How Beekeepers Avoid Getting Stung
Nine Thousand Years of Bee Whispering
Venus Consoling Cupid Stung by a Bee, Benjamin West, American
I am a beekeeper, but I don't enjoy getting stung. My sting site swells up. Bad words erupt from my mouth. And I feel miserable for two or three days. Meat tenderizer helps, but the trick is not to get stung in the first place. Honey bees evolved to defend their hive from animals thousands of times larger than themselves. There have been several cases in the United States where bees have killed horses. Honey bees demand respect.
Honey bees do not bend to our will like domesticated animals do. Rather, we need to understand what motivates their behavior. Humans have learned tricks over the last nine thousand years that allow them to steal honey and wax from bees with as little pain as possible. Most years, I steal a honey surplus without getting a single sting.
Beekeeping tricks are effective because they exploit honey bee cognition. Without knowing it, beekeepers are ethologists and bee whisperers. In this post, I describe a few of these tricks and the innate behaviors behind them. I will show how simple innate behaviors link to form a complex chain of behaviors that are flexible and adaptable—not at all mechanical or robot-like.
A Fixed Action Pattern or FAP is a bit of a misnomer...because it is a flexible behavior pattern. A FAP is a chain of simple, innate behaviors that form a more complex, coordinated behavior. Each link may have a fixed function, but visual and olfactory (smell) perception modulates each function differently. As an example, I will show how a colony responds in a flexible way to a predator. Honey bees are not robots.
In North America, raccoons, skunks, and bears prey on honey bees. Cartoon bears may love honey, but real bears seek the protein found in honey bee brood (larvae) and the bees themselves. Bears will destroy a small apiary of hives to consume brood. When I move hives to bear country, I surround them with an electric fence. But bees also have their own defense.
A honey bee colony typically has around 20,000 to 80,000 individuals. Each worker bee (in the summer) will live for only about 6 weeks, but she will transition through many jobs inside the hive. One of those jobs, late in her life, is to guard the entrance to the hive. She guards against robbing bees from other colonies and against large mammalian predators. The following describes a colony's response to an approaching predator.
1. Honey bees have poor visual acuity (they are legally blind by Department of Transportation standards), but nearly 200 million years have tuned their nervous system to respond to dark, moving shapes that expand ever larger as they approach. This perception acts as a trigger or releaser for the first link of a FAP response. The response is to intercept the intruder. This innate behavior is not a reflex—all guard bees do not intercept on perceiving the same thing. The perception only triggers a response in those guard bees with a sufficiently low response threshold. This threshold varies from one bee to the next. Scientists have found that the trigger or releaser for guard bee behavior is stronger if the looming object is moving up than if it is moving downward. This makes sense considering that climbing bears present a greater threat to bees in a tree than falling leaves. As we will see, alarm pheromone also modulates this threshold…but I am getting ahead of myself.
2. The guard bee, having arrived near the dark, approaching animal, perceives aggressive behavior as a rapid motion by the intruder (e.g., biting, swatting). Perhaps she also smells carbon dioxide (CO2) or sweat (butyric acid) — unique to mammals. These stimuli are behavioral releasers that culminate in the guard bee stinging the predator and sacrificing her own life. She will pull her body away and die, leaving a barbed stinger package still attached to the intruder.
3. The stinger package continues to pump poison into the predator. It also gives off a powerful alarm pheromone, which lowers the response threshold of the remaining guard bees and other bees. This alarm pheromone feeds a positive feedback loop, resulting in more recruits, more stings, and more alarm pheromone. This continues until potentially hundreds of bees are engaged in the battle and the predator relents and retreats. Table 1 below summarizes this simple chain of events.
Table 1 - A Colony Defense Fixed Action Pattern (FAP). Author created graphic.
Beekeepers have learned empirical tricks over nine millennia to avoid triggering each behavior in this chain of behaviors:
1. Beekeepers dress in white or pastels because honey bees don't have brightly colored predators. Bears, racoons, and skunks are dark colored. Bees will not respond to white objects as readily as they do to dark-colored objects. Beekeepers approach the hive from the side or back so they do not fall under the alert gaze of guard bees. Guard bees evolved to stand at the entrance to the hive. The entrance was originally a hole in a tree. Danger comes from the front of the entrance. When a beekeeper stands behind a hive and removes the top of the hive to expose hundreds of bees, those exposed bees are busy with other tasks. During a spring nectar flow, you can place your bare hand on the bee-covered frames and the bees will not sting. It is as remarkable as it sounds.
