Friday, July 24, 2015

More Musings about Beekeeping with Africanized Bees



My first experience with beekeeping was through Africanized bees. This is the only bee available in Honduras so I learned how to deal with their defensive behavior and take advantage of them for honey production. A lot of trial and error has been involved over the last 24 years to determine what I could or could not do. 


Beekeepers in other countries with the Africanized bees probably have different experiences. Everyone has different resources available to them and different manners of managing hives. Some countries have a more developed beekeeping industry than others. Everyone also has their own personal situation that determines what they can or cannot do with their hives. 

So this post is my reality of working with Africanized bees. This is what I do and why I do it. The information here is based on my own personal experiences. 

This is a continuation of my previous blog entry, “Musings about Beekeeping with Africanized Bees.”

My background

Like I mentioned, the first honey bees I ever worked with were the Africanized bees. I applied to join Peace Corps at the end of my university career. I wanted to go to a Latin American country and really learn Spanish. I had studied Latin American studies in addition to print journalism. Peace Corps offered me Honduras but as part of their beekeeping program there—beekeeping with Africanized bees.

I actually didn’t give it a second thought—I was just thinking about the opportunity to go to Honduras. I didn’t really realize the reality of working with Africanized bees until I got in country. Peace Corps gave us training in beekeeping in general but also how to specifically manage the Africanized bees. This was in early 1991.

At that time I didn’t really have anything to compare them with—I had no experience with honey bees while growing up in Wisconsin. The closest I got to a honey bee as a boy was eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches as an after-school snack or freezing while playing outside on the lawn until the  occasional bumble bee would stop circling me and fly off.

But Peace Corps accepted me because I had a bit of a farming background (rural Wisconsin) and I spoke some Spanish. It is hard to find volunteers with beekeeping experience so they accept “generalists,” people who were willing to learn beekeeping and who can assimilate easily into a different culture.

Beekeeping in my Peace Corps days. I had several hives that I used for demonstration purposes and just to learn more about managing Africanized bees. This was a small hive so they stayed calm, unlike most hives in Honduras. With experience as a beekeeper in Honduras I learned to judge whether the bees should stay fairly gentle or whether I needed to fully suit up.

My first experiences with European bees didn’t come until quite a few years later in 2007. I returned to my home state of Wisconsin to work seasonally with a commercial beekeeper. These folks had nearly 2000 hives at that time and I was with them for three seasons. 

The work included nearly the entire gamut of beekeeping tasks, beginning with making nucs and package bees when the hives returned from almond pollination in California. We would then begin to move the hives from the central holding yard at the “farm” and to the out yards where we began supering them. Harvesting and honey extraction followed. Finally it was the fall treatments and feeding before sending the bees back to California to await the almond orchards again in the spring. 

I liked to joke with John about how his bees were wimps compared with my Africanized bees in Honduras. As commercial beekeepers you can get the bees riled up. This work is a matter of getting into and out of the yard as fast as possible. Time is always at a limit so the boxes and the hives will get banged around in order to finish the work. Bees would be all over in the air. But these bees were a different animal from by Africanized ones in Honduras. The bees wouldn’t really follow you out of the apiary and they settle back down fairly fast. They weren’t nearly as ornery and stingy as my bees.

Bees all over in the air—the nature of commercial beekeeping in Wisconsin. Get it done and get it done fast. We didn’t overly worry about riling up the bees a bit. But at no time did they act like my Africanized bees in Honduras.

I also started a small apiary with my brother so I had the opportunity to deal with European bees on a hobbyist’s level and in top bar hives.

More recently I had a chance to again work with European bees when I volunteered to do trainings with a top bar hive project in Jamaica. I did three one-month long assignments through Partners of the America’s Farmer to Farmer program. In Jamaica everything with beekeeping is still Europeanized. Never before had I done beekeeping in shorts and flip flops.

So all of this means I’ve seen both sides of the picture. The Africanized and the European. The ugly and the pretty.

