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aggienaut Killer bees. You have no doubt heard of them. After being accidently introduced to Brazil (from Tanzania) by a mad scientist (Warwick Kerr; my boss actually has met him and reports he's a very nice man) in 1957, the Africanized Honeybees slowly spread through the Americas. By the early nineties they had reached the southern United States and there was panic. Now they are pervasive across the southern reaches of the United States, since they easily outcompete European Honeybees (there are no native American Honeybees).
However this entry is not about Killer Bees. This entry is about the bees that are actually driving killer bees out of their own homeland.
Bees that can clone themselves.
Clone Wars
The binomial name of honeybees is Apis mellifera. Honeybees can further be divided into subspecies.
Apis mellifera mellifera I'm assuming was the first one named. It is the German honeybee and was popular previous to the 20th century and was the first to be introduced to the Americas. A. m. ligustica is the Italian honeybee, which is currently the favourite among commercial beekeepers. Generally this is what commerical beekeepers keep (at least in the US).
A. m. scutellata is the so-called Killer or Africanized bee (-ized because its assumed to be a crossbreed between the 26 queens Kerr brought over and "nonafricanized" bees). As mentioned they are native to Tanzania and southern Africa. Bees in Europe evolved to be docile because those that survived were those people could work with to harvest honey. In Africa predators (and people) would destroy the hive to get the honey, so the bees that survived were the ones that were mean as shit
And A. m. capensis is the Capetown Bee. Because there are strong winds around Capetown (South Africa) the queen would often get swept away on mating flights (did I mention queens go on mating flights?). To compensate for this potential loss of the only egg-layer (which would theoretically mean the death of the hive in 24.7 days), ALL the workers in a capensis hive can lay eggs!! O=
HOWEVER, since these bees have never mated, their eggs have only the mother's DNA. They are therefore clones of the bee that laid them.
Furthermore, capensis bees can actually infiltrate scutellata hives without being killed (the usual treatment of illegal immigrants in beehives). These "undocumented workers" then go about laying clones of themselves!
It seems the capensis bees then proceed to loaf about and are underrepresented among the bees foraging for their new host colony. As they clone themselves and live off the welfare of their host colony the burden soon becomes too great and the scutellata hive collapses (not literally House of Usher style, but everyone starves). I’m assuming the capensis clone slacker army then moves on to a new scutellata hive.
I find this interesting because, while there are certainly other insects, such as the cuckoo wasp (and animals such as the cuckoo bird) who sneak their eggs into a similar animal’s nest to be raised by them, I know of no other creature that is such a social parasite. They have a normal lifecycle like any other bee (the workers don’t reproduce themselves in a hive of their own with a queen of their own), but if their queen is lost or they become seperated from their hive, they switch to a new parasitic lifestyle. And furthermore they don’t completely loaf, they DO do SOME chores, just extremely half-heartedly,like bad roommates.
So yeah. Apis mellifera scutellata may be taking the Americas by storm, but back home they are being pushed out by slacker clone armies.
Related
The Birds and the Bees - My official guide to bees, wasps, yelloyjackets, bumblebees, hornets, & bears oh my!
Colony Collapse Disorder - Everything you wanted to know about everyone's favourite thing to ask me about.
How to Write a Bee Attack Article - Since newspaper writers always bungle it.
A Bee In Math - Find out how the numbers 24.7, 2,500, 61,750, 500, and 54f relate to bees.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-24 08:23 am (UTC)Toast is Pretty Awesome
Date: 2008-10-26 04:49 pm (UTC)Also, although it wasn't mentioned anywhere I saw in my quick perusal, other than your name of course, I'm assuming you are a figure skating judge? (=
Re: Toast is Pretty Awesome
Date: 2008-10-26 08:26 pm (UTC)As for my LJ being hacked, yes, that was a bad experience, but it's all over and done with now. Phew.
You are correct, I am a figure skating judge. I used to be a competitive figure skater, but grew too tall to compete. By the end of high school, I was 5'8". Skaters may look tall on television, but in reality most are well under 5'2".
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Date: 2008-10-24 08:30 am (UTC)I love bees but bees don't love me as I am allergic to their sting something I found out when young and had a week in bed all swollen up. I may have grown out of it - as I grew out of an allergy to strawberries but just don't fancy testing it. :)
I have on my shelf a book called 'The Sacred Bee' which I bought when I was researching a link between bees and ecstastic/manic states following hearing poet Peter Redgrove mention aspects of this when speaking about his book 'The Beekeepers: a novel'.
Bee stings
Date: 2008-10-26 04:52 pm (UTC)Yeah allergies are weird. They can fade away completely with time. Otherwise I had a professor explain it to me once, I guess you have a level of tolerance, the closer your exposure comes to that without reaching or exceeding it, your tolerance goes up, but if you reach or exceed it your tolerance goes DOWN for the future. I once got 150 stings in one evening, and apparently didn't exceed my tolerance (though that same professor, who was with me at the time, said I probably came close). Doing some math on it that was probably 11% of a lethal dose for me. (Allergies not incuded, one can take 10 stings per pound of body weight) Good times! (=
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Date: 2008-10-25 12:59 am (UTC)While your post didn't teach me anything new (as I said, I love bees and obsessively keep up on Bee Current Events), it made me wonder something. If the Cape Bees are used to fight the overwhelming "Killer" Bee population, then how are we going to stop the Cape Bees? And, well, since Cape Bees come from the mild coastal climate of South Africa, doesn't that mean that they can travel farther north than their "Killer" counterparts?
Also, Weekly Reader promised me in the fourth grade that THE KILLER BEES WERE COMING TO PENNSYLVANIA, and I am still waiting. Do you have a timetable for this, or was Weekly Reader just full of crap?
Bees!
Date: 2008-10-26 05:06 pm (UTC)Thats a good question about the capensis climatic tolerances. What I've gathered from my research is that they are NOT good with inland desert climates, and hence weren't seriously bumping into scutellata bees due to the inland desert of South Africa, until commercial beekeepers using them transported them past the desert and closer to scutellata territory on the far side of the desert. So they have different climatic preferences than scutellata, but not necessarily better.
If introduced to America it does mean they could probably migrate further north than the "killer bees." Which brings us to your other question.
Yes the Weekly Reader is full of crap. "Killer Bees" are not good at all with cold winters and so they are unlikely to spread any further north in the United States than they have already. Over here on the east coast the upper thresh-hold of their spread is said to be Monterey, California. I don't know about the East Coast but there is surely a point beyond which they just aren't going.
I think the major reason for this is that Killer Bees don't store as much honey as other bees. They don't have to build up for winters so they live in smaller colonies with less honey, (and swarm about six times more frequently). When winter does come around they find they don't have enough honey to get through and/or enough bees to huddle together and stay warm.
Thanks for your good questions! I love talking about bees. (=
Re: Bees!
Date: 2008-10-26 07:24 pm (UTC)I would guess that it very neatly corresponds to the freeze line. (I just made that up, but I imagine that there is a well documented line north of which (or higher altitude above which) it generally freezes in the winter.)
Correction
Date: 2008-10-26 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-26 04:26 am (UTC)Now you'll have to read this article from today's Yahoo News. (10/25)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081026/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_australia_science
1, 2, 3, 4, 1?
Date: 2008-10-26 05:07 pm (UTC)Antarctica
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Date: 2008-10-27 03:55 pm (UTC)Thank you. I love science.
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Date: 2008-10-29 12:07 am (UTC)doze well
Date: 2011-04-02 07:07 am (UTC)