2. Before I approach the bee yard, I stop, take a deep breath, and try to relax as much as possible. I move in a slow, deliberate manner. I call this my Zen mode. To honey bees that perceive motion six times faster than we do, I am less likely to attract attention. I become a strange white bush. Working in an opened hive, I move slowly and try to avoid vibrations which will solicit an audible growl from the colony. I also do my best not to breathe on the bees. Sensing the carbon dioxide in my breath or sweat dripping from my brow also makes them growl. I also regularly wash my bee suit to remove traces of alarm pheromone from previous encounters.
3. Beekeepers use smokers: a portable device that holds a smoldering fuel such as pine needles and bellows to force out the smoke. The beekeeper blows smoke into the hive entrance and into the tops of exposed frames. This smoke interferes with the honey bees’ most important sense: smell. Smell is how bees communicate with each other… including the alarm pheromone. Besides masking the alarm pheromone of bees, smoke triggers an entirely different, instinctive FAP response. Bees will gorge on their own honey when they smell smoke. They prepare to leave their “tree” with as much of their honey as possible, fearing that a forest fire might destroy their food stores along with their “tree”. A honey bee colony comprises tens of thousands of worker bees, each engaged in one of scores of different tasks. That a puff of smoke can make them stop what they are doing and immediately engage in an entirely different and coordinated behavior shows the flexibility of innate behaviors.
Table 1 suggests that FAP#2 and FAP #3 become an endless positive feedback loop until the intruder leaves or all bees die, but that is not the case. Recent research shows that increases in alarm pheromone concentrations result in a higher percentage of stings until the pheromone concentrations reach some point after which the percentage of strings fall. This shows an innate, self-limiting response to the alarm pheromone. For Africanized Honey Bees (aka “killer bees”), this self-limiting threshold is much higher; this accounts for their more defensive (some would say aggressive) behavior. The self-limiting threshold minimizes unnecessary loss of life, since a worker bee that stings must lose her life.
Now you know how beekeepers avoid bee stings. There is much more to learn to become a successful beekeeper and none of it requires ethology or psychology…just a few tricks. But I find the mechanics of cognition fascinating and honey bees are a great place to start. With less than one million neurons in their grass-seed-size brain, we will understand bee brains long before we ever comprehend the human brain’s 86 billion neurons.
For More Information
This story of innate behaviors only scratches the surface of what honey bees are capable of. Even more complex and more adaptive behaviors, such as foraging for honey, are possible through learned behaviors. I describe honey bee navigation in my post First Flight.
Honey bees are amazing. If you wish to learn more about their cognitive gifts, I can recommend the following books:
The Mind of the Honeybee, Lars Chittka
Honey Bee Democracy, Thomas Seeley
The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism, Jurgen Tautz
What to do if you get stung by a honey bee.
Honey bees are only aggressive when they defend their hive. People often tell me about their bee stings. I ask, "Did you see a stinger?" When they say "No", I am pretty sure a wasp stung them. Yellow Jackets are aggressive wasps that make their homes in the ground and resemble bees to the uninitiated. The smooth stingers of wasps allow them to sting repeatedly. You are more likely to find a yellow jacket around a picnic table than a honey bee.
Unlike wasps, a worker (female) honey bee can only sting once because her barbed stinger remains in her victim along with part of her abdomen. With every sting, a honey bee dies.
But what a remarkable package she leaves behind. A poison sack filled with venom comes attached to the stinger and a muscle continues to pump venom into the victim. The quicker you remove the stinger, the less venom will end up in your body. The stinger package also gives off a pheromone that encourages other bees to sting you.
But if you attempt to remove this stinger by pinching it with your fingers, you will end up squeezing apitoxin from the venom sack into your body. Don't do it! Instead, find a dull edge—like a credit card, a butter knife, even a fingernail—and scrape the stinger from your body without squeezing the venom sack.
If you are like me, the area around your sting will swell up and hurt. That is a normal localized reaction to apitoxin. I find rubbing meat tenderizer with a drop of water on the sting site helps. Antihistamines and pain relievers also help.
If you have difficulty breathing or have other symptoms that appear within two hours of a sting and appear a foot or more from the sting site, you may have a systemic, allergic reaction. In that case, seek immediate medical help.