BEES
Bees have barbed stingers that pull out when inserted in a target and yanked out. They sting only in defense and use their stingers only one. In contrast hornets have a smooth stinger that slides in and out. They use it for hunting as well as defense and are able to use it repeatedly.
A French mathematician concluded in 1934 that it defied science that bumble bees were able to fly. Bumble bees and other beers do have small wing to body sizes but are able to compensate for this by working harder than other insects and flapping their wings in unusual ways. Their unorthodox flapping methods lets them hoover, evade predators and get lift even when loaded up with nectar.
Most flying insects move their wings in long, sweeping strokes (140 to 165 degrees) at roughly 200 beats a second. But honeybees flap in short arcs (about 90 degrees) so they have to compensate with more speed (up to 240 times a second). To beat gravity bees beat their wings plus flip them. When they fly bees: 1) first flap forward creating a vortex above the bee and generating lift. 2) The wings then rotate and slow down in preparation for the backward stroke. 3) In the next step the wings finish rotating and start sweeping backwards, utilizing the previous stroke’s wake. And 4) Finally, the wings fling backwards, creating a new vortex in the process. The cycle then repeats.
Bees are widely used to pollinate agricultural plants. Beekeeping is encouraged in many places as a way for poor farmers to make supplementary income.
RELATED ARTICLES:
FLYING INSECTS: FLIES, DRAGONFLIES, FIREFLIES factsanddetails.com ;
STINGING INSECTS: WASPS AND HORNETS factsanddetails.com ;
INSECTS: CHARACTERISTICS, DIVERSITY, USEFULNESS, THREATENED STATUS factsanddetails.com ;
KINDS OF INSECTS: MANTIDS, CICADAS AND ONES THAT KILL HUMANS factsanddetails.com
Hornets and Bees
Kevin Short wrote in the Daily Yomiuri: Hornets are close relatives of bees, but are fundamentally different in terms of feeding ecology. Bees raise their larvae on nectar and pollen collected from flowers. Hornets, in contrast, do sip pollen and nectar for short-term energy boosts, but feed their larvae a steady meat diet. They hunt and kill caterpillars, grasshoppers and other insects, then use their powerful jaws to cut out bite-size pieces to carry back to the nest. [Source: Kevin Short, Daily Yomiuri, October 18, 2012]
Bees sting only to protect their nests. In many species, the poison stinger is tipped with a barb that catches in the flesh of the enemy. When the bee pulls away, her abdomen rips apart, leaving the barbed stinger inside the victim. These bees can sting only once. Hornets, however, use their stingers not only in defense of the nest, but in their daily hunting chores as well. Their stingers are thus not barbed, and can be used over and over again.
Local farmers are a bit ambivalent about the local hornets. On the one hand, they recognize that these predatory insects eliminate large number of caterpillars and other crop pests. On the other hand, farmers who keep honey bees to pollinate their strawberries and other fruits and vegetables fear the hornets. The larger species often attack honey bee hives to get at the larvae inside. A squadron of a few dozen hornets can wipe out an entire hive in no time. [
Imported European honey bees have no defenses against a hornet raid. The workers rush out bravely, but are quickly cut to pieces by the hornets' powerful jaws. The ground around a raided hive will be littered with decapitated bees. Native Japanese honey bees, however, have evolved alongside the hornets, and have developed a technique for protecting themselves. Rather than trying to sting the intruders, they simply blanket them in huge numbers. This raises the hornets' body temperature and kills them.
World’s Oldest Bee Found in 100-Million-Year-Old Myanmar Amber
In October 2006, scientists announced, in a study published in the journal Science, that they had found the oldest known bee fossil — around 100 million years old — was found in a piece of amber found a mine in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar (Burma). Amber, which begins as tree sap, often traps insects and plant structures before they fossilize. "This is the oldest known bee we've ever been able to identify, and it shares some of the features of wasps," said lead author George Poinar, a researcher from Oregon State University. "But overall it's more bee than wasp, and gives us a pretty good idea of when these two types of insects were separating on their evolutionary paths." [Source: Sara Goudarzi, NBC News, October 26, 2006]
NBC News reported: The quarter-inch fossil shares traits of the carnivorous wasp such as narrow hind legs while exhibiting branched hairs on its leg, a characteristic of the modern bee that allows pollen collection. Around the same time the bee was trapped, plants that rely on mechanisms other than the wind to spread their seeds, started expanding and diversifying.
