Planet of the apiary: Human life depends on modest and busy bees

IT was a shopping trip to remember, the other day, for Carol Howarth. For when the 65-year-old returned to her car, she found it adorned with some 20,000 mildly cross and distinctly bewildered bees. They were duly removed by a National Park ranger, three hastily summoned local beekeepers, several passers-by, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all. But Mrs Howarth’s drama was not over because hundreds of bees still humourlessly followed her home and, in large number, continued to pursue her vehicle for the next two days.

Experts suggest their queen – or, at least, a queen – had become trapped in the car, and that her imperious hormones attracted hopeful subjects anxious for a new start in life. Or, ‘perhaps they just liked the heat of my car’, says Mrs Howarth, of Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, faintly.

It is that warm, busy, floral time of the year when honey-bee colonies are apt to explode in population and swarms make occasional break-out with some ambitious young queen-bee, like something out of Game of Thrones.

But there are two essentials to grasp about these fascinating creatures, vital not just to our honey industry but to the very countryside – for it is bees, in their prodigious industry, which pollinate the mass of our crops as they bustle from flower to flower.

The first, and it is extraordinary how many cannot tell the difference, is that the honey-bee, smooth-bodied and pinch-waisted as it is, is not the same as a wasp (smaller, yellow-and-black, and staunchly carnivorous).

The second thing is that, in terms of behaviour, lifestyle and ethos, there is no such thing as a bee. For all intents and purposes a hive (or swarm) of honey-bees is a single organism, each devoted with hysterical selflessness, and to the death, to the survival of the colony.

They have ruthless hierarchy, a strict distribution of duties, and set protocols for emergency. They boast a work-ethic that makes Nicola Sturgeon, by comparison, resemble a frozen sloth.

ONLY one, the queen, gets very much sex. Without her there is no colony, for she alone can lay fertile eggs, and is otherwise waited upon hand and fuzz. Duties of foraging or tending the young are not for her.

The typical hive boasts one queen, 250 drones (males which neither work or sting and lead short inoffensive lives), and 50,000 workers – female by structure but of lifelong celibacy.

Of these industrious wifies, about 20,000 go out daily in search of nectar, while 30,000 keep house: minding the larvae, building beeswax combs and waiting upon the queen.

What’s more, bees can talk: not verbally, but with an ingenious dancing technique whereby a worker returning from successful venture can tell her colony not just that she has found a good food-supply, but how far away it is, in what direction and how to get there.

They also communicate by scent, excreting pheromones that can have the hive busy – or enraged – within seconds.

The queen’s pheromones, as she is pleased to ooze them, give her subjects a host of information: that she is still alive; it’s time to be a-busy making comb; to feed the babies; to head out for provisions or to store away garnered honey.

Most infamously – though invisibly – there is an ‘alarm’ pheromone which bees secrete on detecting any attack on the hive and which can have the pack of them at you as one crazed Luftwaffe in seconds.

Early, and but once, in the queen’s life she goes a-courting, flying from the hive and doing her stout best to outrun any pursuing drones – so that, at last, only the toughest and most determined 20 or so are permitted final intimacy.

Unfortunately for the drones, mating – without going into undue detail – is terminal; they die in the act. This seems a bit rough on fit lads, but the fate awaiting drones who do not get their end away is darker still. On return to the hive they are refused admission and turned away to pine and starve.

Now fertile, the queen regnant (and indeed pregnant) can even choose the sex of her offspring. Those eggs she selects to fertilise hatch as female workers, the others as drones.

Workers also lay infertile eggs, which likewise hatch as drones. But workers – in particular, those assigned nursemaid duties – have a still more remarkable gift: a secretion from glands in their heads called royal jelly, an extraordinarily concentrated superfood rich in protein, minerals and vitamins.

All baby bees are fed this for three days. Thereafter, drones and workers get boring old honey. Larvae identified as queens, however, are fed nothing but royal jelly and the queen, once hatched, will live on nothing else for the rest of her days.

Accordingly, she enjoys a very long life – typically, seven years compared to the seven weeks of a worker – and one of fabulous productivity, laying 3,000 eggs a day throughout the summer, and for summer upon summer.

Her life begins with singular ruthlessness. The first queenbee to hatch in a hive will promptly sting to death every other queen-bee unborn. And, as no hive can have two queens, there are periodic break-outs, about this time of year, which is why bees swarm.

The colony can survive even if the queen expires – by seizing upon one ordinary larva, cossetting it with royal jelly and ensuring it hatches as a female capable of full reproduction.

AND they have another talent: bees do not just produce wax and honey, but their own all-purpose sealant and glue, a substance called propolis, which they make from sticky sap or resin.

Bees use this to seal gaps in the hive or to strengthen honeycomb, or in rare hygienic emergency when (for instance) a mouse might break in. The varmint is, of course, in short order stung to death, but an exmouse is too big for bees to tow outside and they can scarcely have it hanging about stinking the place out.

Instead, they embalm it in propolis – a substance much prized in traditional medicine and which Antonio Stradivari is said to have used for varnishing his celebrated violins.

A bee’s sting, of course, is not to be taken lightly. The venom is acidic, and should be treated with an alkaline solution such as bicarbonate of soda. (Wasps, vexingly, have an alkaline sting, which should be daubed with vinegar or similar.)

A bee can, given time, extract the barbed stinger from its foe without fatal injury, but time is rarely a privilege one is inclined to bestow in such a moment, and most bees die in the act.

But, chiefly, bees work. A foraging bee needs to visit 100 flowers to fill its pinhead tummy; a typical bee will visit 2,000 flowers a day and, in its entire life, produce one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.

Flying at about 13 to 15mph, she hunts up to a four-mile radius from her hive. It takes bees ten million trips to make the average jar of honey, or about 50,000 miles – the equivalent of flying twice round the globe. They also gather pollen, the typical hive consuming around 100lb of it a year.

But bees are not invulnerable. The infamous Spanish flu, at the end of the Great War, did not just kill some 228,000 British people, but wiped out our native British black honeybees.

New European and African strains were hastily introduced, but these proved vulnerable to the varroa mite as well as the so far unexplained colony collapse disorder.

The vast bulk of our honey has already to be imported, but any threat to UK production is dwarfed by the entire disaster were our bees removed from their vital role in our ecosystem – for, in pollinating, they account for a third of all the food we eat.