My Bees in Honduras

All my hives have Africanized bees—pure 100 percent Africanized bees from Honduras. There are no longer any pure European bees here. Everything has become Africanized—bees with genes of both European and African strands of bees. But the African genes stand out and that means defensive behavior. 

I started the vast majority of my hives by capturing swarms. A few others came from cutouts. I work with the bees that I capture as they are, dealing with the temperaments with which they come.

I don’t do queen breeding and requeening in an attempt to improve their temperament or make them more productive. I also don’t buy queens. The queen rearing industry is not that developed in Honduras which complicates getting queens when needed. All queens are generally replaced naturally overtime by the colony itself.

I should also mention that I don’t do intensive management of my hives, mainly because of time restrictions imposed by my job as a fifth and sixth grade teacher. Generally the bees give me what they want in terms of honey and I’m satisfied with that.

My glove after a day of playing with the bees. For the newbee or inexperienced beekeeper, all those little white things in my glove are stings. I’ve been using insulated winter gloves that I brought back when I was home in Wisconsin. My wife sews a sleeve on them and the insulated part keeps the stings from passing through directly to my hand. Leather won’t stop all stings. Otherwise I use some cheap cloth garden gloves (three pairs!) with a sleeve sewn on the outer one.

Africanized bee management

But can they be managed? Can you do the normal hive manipulations to optimize the honey production?  Most definitely. When the Africanized bee first entered Honduras back in 1981, beekeeping went way downhill. Many of the backyard beekeepers got rid of their hives. Most people did not want to deal with very defensive bees. Few new beekeepers were taking their place—until recently. 

There has been a resurgence in beekeeping in the last ten years or so. The Honduran government and international development agencies has been promoting beekeeping as an economic alternative for Hondurans—because the Africanized bee can be managed, they can produce good amounts of honey, and they can create a healthy income for the people who want to work with them. It is just a matter of learning the proper management techniques.

The bees can be defensive, however. They have earned their nickname “killer bees” for a reason. Their defensiveness can go to the extreme where animals and people die. Most everyone I know can comment on deaths and severe stinging incidents caused by these bees. This is the main difference between the Africanized bee and the European bee.

Biologically the differences are minimal. Both bees collect honey and pollen in the same manner. They both raise new brood in the same manner. Comb is constructed and the nest is set up in the same way. The beekeeper harvests and extracts honey in basically the same manner. Similarly you can also split a hive and raise queens. The Africanized bee is slightly smaller and its development into an adult slightly shorter.

Africanized bees can be defensive. They earned their nickname “killer bees” for a reason. But at the same time, with plenty of smoke, slow and calm manipulations, and the proper weather a person can work with these bees and take advantage of their ability to produce honey.

Again, the difference is the increased defensiveness of the Africanized bee. This means the beekeeper needs to take extra steps or different steps during management to take into account this behavior. This temperament varies, however—sometimes greatly. Some hives can be very calm and can be manipulated without too many problems. At other times they can take their defensiveness to the opposite extreme and put into action their nickname of “killer.” In the end, I always enter the hives on the side of caution, expecting the worse but happy if it doesn’t transpire.

There have been many occasions where the best thing was to simply close the hive back up and return another day in an attempt to work them. They got so out of hand that it was literally like a black cloud around me. They were bouncing off my veil and trying to sting me where ever they could. Too many bees were dying from stinging. Although I wasn’t that worried about myself (I always suit up really well) I always think about that person taking a short cut across the pasture near the yard when they shouldn’t. 

Other times, however, they acted almost like a normal hive of European bees by staying calm and allowing me to look through and check their combs.

Triggering the Defensive Behavior

I have seen that their defensive behavior depend on a number of things—

  • the time of year (rainy season vs. dry season)
  • dearth vs. honey flow
  • the climate that day (overcast or sunny),
  • how many hives I go into (a couple hives or the entire apiary)
  • the type of management  I need to do (major or minor intervention),
  • the colony size (new swarm or established colony),
  • the beekeeper’s hive manipulations (slow and careful or not so)
  • the apiary location. 