Prior to that, the world was mostly green with conifer trees that depended on the wind for pollination. "Flowering plants are very important in the evolution of life," Poinar said. "They can reproduce more quickly, develop more genetic diversity, spread more easily and move into new habitats. But prior to the evolution of bees they didn't have any strong mechanism to spread their pollen, only a few flies and beetles that didn't go very far."
Bees and Honey
Bees gather nectar — the thin, sweet, watery, liquid found in flowers — and deposit it in the honey combs of their hives, where it goes through chemical reactions to become honey. A gallon of honey weighs 12 pounds. One pound of contains the nectar from two million flowers gathered on trips between the hive and flowers by bees.
Honey is composed mostly of sugars: levulose (40.5 percent), dextrose (34 percent), and sucrose (1.9 percent). It also contains minerals such as iron, copper, sodium, calcium and potassium. The taste of the honey is often determined by which flowers are fed on by the bees. In the United States most commercial honeybees gather nectar from five plants: clover, buckwheat, alfalfa, orange trees and cotton.
Honey was really the only source of sweetening before sugar became widely cultivated in the 16th century. Athletes in the ancient Olympics ate honey for energy. Bees were first domesticated around A.D. 500.
Bee Group Behavior
Even though groups of honeybees often differ in where to establish a new nest, the group usually chooses the best site. Bees reach a decision by gathering information, conducting independent evaluations and holding a kind of vote. Traders of some commodities such as soy bean futures use similar strategies. [Source: National Geographic, July 2007]
Thomas Seely, a biologist at Cornell University, has studied how bees make decisions about nesting sites by applying tags and dots to several thousand bees and watching how they act when they search for a site to make a new hive with the only possibilities being boxes of different sizes. In his experiments bee scouts check out the boxes and return to the nest and give information about the boxes and their location to other bees through an elaborate dance. As soon as the number of visible scouts outside the entrance of a box reaches 15, the tipping point, news begins to be relayed about the box with the 15 scouts and the swarm begins taking steps to move there.
Seely told National Geographic, “It’s a race. Which site was going to build up 15 bees first.” He said the has applied the rules he learned about bee decision-making — seeking a diversity of opinions, encouraging free competition among participants, and forming an effective means to narrow choices — at faculty meetings and the methods have produced good results.
40,000-Year Relationship Between Humans and Bees
Holly Norton wrote in The Guardian: One of the earliest recorded instances of humans interacting with bee products comes from a modest spear point found in a Spanish cave, which was attached to its shaft with the aid of bee’s wax 40,000 years ago. Ancient rock art from such diverse places as southern Africa, Turkey, Bhutan, and Australia depict various aspects of bee hive life cycles, often with human figures attempting to access the hives. Most of this was created by nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples who hunted wild honey sources. Some of these depictions, such as red and white paintings from Zimbabwe, depict not only honey and comb, but also depict brood, the reproductive portions of the hive where the queen lays the eggs and the larval bees grow to maturity each in their own cells. Understanding brood and when hives are the most (re)productive would have aided hunter-gatherers in collecting wild honey. Such cultures also ate the brood, which is rich in fat and protein. [Source Holly Norton, The Guardian, May 24, 2017]
The archaeological evidence for bee keeping, not just wild honey collecting, is sparse, but what does exist is geographically broad. Bees were a common symbol in the Ancient World, with the practice of bee keeping seeming to be an important aspect to the neolithic revolution and the emergent dependence on agriculture. For instance the honey bee held a special place in Ancient Egyptian mythology, being born from the tears of the Sun God Ra. Bees are a hieroglyph that occurs as parts of titles of state, and depictions of horizontal hives decorate some tomb walls.
Early direct archaeological evidence is from Israel, in the ancient city of Tel Rehov (Tell es-Saram in Arabic) dating to the tenth-to-ninth centuries BCE. While many bee hives are often outside of cities, this site recorded 30 hives, with an estimated total of 100 hives at the time of use, within a dense urban area. This discovery was striking for a couple of reasons. Not only does it speak to the prominent role of honey and and other bee products in ancient economies, but keeping up to 100 hives in an urban area speaks to the possible ecology of the city and the wide availability of food for the hives.
