants, wasps, and bees). The queen lays drone eggs in special, overlarge honeycomb cells-whether she is induced to do so by the workers or whether through her pheromones (scents that communicate certain messages) she "directs" them to build the appropriate cells is unclear. Similarly, she may lay eggs in other special cells whose larvae, fed a sugary, hormone-laced substance called "royal jelly" throughout their youth, develop into queens.

In spring the workers prepare to swarm by foraging in earnest, stockpiling food, and nurturing as many as 30,000 young, among them several larval queens. When the new queens begin pupation (the period spent inside a cocoon during which the infant bee metamorphoses into an adult), about half the bees gorge on honey and, with the old queen, leave the hive en masse in search of a new home. The swarm, if it is lucky, establishes a new colony; the remaining bees continue life in the original hive with whichever of the young queens prevails.

Steve Buchmann describes bees as “living Swiss Army knives.” Their bodies are loaded with tools for grooming, for harvesting, for transporting and storing food and building materials.

Once a honey bee reaches adulthood, she goes through a typical life cycle. It begins with cleaning and preparing cells for the queen to fill with eggs. Later she nurses the young and the queen with royal jelly-the average larva is checked 1,300 times a day by the typical hive's 2,700 nurse bees. As the worker ages, the glands that secrete royal jelly atrophy but wax-producing glands mature, and so she helps build the parallel sheets of hanging comb that shelter the young and store the hive's honey.

A few days later, she begins to help unload returning foragers and store nectar and pollen. Bees exchange food constantly; in a sense, say the Goulds, “a colony has a communal stomach.” At about two weeks of age, the bee takes up guard duty, defending the hive from other colonies' foragers who are not above a little thieving, and from birds, mammals, wasps, and ants. At about three weeks, the worker begins the huge mental and physical effort of foraging. She may visit flower patches as much as six miles from the hive-a journey equivalent to a human trip of 800 miles. Borne on wings that beat 200 to 300 times a second, the 1/25-ounce courier collects nectar from about 100 blossoms per trip. The task requires elaborate navigational abilities, for she travels far from the hive over terrain she has never seen. This is the last phase of her life. After about 500 miles of flightaccomplished in anywhere from nine days to three weeks-her flight muscles simply wear out and she dies.

Honey bees apparently navigate by the position of the sun. However, researchers believe they do not perceive the sun as a bright disk in the sky. Instead, bees are sensitive to polarized light, and they may reckon their position and course according to patterns, invisible to us, tracking across the sky.

If we asked a honey bee to examine a human-style eye chart, she would prove legally blind. Her multifaceted vision (workers have 4,500 individual facets per eye) is so coarse she can't make out the sun's orb.

But if one of us had to take a bee vision test-say, she demanded that we describe the markings on a yellow primrose-we would likewise flunk. Honey bee eyes contain cells sensitive to ultraviolet and polarized light. These enable the forager to see hidden figures in many flowers, marking the source of nectar and pollen. And she may recognize the sun's position, if not its actual appearance, by interpreting the distribution of ultraviolet and polarized light in the sky.

In addition, bees can sense magnetism. As pupae, they develop small patches of magnetite (lodestone) in the abdomen, a device thought to help them determine directions.

Honey bee society, like ours, depends on communication. There is, of course, the famous waggle dance, the “sign language” through which returning forag ers tell their hive-mates where to find pollen and nectar-rich blossoms. The Goulds note that the dance language, unique among invertebrates, “contains abstract conventions capable of transmitting millions of distinct messages.” And yet, they say, the dances are often impre cise and dialectal. However, Buchmann adds, distance and direction are usually quite accurate.