The worst time to enter Africanized colonies is during the rainy season on an overcast day. The rainy season is the dearth period in Honduras—the vast majority of plants are not flowering so there are no blooms for the bees to work. And if a little something is blooming, the nectar often gets diluted with the rain. 

This means that all the bees tend to be at home, including the ornery old field bees. Everyone is there in the hive and ready to get into your face when you open it. I usually don’t even bother going to the bee yard if the day is a bit overcast, especially up in the mountains. It is hard to do any type of management, even feeding, if the bees will get riled up.

The Africanized bee is often at its worse during the rainy/dearth season, when feeding needs to be done. I try to avoid having to open up the hives so I use a system where the sugar water is poured through a screened section and into a tray located below it. Checking the brood area during this time of the year is just asking for trouble.

The best time or easiest time to work with a hive generally is during the honey flow on a nice sunny day. Many of the old field bees are out of the hive working the flowers. You’ll still get a lot of bees in the air if you are doing major manipulations but generally they don’t attack as aggressively as they do during the rainy season. 

The more hives you enter, the more defensive they will get. I can usually enter the first three or four hives without too many problems on a day with the right weather conditions. I may not even put on the full suit if that is all I am going to enter. From then on, each one gets a bit more defensive. Each one sets off the next one. People talk about keeping very small apiaries of just several hives, which makes sense for just this reason. 

If I want to have more hives in a location, I try to space them out as much as possible. Other times I take two days to go through the hives in a bigger apiary. All my hives are set up in pairs because of the costs of my hive stands. I’ll take the right hive one day and come back another day to do the left hive. Avoiding working the hives right next to each other makes them a bit more manageable.

You can’t bang the hive around, especially like we did during the commercial beekeeping back in Wisconsin. You need to work nice and slow, always using care when manipulating the combs. You constantly smoke the bees.

Big hives are always more defensive than a small hive—simply because it has more bees in it. Newly caught swarms are always easier to work until they grow to a certain size—maybe at least eight full combs. Then I start to see a notable behavior difference.

On occasion, there will be those certain apiaries where the bees are always defensive and constantly nasty. There never seems to be any rhyme or reason to it. The one I have in mind was in an intermediary zone, not high in the mountains or right down in the valley. It was neither very hot nor cold. The vegetation was excellent—probably my best producing yard. It didn’t usually matter how the climate was or how slow I would go when working with them, they always wanted to get into an uproar. We always needed to enter the apiary armor plated and ready to do battle. The only reason I tolerated this location was because I knew the bees would fill the boxes full of honey.

The Africanized bee doesn’t really like to stay in the box. The longer you keep a hive open, the more bees that crawl out. When you are done checking the hive, the box may sometimes be literally covered with bees. I smoke them and brush them away a bit in order to close up the box and eventually they start crawling back inside.

If I need to remove a wild colony, I normally wait until the afternoon. It can be the worst time of the day for me since it’s so hot. But my reasoning is that if the bees get ornery, evening won’t be far away to help settle them down. You can get the bees all riled up but come the next morning they are usually calm and going about their business normally. That means you can go about your business normally also.

There is a third part coming--"Even More Musings about Beekeeping with Africanized Bees ."
 
---Tom


Friday, July 10, 2015

Musings about Beekeeping with Africanized Bees



I have a love-hate relationship with Africanized bees. It’s what I have to work with in Honduras. Sometimes I just want to get rid of all of them and say that’s enough—no more dealing with these ornery critters. Other times I actually consider myself lucky that these are my bees. And then when the honey comes in and the money from the sales start, it makes all the stings worth the effort.


Beekeeping with Africanized bees is a love-hate relationship for me. They have a good side and a bad side. It’s been a long journey of trial and error to learn some of the tricks necessary to work with these bees.


I’m frequently questioned about how it is to work with Africanized bees. How defensive are they? How is the honey production? What do you need to do differently? Are they really killers? What needs to be done to manage them?


