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.
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
