http://www.beekeeping.com/articles/us/battle_of_the_bees.htm
First, the Cape honeybees dispatch small swarms of female workers to sneak into African “killer bee” hives.
There they lay eggs in the hives of their unwitting hosts. The infiltrating Cape larvae then manipulate the killer bee workers into giving them better food than what is fed to their host’s own brood. This gourmet-quality food contains less sugar filler and more nutrients than regular honeybee food. It’s more like what the queen bee is served.
Writing in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, researchers led by Madeleine Beekman, a research associate at Sheffield University’s Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects in England, offer a theory about how Cape larvae are able to receive the royal grub.
“We think that this is caused by the [Cape honeybee] brood having a different smell, meaning different pheromones,” Beekman says. “In some way this results in the nurse bees feeding this brood more food and food of different composition.”
Beekman and her colleagues analyzed the interaction between Cape and European honeybees, but she says her study can apply to how the Cape bees raid African killer bee colonies, too.
Faux
Queens
Pampered and well fed, many of the Cape larvae develop into pseudoqueens, possessing some of the characteristics typical of queen bees, such as greater body weight. These pseudoqueens are the key to the overthrow.
Explains Robert Danka, research entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics and Physiology Laboratory in Baton Rouge, La.: “Pseudoqueens don’t work like workers and they aren’t normally as reproductive as regular queens. The colony becomes dysfunctional and you wind up with a bunch of weird misfits.”
In the ensuing chaos, the killer bees reject their own ruling queen. When faced with this dire situation, killer bee workers usually are able to rear an “emergency queen.” But the presence of egg-laying Cape workers prevents them from doing this. Eventually the host colony either dies out, or the egg-laying workers are usurped by a Cape bee queen.
Given their ability to destroy killer bees, could the Cape honeybee help us to curb the attack of the killer bees in the United States? Here, the honeybee of choice is the European honeybee, which doesn’t possess the same talent for guerilla warfare.
Unfortunately, no, according to Danka. “An introduction of Cape bees to alleviate problems with Africanized bees,” he says, “would be exactly wrong for beekeeping according to most beekeepers who have experience with both bee types in Africa.”
Danka explains Cape bees would invade not only the colonies of killer bees, but also virtually all bee colonies, causing them to become nonproductive or to die. Cape bee genes could mix with those of our honeybees, ruining hundreds of years of selective breeding.
He adds, “In the end, it may be summed up that, at least for beekeepers, the problems posed by Africanized bees are less than those posed by Cape bees.”
Sometimes, nicer doesn’t mean better.
First, the Cape honeybees dispatch small swarms of female workers to sneak into African “killer bee” hives.
There they lay eggs in the hives of their unwitting hosts. The infiltrating Cape larvae then manipulate the killer bee workers into giving them better food than what is fed to their host’s own brood. This gourmet-quality food contains less sugar filler and more nutrients than regular honeybee food. It’s more like what the queen bee is served.
Writing in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, researchers led by Madeleine Beekman, a research associate at Sheffield University’s Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects in England, offer a theory about how Cape larvae are able to receive the royal grub.
“We think that this is caused by the [Cape honeybee] brood having a different smell, meaning different pheromones,” Beekman says. “In some way this results in the nurse bees feeding this brood more food and food of different composition.”
Beekman and her colleagues analyzed the interaction between Cape and European honeybees, but she says her study can apply to how the Cape bees raid African killer bee colonies, too.
Faux
Queens
Pampered and well fed, many of the Cape larvae develop into pseudoqueens, possessing some of the characteristics typical of queen bees, such as greater body weight. These pseudoqueens are the key to the overthrow.
Explains Robert Danka, research entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics and Physiology Laboratory in Baton Rouge, La.: “Pseudoqueens don’t work like workers and they aren’t normally as reproductive as regular queens. The colony becomes dysfunctional and you wind up with a bunch of weird misfits.”
In the ensuing chaos, the killer bees reject their own ruling queen. When faced with this dire situation, killer bee workers usually are able to rear an “emergency queen.” But the presence of egg-laying Cape workers prevents them from doing this. Eventually the host colony either dies out, or the egg-laying workers are usurped by a Cape bee queen.
Given their ability to destroy killer bees, could the Cape honeybee help us to curb the attack of the killer bees in the United States? Here, the honeybee of choice is the European honeybee, which doesn’t possess the same talent for guerilla warfare.
Unfortunately, no, according to Danka. “An introduction of Cape bees to alleviate problems with Africanized bees,” he says, “would be exactly wrong for beekeeping according to most beekeepers who have experience with both bee types in Africa.”
Danka explains Cape bees would invade not only the colonies of killer bees, but also virtually all bee colonies, causing them to become nonproductive or to die. Cape bee genes could mix with those of our honeybees, ruining hundreds of years of selective breeding.
He adds, “In the end, it may be summed up that, at least for beekeepers, the problems posed by Africanized bees are less than those posed by Cape bees.”
Sometimes, nicer doesn’t mean better.
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