As a beekeeper in Honduras, I’ve been having this love-hate relationship with Africanized bees for the last 24 years. Some things I have figured out with these bees, but it is still a continuous learning process. 


Honduras as a country generally experiences this same relationship. When this bee first arrived everyone hated them. It basically destroyed the honey industry here. Now, some 30 years later, many Hondurans have come to love the bee, learning ways to manage them and improve their lives through honey sales. 


Africanized bees in Honduras


Beekeeping has a long history in Honduras. It goes back to the times of the Mayas who managed different types of native stingless bees common to this area. The bees were usually kept in hollow tree trunks and the honey would often be fermented and used in their rituals. Later European colonists arrived, and the European honey bee came along with them. It wasn’t until the late 1930s that the modern system of movable frame beekeeping began to appear (although many people continued to keep colonies in rustic boxes).


The coloring of Africanized bees can vary. Many tend to be rather dark but some can be a nice orange color. In general they are a bit smaller than European bees. Their reputation of being very defensive is well earned. But at the same time they are now earning a reputation for being good honey producers. 


The big change for Honduran beekeeping came in the early 1980s with the arrival of the Africanized bees that had slowly been making their way northward from South America. Although it is a cross between African and European bees, genetically it remains closer to the African bees, including preserving the defensiveness these bees had developed.


Most of the backyard beekeepers got rid of their hives when the bees arrived. Few new beekeepers took their place. The production of honey declined precipitously. No one wanted to deal with these ornery creatures.


A common question I receive is if they are defensive and “killers” like the news and media portray. Most definitely they can be. There are always articles in the Honduran newspapers mentioning attacks by Africanized bees—and sometimes they do result in death. Everybody has a story about chickens or dogs or horses or donkeys being stung to death. Other times the victim was a person.


There are always newspaper headlines about Africanized bees attacking people or even deaths due to stinging incidents. Everybody seems to have a story about chickens or dogs being killed by bees. Africanized bees can definitely be dangerous.


The most recent fatality was on June 10 of this year. According to the newspaper articles a 76-year-old man was stung to death after accidentally bumping into a hive on the property he took care of. He apparently had poor eyesight and failed to see the box. The fire department reported that the man was stung at least 500 times. Not so many years ago the victim was a former Honduran congressman who had a run-in with a colony on his farm.


Here are some newspaper headlines about these two incidents and others from the last four years:


“Muere hondureño atacado por enjambre de abejas”—“Honduran attacked by swarm of bees dies”




“Muere diputado “Lalo” Sarmiento”—“Congressman “Lalo” Sarmiento dies”



“Abejas atacan y matan a Eduardo “Lalo” Sarmiento”—“Bees attack and kill Eduardo “Lalo” Sarmiento”



“Huye de enjambre de abejas y cae en abismo”—“Escapes from swarm of bees and falls in abyss”



“Abejas africanizadas matan a anciano”—“Africanized bees kill elderly man”



“Ataque de abejas africanizadas en Talanga”—“Africanized bee attack in Talanga”



But can they be managed? Most definitely. There is now a resurgence in beekeeping, because there are ways to deal with them and they can produce good amounts of honey. People are realizing it is a viable alternative to generate income for their families. The number of new beekeepers is growing as people learn the techniques to manage this bee and reap the sweet benefits of their efforts. 


Beekeeping is always on the list of projects to promote when development organizations want to improve the lives of rural farmers or find alternatives for people living in or near protected forest areas. The national government is always earmarking money to go towards beekeeping projects. Honey production is increasing yearly. There are far more headlines in the newspapers about this increase in beekeeping and honey production than there are for the attacks by these bees.


Africanized beekeeping is now being actively promoted in Honduras. More and more people are being trained to take advantage of this activity. Honey prices tend to be high and much more stable when compared with something like coffee. The number of beekeepers and the amount of honey harvested is increasing yearly.


Abejas africanizadas—a bane or a boon?


Would I change my Africanized bees for some pure European bees? I don’t even really want to explore this question. I have what I have and I really can’t do anything about it. They are Africanized, and I can’t change that. But for the sake of those who are curious, here is a list of what I consider some pros and cons with them.