Many excavated hives like those at Tel Rehov, or depicted such as in Ancient Egyptian art works, are of cylindrical, horizontal hives, often built into walls and made of fired clay or ceramic. This was not necessarily universal, however. Archaeological evidence has indicated that in Greece upright clay pots were used for bee hives. As of 2012 the archaeologists working on bee hives in Greece reported that no lids or lid fragments had been recovered for these vessels. Experimental archaeology re-creating these clay-pot hives, and using both clay lids and wooden bars or strips, and using these clay hives to actually to rear bees proved that ancient apiarists could have utilized movable combs, meaning they could remove portions of the bee hive and transfer them to other vessels, much like the movable frames in modern box hives today. To many it is an esoteric point, but modern bee keepers see the Langstrom hive, or the stack of boxes we recognize today in country fields, as the technological advancement that allowed for movable hives. For that to have occurred thousands of years prior to the modern hive is extraordinary to many.
In medieval and pre-modern Europe hives were often kept in boles, or wall recesses that housed wicker and mud skeps that served as the hive. These have been especially well recorded in England, Ireland, and France but are found throughout Europe. These types of operations were associated with gardens or agricultural fields, such as vineyards.
Along with clay and basket skeps, cultures all over the world utilised natural vessels for hives. While the honey bee is an “old world” insect, there were stingless bees, Apis Meliponinae, that were kept for honey by the Ancient Maya in the New World, usually in logs that were closed by ground-stone discs. Interestingly, when these discs were first identified by archaeologists in the 1970s, they were found in pairs of the same size, separated by short distances. These pairs differed in diameter from other pairs of stone discs, and are thought to have been made to the same diameter as the opening of the log. Ethnographically these types of log hives are seen stacked in “A” frames and were described by 16th-century Spanish explorers to the region. The Maya also had a Bee God, Ah Mucan Cab. Mayan bee keepers, like bee keepers in many other cultures, created a fermented drink, Balche, made from the honey of the stingless bee and tree bark. This was reportedly widely used on ceremonial occasions related to the life cycle of keeping the bees and the harvest of the honey and wax.
Book: “The World History of Bee Keeping and Honey Hunting” by Eva Crane (1999) contains a wealth of archaeological information.
Threatened Bees and Bee Colony Collapse Disorder
According to Reuters: Threatened bumblebees include 28 percent of North America’s species and 24 percent in Europe, according to the IUCN. North America’s rusty-patched bumblebee has seen its range shrink by 87 percent in the last 20 years. [Source Julia Janicki, Gloria Dickie, Simon Scarr and Jitesh Chowdhury, Reuters. December 6, 2022]
U.S. honeybee colonies, which are trucked across the county to pollinate cucumbers, almonds and other commercial crops, have been declining steadily for decades, with about 2.7 million colonies now compared with some 6 million in 1947. The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization has warned that the decline in bees threatens global food security.
In the mid 2000s, beekeepers in the United States began experiencing huge loses due to a phenomena called Colony Collapse Disorder is which bees suddenly abandon their hives perhaps because of some mysterious disease. In many cases the hives are empty except for a queen and handful of bees and honey and pollen.
During the spring of 2007 a quarter of the 2.4 million honeybee bee colonies in the United States were lost. Similar reports have come from Brazil, Spain, Germany, Japan and Taiwan. Bees observed in hives that were in process of collapse had a number of diseases. The matter is being treated quite seriously. A third of the food supply is dependent on animal pollinators, with honeybees being one of the main players.
There are lots of theories as to what was happening — everything from a reaction to pesticides to the effects of cell phones — but no one has yet come up with a good explanation. Officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture think it might be related to the stress bees used as commercial pollinators experiences as they are loaded on 18-wheel trucks and moved across the country to pollinate everything from almonds to watermelons.
Africanized Bee (Killer Bees)
Africanized bees, known colloquially as "killer bees", are a hybrid of the western honey bee (Apis mellifera), produced originally by crossbreeding of the East African lowland honey bee (A. m. scutellata) with various European honey bee subspecies such as the Italian honey bee (A. m. ligustica) and the Iberian honey bee (A. m. iberiensis). The East African lowland honey bee was first introduced to Brazil in 1956 in an effort to increase honey production. They were imported to Brazil because they produced twice as much honey as normal honeybees and it was hoped the hybrids would be gentle bees that produced lots of honey and were productive in a tropical climate.. [Source: Wikipedia]
The sting of Africanized bees is no worse than that of other honey bee. What these bees so dangerous is the fact they attack in swarms of a thousand or more bees. The poison injected by multiple stings is what sometimes proves to be fatal.
