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03-24-2007
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Honey Bees Disappearing!
I only recently heard of 'colony collapse disorder' and it sounds as if it is getting serious. It...
Last edited by Turtle; 04-26-2007 at 03:15 PM..
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Re: Honey Bees Disappearing!
Here's a strange random observation:
A friend of mine has a house in Los Angeles. He's got a screw-in fluorescent light by the front door. There's a bee hive next door, and the bees are attracted to the light and are for some reason dying in large numbers on the front porch. Because he's having work done on it, there's a large gap underneath his front door and the dying bees appear to crawl under the door and there are a dozen or so spread across his entry hall every morning.
There do not appear to be any shorts or even exposed wires on the light that they might be getting shocked by, so this proximity does not seem to be any indicator of the direct cause.
Anyone know what to make of this?
Are they just putting the bzzt in bzzz,
Buffy
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Re: Honey Bees Disappearing!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Buffy
Here's a strange random observation:
there's a large gap underneath his front door and the dying bees appear to crawl under the door and there are a dozen or so spread across his entry hall every morning.
Anyone know what to make of this?
Buffy
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This is strange.
I have never seen bees atracted by light.
The entrance to modern bee-hives is very much like entering though a crack in a doorway.
A once bee keeper |
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Re: Honey Bees Disappearing!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Buffy
A friend of mine has a house in Los Angeles. He's got a screw-in fluorescent light by the front door. There's a bee hive next door, and the bees are attracted to the light and are for some reason dying in large numbers on the front porch. Because he's having work done on it, there's a large gap underneath his front door and the dying bees appear to crawl under the door and there are a dozen or so spread across his entry hall every morning.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Michaelangelica
This is strange.
I have never seen bees atracted by light.
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Like Michaelangelica, I’m puzzled by the claim of bees being attracted to a light. For all practical purposes, except for a few species, bees don’t fly at night when lights are on and visible, so can’t be attracted to them.
My guess is that it’s either a coincidence corresponding to a normal seasonal die-off, some sort of freaky mating behavior , or the bees (or wasps – note earlier in the thread the discussion of how commonly the suborders are confused) are getting lured to their ends by something other than the light. It might be an abnormal “colony collapse” –type die-off, but to be sure of that, you’d need to find evidence of tens of thousands of dead bees.
A few questions: How many dead bees are “large numbers”? Are we talking about ten a day, a hundred, or more? Do they doomed bees appear mostly at a certain time of the day?
Are you sure all the bees crawling under the door are dieing? Or are healthy bees coming and going, and the dead ones just unfortunate stragglers? Is there anything in the house that the bees seem attracted to?
Much insight might be gained if someone paid close attention to the bees for a full daylight period. There’s really no substitute in naturalism for long and careful watching.
I suspect that once your friend gets his door seals fixed so that bees can’t get in, the bee-corpse pile-up will end. Sometimes Hymenoptera behave in ways we humans, with our substandard chemical sensor suites (noses), never can make sense of.  |
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Re: Honey Bees Disappearing!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Buffy
He's got a screw-in fluorescent light by the front door. There's a bee hive next door, and the bees are attracted to the light and are for some reason dying in large numbers on the front porch.
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Is your friend the scientific type that might try an experiment? I wonder what happens if he changes the bulb to incandescent. Maybe even some different colors. It would be interesting to know if the fluorescent lamp is really a contributing factor. |
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Re: Honey Bees Disappearing!
No, he's a sales guy! 
These were my own observations:
There were dead bees inside and outside, thus making it clear that the "incapacitate and crawl" scenario is most likely.
There was a dispersal pattern around the light itself, indicating a possible relationship, but not clear, because it wasn't a very large area and there were more heading in the direction of the door. I did see one bee heading for the light in the daytime: light was on. Who knows, there may have actually been a hive being built through a crack there!
Don't fluorescent lamps put out some E-M waves in addition to light?
Accumulation was in the 4-5 dozen range over what he claimed was "a few days". I personally have never seen bees "piled up" before, which is why I took note of it.
They were dead, but they definitely looked like bees and not wasps. I hate them both so I was not about to do an autopsy.
Honey of a mystery,
Buffy |
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Re: Honey Bees Disappearing!
They may have been transendental bees that "saw the light", felt they had served their purpose, and buzzed off the great bee-yond.
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Re: Honey Bees Disappearing!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Buffy
Who knows, there may have actually been a hive being built through a crack there!
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That would be my primary suspicion. Yellow jackets are notorious for building nests in between wood shingles and paneling of houses, so much so in the South that there is an entire business market dedicated to their removal.
Perhaps he has his house sprayed with pesticides and the unsuspecting bees go into the paneling and come out (both inside and outside) confused and dying.
Although the "mysterious science" part of me secretly hopes that a certain spectrum of light is responsible, as C1ay pointed out above. |
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Re: Honey Bees Disappearing!
Quote:
Originally Posted by EStein
They may have been transendental bees that "saw the light", felt they had served their purpose, and buzzed off the great bee-yond.
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Boooooooo!  |
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Re: Honey Bees Disappearing!
Quote:
Originally Posted by freeztar
That would be my primary suspicion. Yellow jackets are notorious for building nests in between wood shingles and paneling of houses, so much so in the South that there is an entire business market dedicated to their removal.
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Chink in this theory: Its a Spanish California house: the outside is 2-foot thick stucco on brick (one of those places that *needs no air conditioning in Southern California* because its so unbelievably well insulated), so there's not much space in there except for conduit, and certainly not much wood for wood-loving wasps/jackets. Like I say, IANAE ("I am not an Entomologist"), but I'm pretty sure these were indeed bees...
Need Gil Grissom on this case,
Buffy |
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Re: Honey Bees Disappearing!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Buffy
Chink in this theory: Its a Spanish California house: the outside is 2-foot thick stucco on brick (one of those places that *needs no air conditioning in Southern California* because its so unbelievably well insulated), so there's not much space in there except for conduit, and certainly not much wood for wood-loving wasps/jackets. Like I say, IANAE ("I am not an Entomologist"), but I'm pretty sure these were indeed bees...
Need Gil Grissom on this case,
Buffy
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I was using yellow jackets as a local case (I know they are not true bees). Given this particular building, I suppose my original theory is dead in the water. Have you asked him/her if they have the place sprayed or if they've done any pesticide work themselves? |
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