Bees Make the Best Pets. Jack Mingo

      Oddly, winter is the time when a beehive is most in tune. Most of the bees that winter over are fully grown female workers bunched together for warmth. During that time relatively few new bees are hatched. In the warmer parts of the year, a hive is made up of not just adult females, but also male drones, young females, and bees of all ages doing different jobs; each of those jobs create different sounds. Newly hatched females are full-sized, but their wings do not become fully hardened into flight-worthy tools until the age of nine days. When they fan their floppy new wings for warmth and ventilation, the lack of wind resistance means their wings fan faster than the adults' wings, making a higher tone. Meanwhile, the oversized drones have bigger wings that flap more slowly, creating a lower tone. The guard bees, protecting the hive from bears and beekeepers, fly fast in a beeline buzz bomb, in order to have the most impact when they give a warning thump and then a sting; this creates a higher, more insistent tone. Perhaps the time to imagine you can hear Christmas carols is in the summer, when there are more notes to choose from.

      THE MOST PREVALENT NOTES

      Very young bee fanning: C#–D

      Adult guard bee attacking: C–C#

      Adult bee flying: B

      6-day old bee fanning: A–A#

      Adult bee fanning: F#–G

      Drone flying (loud, like a bronx cheer): Discordant flat low G

      KEEPS THE ELEPHANTS AWAY

      Why keep bees? Because it keeps the elephants away. Okay, it's an old joke, but just in case you haven't heard it:

      A man in a restaurant is perturbed by the odd behavior of a woman at the next table. He asks: “Why do you keep snapping your fingers and tossing your napkin in the air?”

      She answers: “Because it keeps the elephants away.”

      “But that's ridiculous,” says the man. “There's not a wild elephant for thousands of miles!”

      She gives him a triumphant look, and responds: “See how well it works?”

      It turns out that bees really can keep the elephants away. In 2011, the BBC reported that Kenya had successfully reversed a serious decline in the elephant population, bringing their numbers up to 7,500. The problem was that pillaging pachyderms began raiding subsistence farmers' fields for tomatoes, potatoes, and corn. The destruction, as you can imagine, of having a bull elephant in your garden can be pretty extreme, and farmers began fighting back with guns and poisons.

      The elephants easily knocked down fences and barriers, but in 2009 researchers at the University of Oxford and Save the Elephants discovered a method that was 97 percent effective in repelling elephants: beehives. A group of 17 farms was surrounded by a border of 170 beehives, placed 10 meters (33 feet) apart.

      Elephants may be thick-skinned, but they don't like bees for a very good reason. The bees are very good at targeting the vulnerable parts of even thick-skinned animals, around the eyes, mouth, and nose. Elephant trunks are especially sensitive, and the aggressive African bees will fly right up inside them to sting if necessary.

      The bottom line is that elephants attempted 32 raids over a three-year period. Only one got through the beeline; the rest were quickly convinced to pack up their trunks and go.

      Last news was that conservationists intended to use the idea in other communities as well. Meanwhile, the farmers were trained to harvest honey and wax from their garden guardians, providing additional income and extra motivation for keeping the hives in good shape.

      MY CONVERSION

      I don't often have road-to-Damascus, struck-by-lighting, instant-enlightenment, come-to-Jesus, scales-falling-from-the-eyes moments. However, my conversion to the Church of the Living Bees was one of those moments. (Say hallelujah, somebody!)

      Friends, I had always been apathetic to bees at my strongest moments, slightly scared of them at my weakest. That all changed on a visit to an environmental awareness house in Berkeley, California in the summer of 1978, when I was a young man. It was there that I saw an observation hive.

      Previously, I'd seen a few of these beehives with Plexiglas on the sides so you can see inside but had always been indifferent to them.

      I loved ant farms, despite their mournful quality, because you could actually see the ants doing something recognizably antlike: digging freeform tunnels, eating, drinking, and carrying the bodies of their constantly expiring farm mates for burial. But beehives? There was no concrete activity I could really figure out. It just looked like modestly repugnant bugs running around randomly, like a lot of cockroaches scurrying around in a box.

      Little did I know. I was a fool. Once lost, now found. Blind, but now can see.

      What did it take? Somebody with a little knowledge and about two minutes. He pointed out a soccer ball-sized ring of yellows, oranges, and reds in the beeswax cells. This was the pollen that the bees had collected. The bright ring was a line of demarcation. Outside of it, the bees filled the comb cells with nectar; inside it was the nursery, containing eggs and larvae.

      The outside of the circle was suddenly understandable. Field bees arrived from outside, carrying either nectar or pollen. Just inside, they transferred their cargo to warehouse workers who put it where it belonged. It was no less (and, frankly, no more) interesting than watching the loading docks of a warehouse.

      The inside of the pollen circle, however, made up for it. The placement of the pollen is convenient because pollen is what the nursemaid bees feed bee larvae—little white grub-like things, each inside its own cell. (Adult bees eat only honey.)

      Then I saw the queen. She was surrounded by a small circle of worker bees. Each was facing her, looking like petals on a daisy. The queen was sticking her long, pointy ass into an empty cell, laying an egg. I waited and when she finished, she was pushed and pulled by her attendants to the next empty cell. I looked closely at the cell she had just left and, sure enough, there it was, the egg, white and smaller than a grain of fine sand.

      I watched the nursery for quite a while. It was abuzz with activity: Eggs being laid, larvae squirming, and the bigger ones were being sealed into cells with a pollen/wax mix, to make the final transition to full-fledged bee.

      It was so cool. I wanted my own observation hive. It would be a few years, but I eventually would get one of my own. But more about this later.

      WHY BEES MAKE THE BEST PETS, TAKE 1

      1 They are among the nicest stinging insects you'll ever meet.

      2 A bee is (literally) as cute as a bug. Actually cuter than most.

      3 Honey.

      4 Beeswax.

      5 They protect your garden from elephants. Seriously. They may work with other animals, too.

      6 They have soft fuzz that is almost irresistible. It glistens in the sun for great photos.

      7 They are amazing natural architects.

      8 They make their own building materials.

      9 They are ten times cleaner than any pet you've ever owned.

      10 They make your house smell better instead of worse.

      Bee Team #1: The Sex Workers

      There are only two categories of bees that have the same job their entire life, and for both of them, that job is reproduction.

      The Queen: The queen lays eggs. She's the