Cornell University biologist Roger Morse blames the "killer bee" hysteria on the repressive military governments in Brazil. He claims the first mention of "killer bees" was in a September 1965 article in Time magazine. The story had been picked over from a press release by the Brazilian government about “abelhas assassinas” (killer bees) intended to discredit Professor Warkick E. Kerr, the man who introduced the African bees to Brazil, who also happened to a critic of Brazil’s government.
Escape and Spread of Africanized Bee
The Africanized bee “rampage” began when 26 African honeybee queens used in a genetics experiment escaped from a research station near São Paulo in 1957. The queens of the African species were placed in special boxes that had a device that allowed drones to fly in and out but kept the larger queen inside. The Africanized bees were in an apiary with other bees and the queens escaped when a worker, who knew nothing about the bees, removed the device from the boxes allowing the queens to escape. By 1975 the Africanized bees had spread to Venezuela and in the early 1990s they reached the United States. [National Geographic, Rick Gore April 1976, Geographica, January 1989]
At one time the Americas had no stinging honeybee. The ones that are found in North America today were imported from Europe. It took about 20 years for the Africanized bees to get out of Brazil. They were slowed down a bit by the heavy rains and dense forests of Guiana, but once they arrived in more hospitable Venezuela in the late 1970s it was smooth sailing through upper South America and central America. University of Kansas entomologists predicted in 1975 that the Africanized bees would arrive in the United States in the 1990s and that is when they arrived. Africanized bees entered Texas from Mexico in October 1990, and they were reported in New Mexico, Arizona and California not long after that.
Africanized bees arrived in California in 1994 but were largely confined to desert areas until the heavy El Nino rains helped them expand their range. By 1998, hives may be found anywhere from eastern San Diego County, California to Henderson, Nevada, and Barstow, California to Yuma, Arizona, not far from Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego. [Source: Associated Press, August 6, 1998]
Africanized Bee Behavior and the Honey Industry
What set Africanized bees apart from European honey bees is their temperament. Both types originated in Asia, both inject venom of the same potency and both die after they loose their stinger, but the Africanized bees are much more aggressive. Unlike European honeybees which live out of a hive and traditionally had few rivals in cool climates of the north, the African bees are nomadic and they come form a much more hostile survival-of-the-fittest environment in the rain forest with a lot more competitors. They are much more easily provoked and will swarm on the source of the disturbance rather just defend the hive.
The wing beat frequency of Africanized bees is different from that of Europeanized bees. Using an optical instrument that reads reflecting light, naturalists and officials hope to identify potentially dangerous hives near schools and playgrounds. Africanized bees respond to loud noise and movements. Spectators at soccer game have been attacked when they started stomping and cheering for their team; drivers of sugar cutting machines have to wear special suits to protect them from swarms which are attracted by the noise and the sugary sweetness of the cane.
Queen bees begin as larvae like any other bee, but they are fed a special jelly which produces the royal attributes. At certain time of the year triggered by nature she takes wing at the same time as several hundred males, a handful of which successfully mate with her in the air.
The Agricultural industry is worried about the invasion of Africanized bees. Over 80 percent of insect pollenation in the United States is done with honeybees. Plans to mellow the bees disposition have included injecting sperm from Europeanized males into African queen; injecting smoke into an Africanized bee hives and killing the queen; and inundating areas with Africanized bees with European bees to dilute their genetic ferociousness. Some say that the cooler climate of the United States will naturally make them calmer and more relaxed. They are much more aggressive when it is hot and humid.
Africanized bees may in the long run be beneficial. They are more disease resistant and productive. Before they were introduced, Brazil ranked 47th in the world in honey production, By the 1990s they ranked seventh. There were men in the poverty-stricken town of Aracati on the northeastern coast of Brazil that actually make a living harvesting honey from the Africanized bees. They often get drunk first and sometimes sustain so many stings they come down with a fever. In an average season in the 1990s a honey hunter could harvest about 520 liters of honey which he could seel for about $200, the majority of his income.