Bees' hearing is indistinct; they seem deaf to airborne sounds, although they can sense vibrations in the substance they're standing on. Instead, they have honed another sense to a fine conversational edge: smell. Two of Buchmann's colleagues at the Bee Research Center, Steve Thoenes and Justin Schmidt, are engaged in studying the messages various odors transmit to honey bees. Many creatures, humans included, produce scents that indicate when they feel frightened, angry, amorous, perhaps even hungry. It would appear that bees are more sensitive to this code than laundered, deodorized modern man. Thoenes and Schmidt, for example, are experimenting with isoamyl-acetate, a banana-scented chemical guaranteed to throw a happy honey bee into a rage. Other odors may calm the angry bee as music soothes the savage breast. By using devices that dislodge andcollect part of each incoming forager's pollen load, Steve Buchmann and his assistant, Charles Shipman, can answer such questions as which flowers honey bees prefer and when; how weather and the quality of available food affect a hive's life cycle; and how the European bee adapts to the rugged Sonoran Desert. Buchmann invented a high-tech system to count a forager's individual trips: gluing a featherweight bar code, similar to those on grocery items, onto the bee and placing a scanner at the hive entrance.

On what, precisely, do honey bees like to dine? Over the course of a ten-year study, Buchmann determined that colonies in Pima Canyon and the Santa Rita Mountains favored the pollen and nectar of aster's, members of the sunflower family, mesquite, jojoba, creosote bush, and eucalyptus. Ragweed is popular after a rain, and saguaro flowers apparently are quite delicious during the short time they bloom. The average colony consumes about 45 kilograms of pollen a year.

The warm Sonoran Desert is an almost ideal habitat for bees. The foraging season extends 11 months, with killing frosts rare. Water is scarce, but not impossible to find and bees obtain much water from nectar, dewfall, and tinajas (natural water tanks). The only other serious drawback is heat. But the bees have a solution. They bring water into the hive, and selected workers fan their wings to evaporate it and move the air. This behavior is so effective that one of Buchmann's hives survived a brushfire virtually intact.

No essay about honey bees would be complete without some allusion to the so-called "killer bees," which may be arriving in Arizona soon after you read this article.

The term "killer bee" is the offspring of a "Saturday Night Live" skit and much media hype. These insects, close relatives to our Italian race of honey bees, are more properly called "Africanized" bees. Scientists disagree about how dangerous they are and whether, as claimed, they actually pollinate less than garden-variety bees. In Brazil, where the irascible bees escaped from a research station, beekeepers have learned to cope with the changes that took place when the fugitive Africans bred with the established European honey bees. Now business is almost back to normal.

Africanized bees store smaller quantities of honey than Italian honey bees because eons ago their ancestors stayed in Africa, unexposed to harsh winters that over generations taught their traveling cousins to stockpile food. As unfortunate for beekeepers is the insects' habit of "absconding"-relocating the entire hive when conditions don't suit them, rather than waiting out bad times.

It is true that the Africanized bee has a short fuse. But Africanized bee venom is no more potent than any other honey bee's. Reports that 350 people have been killed by mass stingings in Latin America may be true; but in the United States, about 40 people die from ordinary bee attacks each year, fewer than half the number of deaths by lightning strikes. That number is expected to grow to 100: undesirable, but hardly a major calamity. Three times that many Americans die from penicillin reactions each year.

Scientists agree that the United States' and Mexico's $2.6 million joint program to control the Africanized bees' northward expansion will have almost no effect. The bees are expected to enter Arizona in the early 1990s, probably through the area around Yuma.

The greatest harm these bees will do to U.S. agricultural and apiary concerns will come from hysteria. Normally levelheaded government leaders in California have already reacted to Africanized bee sightings by banning beekeeping in a 120square-mile area a move guaranteed to drive out Italian bees and leave the field clear for the Africans.

Buchmann, like other experts, predicts that America's beekeeping industry will suffer an abrupt decline as the Africanized bees spread across the southern part of the country (unlike Italian bees, the tropical Africans cannot survive a cold winter, and so their northward expansion is limited). Beekeeping as a hobby will stop in Sunbelt states, partly because many towns will ban it. In time, however, apiarists will learn to manage the new race.

For as long as we have records, people have lived with bees. There is no reason to believe the honeymoon will end soon.