Hi, all
"I think each of these species exhibits behaviors that are inextricably linked with their nesting habits. Dorsata and the African bees are continually molested by marauders."
I recently worked with A.m unicolor in Mayotte (Comorros Island, between Africa and Madagascar). Until a few years, the bees has not been managed by man except collection of honey from natural nests. Nevertheless, its behavior appears to be fairly gentle. This bee developed another way to escape to robbers : Absconding. The colony can abandon the nest very easily when a stress occurs. So defensive behavior is not necessarly linked to more agressivity, avoidance is an alternative.
Michel BOCQUET
-----E-mail d'origine-----
De : Peter Loring Borst <[log in to unmask]>
A: BEE-L <[log in to unmask]>
Envoyé le : Ma, 10 Avr 2018 16:49
Sujet : Re: [BEE-L] Do locally adapted honey bees exist in USA ?
> it seems to me that they would have retained their propensity to defend their colonies against humans, rather than becoming less defensive.
Well, despite my age, I wasn't there at the time the glaciers receded. My question is whether European honey bees became more docile due to management. This I doubt, for many reasons. African bees seem to be orders of magnitude more defensive than any sort of European bees.
As a bee inspector, I encountered a very hostile colony of black honey bees, quite possibly descended from Apis m. m., by all appearances. They were runny, unfazed by smoke, etc. but as I beat a retreat they stopped following at about 10 feet (3 meters). On the other hand, another colony I encountered exhibited all the characteristics of African bees, followed for 1000 feet and never relented (until I euthanized them). So this is a big difference.
Further, much of beekeeping over the centuries was not selective at all, people just collected colonies and robbed from them regardless of the nature of the bees. It wasn't really until the 1800s that people got the idea that there were honey bee strains that were "better" than others, and the switch from A. m. m. to A. m. l. was under way, especially in the US, at the instigation of Langstroth and others.
I have worked with Park's Golden Italians, and they are docile all right, which is really helpful if you have truckloads of them or you are shaking them into cages. However, they have been selected. Unselected (feral) bees still range from good, bad to ugly.
But beyond that, there are at least three explanations for the radical difference between European and African bees. One, they were selected by humans for manageability; two, they evolved to be less defensive because they lived in protected spaces which required less defense; or three, the Africans and the European branches evolved from a common ancestor in Mesopotamia, which was perhaps somewhere in between on the behavioral spectrum.
Obviously, bees living out in the open will benefit from hair trigger defensiveness, as also exhibited by Apis dorsata -- or the tendency to flee, as in Apis florea. I think each of these species exhibits behaviors that are inextricably linked with their nesting habits. Dorsata and the African bees are continually molested by marauders.
A European colony could go for years without being noticed, high up in a hollow tree with a small hole for an entrance. When such a tree is chopped down, they are completely demoralized by the process (drumming) and the beekeepers had no trouble chopping the trunk down to size and hauling them home. I doubt that would work with African bees, which adventitiously occupy available hollowed out trunks in any case, being far less particular in nest site selection, as we said.
PLB
PLB
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