Advantages:

  • A good hive will produce honey. If managed well, a lot of it. These bees are adapted to the tropics and work hard. It is often mentioned how they usually get started working much earlier in the day. I always see this when I need to seal up a trap hive full of bees in order to move it to the apiary. I need to do this while it is completely dark. If I over sleep and it is barely starting to become light outside, it’s too late to seal them all inside. They are already coming and going.
  • I don’t really have a problem with mites—either because of the Africanized bees’ hygienic nature or because the mite cycle is always broken when they swarm. I don’t feel the need to treat for them. I remember the commercial beekeeper I worked with back in the States. He was always treating with this and that and spending a bunch of money. He had to or otherwise he wouldn’t have the strong colonies or the desired honey production. It was a lot of extra money and a lot of extra time and a lot of extra worries—I’m glad I don’t need to do that.
  • They can protect themselves better—especially from the two legged varmints. There is often not a high respect for other people’s property in Honduras, especially if left unattended. The apiary has to be out in the bush so it seems to say to people that it is fair game to enter it and steal honey. Only the most serious persons, however, will enter the hives to steal—everybody else is going to get stung up big time.
  • If you want to get free bees, there are always plenty of swarms to catch. They are easy to deal with. Africanized bees tend not to be fussy about their nesting cavity so almost any type of box can potentially work.

Disadvantages


  • They are defensive—no ifs, ands, or buts. For any serious bee work you need to armor plate yourself. You are better off overdoing the protection bit and erring on the side of caution.

Full battle gear and lots of smoke. A beekeepers always needs to be over cautious when working hives of Africanized bees. While sometimes they may remain calm, there are other times when they can get downright nasty. The best thing then is to close them up and come back another day.


  • You cannot really do backyard beekeeping any more—unless maybe if you live by yourself out in the boonies. You never know what might set them off and cause a tragedy. Something as simple as the sound of a machete could rile them up. As a result of this….
  • The apiaries are more vulnerable to theft. You are almost forced to keep them in an area away from housed and animals. This means that the die-hard thief will have an opportunity to steal the honey if they want. It becomes much harder to keep an eye on the hives and find secure sites.
  • If the colony runs out of stores, they will abscond rather than stick around and starve to death. You won’t end up with small colonies at the end of the dearth season, rather empty boxes.
  • Africanized bees do like to swarm more—proper and timely management must be taken to curb this.
  • Maintaining colonies of European bees would be very difficult. Any queen rearing or natural queen replacement will be affected by the high number of feral colonies in Honduras. It is almost certain that the new queen will mate with Africanized drones, continuing the Africanization. There is also the threat of them being easily robbed out during the dearth period.

I’m going to stop this post here. There will be more musings, detailing what I have to do in order to take advantage of these bees. It will consist of some of the ins and outs, the dos and donts, the cans and cannots of my beekeeping with Africanized bees.


---Tom


Africanized bees deserve their name “killer” but at the same time they can also be manageable—even for bee beards. We hosted a “Bee Day” for the fish culture volunteers during my Peace Corps training in Honduras. We had to show them, and ourselves, that bee beards can actually be done with Africanized bees.


More newspaper articles:


“Abejas africanas atacan a estudiantes en Danlí”—“African bees attack students in Danlí”



“Enjambre de abejas ataca varias personas en un centro turístico”—“Swarm of bees attack several person at tourist center”



“Bomberos rescatan a familia de ataques de abejas africanas”—“Firemen rescue family from attacks of african bees”



“Abejas africanizadas atacan a habitantes y mascotas de vivienda”—“Africanized bees attack the habitants and pets of household”



“Abejas africanas atacaron a tres personas y mataron dos perros”—“African bees attack tree persons and kill two dogs”



“Cuatro escolares hospitalizados tras ataque de abejas africanizadas”—“Four school children hospitalized after Africanized bee attack”




“Brutal ataque de abejas”—“Brutal bee attack”