Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.
This post is from Ed Vlcek, who is interning with The Chicago Honey Co-op.
"Speak with contempt of none, from slave to king
The meanest Bee hath, and will use, a sting."
- Benjamin Franklin
While reading over Ross Conrad's book Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture, I was struck by the playfulness of this quote. As I rubbed my swollen abdomen, my thoughts returned to yesterday morning, when I received my first honey bee sting of the season. How silly I must have looked hopping and flailing back from the hive, smacking my belly and digging through my shirt for other bees! Wearing an untucked shirt proved a painful error. Franklin whimsically elucidates the experience of the people I couldn't tell were watching.
Honestly, though, it came as such a relief. I had been waiting to get stung all season, and now I can proceed knowing that I do not have any severe reactions. Not that I really thought I did, but I needed evidence. And althougth I was not really afraid of getting stung, and had maybe become a little too bold and careless, a certain quantity of fear, or paranoia, has left me.
Interestingly, female bees are the only bees with stingers. Male bees do not have them, because the stinger is a modification of an organ used in laying eggs. Workers, the unfertilized females, are the only bees that typically sting, and they do so with reluctance. The sting is a last flourish of defense, and from the barbs that run along the stinger, that flourish typically ends with the bee's mutilated body slowly dying on the ground. The bee is stuck to the stung with the stinger, and by pulling itself away, or being brushed away, the bee's body is severed.
Conrad marks the bee's tendency toward non-violence at the start of the same book mentioned above:
To live its day-to-day life, the bee need only collect nectar and pollen from the flowers in bloom. These gifts from the plant kingdom, along with some water, plant resins that the bees use to make propolis, fresh air, and sunshine, are all the bees need from the world around them to survive and prosper within their colony. Thus, unless it feels threatened and is forced to defend itself or its hive, the bee is the only creature in the animal kingdom, that I am aware of, that does not kill or injure any other being as it goes through its regular life cycle. Apis mellifera damages not so much as a leaf. In fact, honey bees take what they need in such a way that the world around them is improved.
With no need to kill for food, and a stinger that typically kills the bee if used, the honey bee, in its relation to other species, is disinclined toward aggressive behavior. But, as is evidenced from the heavy gear we typically wear when beekeeping, if the bee does incline toward stinging you, it is something to be very prepared for. Morever, because the bee releases alarm pheromones when attacking, it is unusual to find yourself in a battle with just one bee. More often, it is a fleet of bees on a suicide mission.
All of this amounts to a overall environment of care - we take care not to disturb them more than we need to, and they tend to care only for their primary tasks of doing bee things, rather than worrying about a few oddly dressed mammals. It is also clear from these considerations that the frenzied fearfulness of honey bees (only 1% of humans are severly allergic) is a product of carelessness and ignorance, not some serious threat.
Within the species, as we know, the bee hive is a case of social behavior unparalled in nature, save maybe ant colonies. What exactly the relationship is between the disinclination to sting, their unique role as improvers of and spreaders of life rather than consumers of it, and the eusocial organization of the hive, is a question I am just beginning to explore. In part, I believe it has to do with the sexual divisions of labor in the hive, and the special evolutionary quirks of bee genetics. For now, I will leave you with people much more qualified to speak to this than myself -
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