Africanized Bee Attacks
Africanized bees have killed over 1000 people in the American as the late 1990s. Over 150 people died from Africanized bees attacks between 1957 and 1976. One man was found in Águas de Lindóia, Brazil with a thousand stings on his body and a gun shot wound in his head. Apparently he killed himself to escape the agony. Another man was thrown from his horse when a swarm attacked. He broke his leg and would have been easy prey but fortunately the bees went after the horse, which sustained so many stings it died three days later.
A school teacher with a lame leg slapped at a bee, apparently releasing the chemical equivalent of a battle cry. A swarm attacked her and because she was crippled she couldn't run away fast enough. People saw the attack but they were unable to help, for the bees swarmed around cars so that people couldn't even roll down the windows. Finally she was rescued by firemen with smoking torches but it was too late. She later died.
In September 1994, a swarm of africanized bees attacked an 86-year-old man and three other people in Georgetown Texas. The man's son was stung about 500 times when he came to his father's aid. Scientist say that an adult weighing 175 pounds can normally withstand a 1,750 bee stings. Between 1990 and 1994, there have been two deaths attributed to africanized bee stings, both in Texas. Officials reported another 216 people have reported stung by the bees during this four year period. About 40 people die each year in the United States from sting by normal bees. In Missouri a horse tethered to close to a hive died from multiple stings from European bees.
Most of the africanized bee victims in Costa Rica have been ducks and chickens. A baby girl was killed in Mexico after her brother threw rocks at a nest. In Guatemala people were observed handling Africanized Bees with their bare hands with sleeves rolled up to their elbow. Africanized bees generally seem much mellow at high elevations and cooler climates.
In September 1998, in Boulder City, Nevada, bees attacked two dogs in their back yard, killing one. Each dog was stung more than 100 times. State agriculture officials are studying some of the bees to determine if they were of the aggressive, Africanized variety. Swarms of killer bees have been found in Pahrump, 60 miles west of Las Vegas. Boulder City is 25 miles south of Las Vegas. [Source: Deserset News, September 28, 1998]
In May 2005 in Carlsbad, New Mexcio, a swarm of 200,000 bees from a 4-foot by 8-foot hive stung four dogs, the owner of the dogs and local firefighters and law enforcement. [Source: Carlsbad-Argus, May 6, 2005]
Bee Attacks in Arizona
In January 2005, an Africanized bee swarm attacked joggers near Tuscon, Arizona. Greg Hovey was one of several joggers attacked in Saguaro National Park. He was stung a hundred times and said he thought he was going to die. "Just this incredible buzzing," says Hovey. "There's thousands of these bees swarming around us. Then they attack your face and your neck and your ears the most. They were just all over our head. And the searing pain." Hovey says about a dozen other runners also were stung. [Source: KOLD-TV and KVOA-TV, January 10, 2005]
Another man, who has not been identified, suffered some 500 stings. He was out in front of the other joggers when he swatted a bee buzzing around his ear. That set off the rest of the hive. "I took off my shirt and started trying to brush them off him, which, of course, only made the bees more angry and they started attacking me as well. So both us started running as fast as we could. We ended up at some houses over there and one of the neighbors was kind enough to call 911 and get us some help."
In August 1998, Ken Truman, an electrician was stung more than 700 times by a swarm of angry bees while working atop a 35-meter (120-foot) -tall water tower at the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. The Arizona Republic reported: The electrician and a fellow worker were able to escape the attack by climbing down the tower's ladder. "I would have jumped," said Mesa Fire Department paramedic Casey Pursley, who treated Truman. All of Truman's exposed skin — his face, neck, arms and part of his chest — was covered with bee stings, firefighters said. "He was talking to us, but he was in extreme pain," Pursley said.[Source: Jim Walsh,Arizona Republic, August 20, 1998]
Firefighters administered an anti-inflammatory drug to help keep Truman's airway open because his breathing was labored, he said. The East Valley's second bee attack in a month was set up by two consecutive days of insecticide spraying at the top of the tower, said Mary Baldwin, the airport's director of marketing. The spraying was apparently a bad idea, according to Susan Cote of SRB Beekeepers. "These bees have been agitated for a couple of days," she said. "Think of how you'd feel if someone tried to fumigate you out of your home. These bees are already on the defense."
