A wierd bee sighting - Democratic Underground

Dogmudgeon

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Thu May-03-07 11:07 AM
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A wierd bee sighting

Yesterday, I saw three honeybees.

"Wow," you might say rolling your eyes and preparing to click on another link. But this bee sighting was different.

I live on the second floor of an apartment building in a suburban complex. It is in west central Bucks County, PA, where we have no shortage of bee hives. Yes, CCD has hit a number of apiaries around here, but there are still honeybees to be seen.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by bees. A friend of mine was the daughter of a beekeeper so I occasionally visited and got to see how beekeeping worked and how bees behaved; I also read about it. But I had only ever once seen a queen bee in real life, in a package of mail-order bees sent to her father to establish a new colony.

Queen bees are a little wider than workers, but they are much longer. They are hard to miss in a swarm. They don't really do much except eat and lay eggs, and they don't fly well except on their "nuptial flight", during which they mate with as many drones (fertile male bees) as possible.

Anyway, I was looking outside my kitchen window and I saw the first honeybee. She was checking out the underhangs and eaves. She flew away, and I saw another worker do the same thing, but this one was accompanied by the biggest bee I had seen in years. It took about five seconds to register on me that it was a queen bee.

Af first I thought, "Queen and two drones", but this queen did not look like she was in good shape. I was close enough to see that one of her wings was partially ripped and she was not walking very well. She then fell off the wall. I saw her fall almost all the way to the cement ground (which also made it easy to see) with one of the workers following her. She recovered her ability to fly right before she hit the ground.

The bees then flew away.

It was puzzling. I am pretty sure I was seeing an "old" queen bee with two workers attending her. Normally, when you see a queen outside the hive, she is either being swarmed by males seeking to mate (all of them acting hyper and doing bee-dances), or by a whole flock of workers as they abscond from a hive that has grown too large. No, this was one tattered-looking queen and two workers.

I half expected to see thousands of bees arrive within an hour as the absconding mass arrived, but it never showed up.

Anyway, I wondered if the queen and the two workers were the last remnants of a hive destroyed by CCD, and that they had left the nest themselves, to die. I can't really say -- they were just three bees not doing much of anything.

I don't anthropomorphize insects, so I did not feel pity for these bees, but it did get me thinking about CCD. Perhaps I saw it in action yesterday. More likely, it was a random thing, unconnected to CCD. But it was odd I should see a queen bee for only the second time in my 49-year life, exhibiting odd behavior outside of a nest with two workers.

File this in the "WTF" file.

--p!