Beware — black bees are on the warpath

Press, 2 December 1978, Page 13

Beware — black bees are on the warpath

By

DERRICK ROONEY

Watch out for black bees this summer if you are allergic to stings. That is the advice of an apiarist, Mr Noel Rothwell, who manages 1000 hives west of the Selwyn River for a Leeston company, and also has his own small business raising queen bees. The bee favoured by apiarists for honey production is a medium-sized, golden, Italian bee. not only because it is a good gatherer of honey but because it is relatively docile, too.

Wild bees are smaller and darker, and according to Mr Rothwell there is a direct link between the colour of a bee and its ferocity. The darker the bee, the more likely it is to sting, seemingly without cause.

“Some of the native bees are pretty stroppy,” Mr Rothwell says. “We have to watch our hives closely to make sure our strain stays pure.” If Mr Rothwell considers a bee “stroppy” it is a fairly safe bet that the bee in question is one to avoid, because Mr Rothwell must be one of the most stung people in Canterbury. Sometimes, he says, he is stung 50 or 60 times a day, if he is working his bees at a time when they are very active. But stings do not seem to bother him. Some doctors believe that the effect of bee toxin is cumulative, and that each person has a limit, above which the body will accept no more. Mr Rothwell’s theory is the opposite; he believes that the thousands of stings he has had over the years have built up an immunity.

The bees that sting people

ate all females — worker bees out gathering nectar or pollen for the hive. The only males permitted in the rigid social structure of the hive are the drones, and they have no stings with which to defend themselves. The drones do no work, and if food supplies run short they are the first to be thrown out of the hive. Their presence is tolerated for only one reason: the queen must have them at mating time. Not a great deal is known about the mating of bees, because it is a difficult process to observe. It takes place about 30ft in the air, and after it the drone dies, because his genitalia are ruptured and left behind

in the queen. About 30 drones are needed to fertilise the queen-adequately. As well as their fascinating social, structure, bees have some interesting design features. One is the sting, which contains a powerful toxin intended to kill or immobilise an enemy. Ironically, the sting is also a death sentence for the bee, because after it has stung an enemy the bee will die in a matter of hours or minutes, depending on the weather and the time of the year. The superb design of the honeycomb is often admired and imitated, but there are other fine examples of design about bees. The wings, for example. Bees are equipped with double, membranaceous wings, the front pair being

much larger than the hind pair. Along the back of the front wings is a groove, and on the leading edge of the hind wings is .a row of minute hooks. When these are fixed in the groove the bee is given a broad and powerful surface for flight.

But the hooks are instantly detachable, so that when a bee returns to the hive it can fold its wings right back against its body. As the bees live in small, narrow cells, this arrangement of wings is very convenient. even essential. Things are buzzing in the bee world.

For the last couple of months the bees have been gorging themselves on pollen from willow,

gorse, and broom flowers, to build up healthy hives for tlie harvest, and now the main nectar-producing crop is coming into flower. This is white clover the übiquitous pasture crop that makes nearly all of Canterbury’s honey. Popular belief and romantic folk-songs notwithstanding, it is not bees who make honey. Bees are merely the collecting agency. Plants make honey; it is pure nectar. Rather, most of it is. A small percentage of Canterbury honey is not a true honey, but honeydew — the sweet, sticky excretion of a scale insect that lives on the native beech trees. Honeydew is a unique New Zealand product with a bright future as an

export earner. It is a thick, dark liquid, heavily sweet and smoky in flavour, but overlaid with a faintly acid tang. Many New Zealanders do not like it (it is what is euphemistically called an acquired taste) but to the consumers in Europe it is a rare delicacy. West Germany is the main customer, but other European countries are interested — so interested that the New Zealand Government has just agreed to study honeydew production, to find out just how much of the stuff can be produced. Honeydew has the potential to be a very sweet bit of jam on the apiar-

ist’s export bread and butter. Last year 200 tonnes went overseas, and beekeepers believe that with proper management that figure could be multi# plied.

To find out if they are right, the Ministry of Agriculture has been instructed by the Associate Minister (Mr Bolger) to make a “resource assessment.” In layman’s language, this means that the Ministry is going to find out how much honeydew can be produced, how much is being harvested now by beekeepers, and how quickly they can increase their production. This is not a spontaneous move by the Government. but is a response to approaches made by the Association of Honeydew Producers, and to

recommendations made at a honeydew seminar in Christchurch during the spring.

Honeydew is strictly a South Island product, and in practice its production is confined to the upper part of the South Island — Marlborough, Nelson, North Westland, and Canterbury, where, despite the dry climate, there are residual pockets of beech forest

I visited one of these pockets with Mr Rothwell, who has a group of honeydew-gathering hives practically in the shadow of the beech in the hills Most of his hives produce clover honey, but in the hills he has several stands producing honeydew.

The honeydew season is not fully, under way yet,

but. the indications are that it will be a good one. After the mild winter, the insect population is reported to be unusually high.

When Mr Rothwell visited his hives at Rockwood last week, he walked up among the beech trees to check. “I have never seen so many of the insects,” he said.

The insects go through various stages, and when Mr Rothwell saw them they were in a larval stage, crawling round on the trucks before burrowing into the bark to suck — and grow — on the sweet sap. They were, he said, bright pink, a startling colour.

He showed ’me some honeydew, from Rockwood

— viscous, dark, heavily scented. In beech areas, he said, bees would go for it in preference to clover

nectar, and the yield from each hive was comparable to that from bees in clover. His hives, reached by bouncing in his truck along rough farm roads and splashing through the upper Hororata River, are less than a mile as the crow flies from the beech, but that mile is a graphic illustration of one of the problems faced by honeydew producers, for the. country where the beech grows is precipitous and rugged, and access by vehicle is difficult, perhaps impossible. Access is an important

consideration for a practical beekeeper like Noel Rothwell, because hives must be fed, and inspected regularly for disease, or stray crossings with wild black bees, which live among the beech trees and feed on the honeydew. And in autumn the frames, heavy with honeydew, have to be carried out. These are things that he and other beekeepers put before abstract considerations of lhe irony that the excretions of a New Zealand insect are finding a place of honour on the dinner tables of Europe