Truman and a second worker climbed the tower's ladder together, as required by airport policy. Truman's job was to change the beacon light, while the second man's job was to spray the bees if necessary. "I don't know, except to say they thought they had it taken care of," she said. The man with the protective gear, who was not identified by airport authorities because family members could not be reached, was stung 20 to 30 times. After the attack, the second worker helped Truman down the ladder and then sprayed him with water to ward off the bees, said Fire Captain Ivard Brimley, who also was stung at least once. He said the beehive was in a metal box below the beacon light.
Firefighters called Valley Bee Control after the attack. A beekeeper was hoisted by a fire truck to the top of the water tower to combat the swarming bees. Bob Chapman of Valley Bee Control, a beekeeper for 40 years, said any type of bee will become aggressive if its home is threatened. "They're not aggressive until they have something to protect," he said. "As long as you don't mess with the hives, you're all right."
The incident was similar in some ways to an attack a few weeks earlier in Dobson Ranch in southwest Mesa. Chisha Chang, 88, was stung more than 150 times as he attempted to remove a beehive from a barbecue grill in his back yard. Chang survived the attack but was hospitalized. Cote said her company concluded that the bees involved in the Dobson Ranch attack were an everyday European strain. When told Truman was stung 700 to 1,000 times, Chapman said it is very likely that these bees are Africanized.
Chang was stung repeatedly in the face. "I would describe him as having a hive of bees on his face. You could not see his eyes or his nose," said Mesa firefighter Chris Mapel. "It was like a hive being taken out of a tree and placed on his head." Chang was wearing a plastic bag over his head, but it provided little or no protection, with bees flying under the bag to sting him, Damiani said. Susan Cote, of SRB Beekeepers, said the Valley is in "swarm season," with bees pollinating during the warm weather and more active than usual.
Bill Cote found a hive with about 70,000 bees attached to the grill. Chang and his wife, Mann Hwa Chang, 72, who also suffered stings, were in good condition at Desert Samaritan Hospital. Mesa police Officer Ian Jarvis, the first to arrive at the Chang home in Dobson Ranch, was stung about a dozen times when he pulled the bag off Chisha Chang's face and took him into an enclosed porch, Mapel said. "The police officer did all the real work," the firefighter said. "He got him (Chang) out of the back yard and onto a patio. He did a heck of a job, even though he had no protective clothing like I did." When Mapel and his fellow firefighters arrived, they found Chang lying motionless on the patio, moaning in pain, with the bees attacking his face. Jarvis was standing nearby, with bees still attacking him. Mann Hwa Chang also was being stung and was trying to protect herself with a can of bug spray. "It was the most bizarre thing I ever saw," Mapel said. [Source: Jim Walsh, Arizona Republic, August 4, 1998]
Africanized Bee Attacks in California
In October 2000, a 41-year-old was attacked by bees in Banning, California after he accidentally disturbed a hive. The Press-Enterprise reported: A swarm of possibly Africanized honeybees attacked and killed a Banning man after he inadvertently dumped dirt on a culvert they used as a hive. It would be the second death from Africanized bees in California. Don Algiers, 41, was allergic to bee stings and might have died if he had been stung just once, his brother Randy Algiers said. But Don Algiers was stung more than a hundred times about the head — attacked by so many bees that rescuers had to pluck them from his mouth to render aid, said Randy Algiers, who was among those aiding his brother. "He just didn't have a chance," Randy Algiers said. [Source: Douglas E. Beeman The Press-Enterprise, October 5, 2000]
State and local officials said the swarm's aggressiveness suggests the bees were the so-called "killer bees," although officials won't know for sure until DNA tests of the insects are completed next week. Don and Randy Algiers had been repairing a broken irrigation pipe. The whole day, neither brother had seen a single bee. Randy Algiers is operations manager for the Banning Heights Mutual Water Co., which owned the pipe. Randy Algiers had just left to complete repairs a quarter-mile away when Don, a heavy-equipment operator, dumped a load of dirt and rocks over the side of the road. The load tumbled onto the top of a metal culvert about 20 feet below the road where a colony of bees had established a hive.
"That got the bees going. They swarmed him," Randy Algiers said. Don Algiers scrambled off his skip loader and onto the bumper of a passing pickup, which tried to carry him to safety. But Don Algiers slumped onto the bumper and hitch of a trailer the truck was towing. The driver stopped and ran up the hill to summon Randy Algiers. Once Randy Algiers realized the bees had attacked his brother, he summoned his father, and the two of them tried to revive Don Algiers while others called 911. Randy Algiers even tried calling a few doctors who live in the neighborhood but couldn't reach them. Algiers was taken to San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital in Banning, where he was pronounced dead. Don Algiers was in poor health — he suffered from emphysema — and he didn't carry medicine to counter the effects of the bee venom, Randy Algiers said.
In 1999, an elderly Long Beach man died after he was attacked by Africanized bees while mowing his lawn. Associated Press reported: An 86-year-old man was apparently mowing his lawn about 10:45 a.m. when the swarm attacked, said Sue Hood, a county Fire Department dispatch supervisor. "Then he ran inside to get away from them, but they followed him in and started stinging his 90-year-old wife," she said. There was also a younger caretaker in the home at the time. The occupants of the house near the Arizona border then called emergency officials. "Firefighters showed up and then they started to get stung," Ms. Hood said. "They said the swarm followed the ambulance for a half-mile." The victims were taken to La Paz County Regional Hospital in Parker, Ariz., where they were treated for the stings. All but the elderly man were released. [Source: Associated Press, Sacramento Bee]
In August 2000, a swarm of suspected Africanized bees attacked a woman in Twentynine Palms in her back yard and left her hospitalized in serious condition with more than 100 stings, authorities said. The Orlando Regsiter reported: Vezina, 65, was described as stable in the intensive-care unit at Hi-Desert Medical Center, a nursing supervisor said. Bees taken from a hive beneath a shed in Vezina's back yard were being tested to see if they were Africanized honeybees. San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies were dispatched to the woman's home after receiving a call at 9:49 a.m. Saturday that Vezina was trapped in her back yard, the department said. [Source: Orlando Regsiter, August 21, 2000]
Ohio Man Stung 20,000 Times by Bees and Recovers
In September 2022, 20-year-old Austin Bellamy, climbed high into a lemon tree in Ripley, Ohio, help trim it when he mistakenly cut into a bees’ nest, his mother, Shawna Carter, said. “When he started cutting them, that’s when the bees came out, and he tried to anchor himself down, and he couldn’t … He was hollering, ‘Help! Help me! Help!’ And nobody would help him,” his grandmother, Phyllis Edwards, told the Cincinnati Enquirer. [Source: Maya Yang, The Guardian, September 3, 2022]
Bellamy was stung at least 20,000 times and even ingested some of the insects but made a full recovery according to his family. According to Carter, Bellamy was unable to get down from the tree because he was harnessed. Edwards watched from below alongside Bellamy’s uncle as they were unable to climb the ladder since they were also under attack by the bees. “I was going to try and climb the ladder to get to Austin … I see how high he was … but I couldn’t get to him because I was surrounded [by] bees,” Edwards said.
According to The Guardian: Paramedics and the Ripley fire department responded to the scene and had to cut Bellamy out of the tree. “He was just covered in bees … screaming and yelling, crying for help,” said Carter. “It was just too much for me to take. It looked like he had a black blanket on his head down to his neck, down to his arms.” Carter said that the fire department told her that the bees were a hybrid of the western honeybee and east African lowland honeybee that is considered much more defensive than other bee varieties.
Emergency responders transported Bellamy to the University of Cincinnati medical center by helicopter where doctors discovered that he had also ingested about 30 bees. Pictures posted on social media show Bellamy hooked up to a ventilator with eyes swollen shut and bee-stings covering his head, face and hands entirely. “[The bees] left stingers like an inch long. When I rubbed his head before they airlifted him here, he felt like he was becoming a porcupine,” his mother told WCPO-TV, adding that he suffered kidney failure from the attack.
A couple days after the bee attack, Bellamy woke up from a medically induced coma and is expected to make a full recovery, Carter said. “Austin is still currently in the hospital with breathing problems. His oxygen keeps dropping and he still can’t walk very well, still very wobbly but a lot of the swelling has gone down — a whole heck of a lot,” she said yesterday in an update on an online crowdfunding page set up to help him.
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Mostly National Geographic articles. Also David Attenborough books, Live Science, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Natural History magazine, Discover magazine, Times of London, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated December 2024