` Greetings Mr. and Mrs. insect aficianado, and anyone else who gives a rat's ruddy red patoot ! Earlier today, as I was puttering about outside my humble abode, I happened to notice a bee which had come to rest on my driveway. A bumble bee, to judge by it's fuzzy yelow & black color scheme - thus: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Curious, I strolled over to see what it was up to, and beheld it engaged in a peculiar behavior. It was rubbing or "scratching" repeatedly at it's abodmen - especially the underside - with it's rear legs, occasionally joining in with it's middle pair. It reminded me of a dog scratching a persistent itch with it's hind leg. After a short while, the bee began doing the same thing to the dorsal side of its thorax & head with its forelegs. In between bouts of this "scratching", or whatever. it would crawl about an beat its wings as though endeavoring to take flight, fail to do so, and go back to "scratching". After watching it for 5 minutes or so, I meandered off to do this & that, and when I returned to take another look at it, it seemed to have died. When I blew a puff of air at it, however, it seemed to revive - only to return to the weird little routine of rubbing at it's body and then seeming to try to fly off. Eventually, it wandered off into the lawn and I presume it eventually expired. I'm wondering if anyone knows what might have been the matter with it. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Possibly landed on some plant that had been sprayed recently, and was affected by the poison, and trying to clean it off...that scratching of the thorax certainly looks like an attempt for some urgent maintenence, and the fact that it couldn't fly indicated some sort of poisoning.
` I thought about that, but if so it had to have come in contact with whatever it was in some neighbor's garden or lawn. The only "chemical warfare" I conduct on insect-kind is using a granulated grub control pesticide applied to the lawn in April and September - this to deny the perfidious mole-folk a reason to burrow about the place. Unless... ...another species I have taken action against is yellowjacket wasps. If I left every nest they tried building on the place alone, it would be festooned from stem to stern with the damned things. Plus, it ain't no fun trying to dodge 'em on a roof top when you accidentally disturb the little buggers just trying to fix a leaky gutter or whatnot ! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Wonder how long the spray residue lasts... ...I do occasionally see bees seemingly trying to find a hive entrance where none exists crawling into nooks & crannies where I know I've sprayed for wasps. Maybe it took an unintended "bath" in the stuff...
Mites? My uncle has some bee colonies, and I know from talking to him that mites have been a big problem in apiculture (great word, couldn't resist) lately. The infestations can easily wipe out whole hives.
We recently ( about three years ago) had the varoa bee mite brought into NZ accidentally, and it's had a massive effect on the local wild bee population, and is in the process presently of devastating the commercial beehives. It's a real problem, because orchardists need the bees to cross-pollinate their trees or they won't set fruit.
Hi there, kiwi. :wave: From the little I know, it seems that within this last decade the mite problem has, for whatever reason, become a BIG problem in a lot of places. I don't know, but I think maybe it had something to do certain species becoming resistant to the normal treatments or what have you. Maybe not. I know that they are very hard to eradicate. I have discussed this with my uncle before, as I mentioned in a previous post, and I seem to remember him saying something about a technique wherein the bees are put in some cavity or run through something like between two wire screens with tight enough grids that the bees can't get through, and then vacuum pressure is applied, and most of the mites get pulled off the bees. Something like that. That was two years ago he told me, so my memory may be a bit tangled. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I know! What's really scary is that in the last couple years there were a lot of mysterious hive deaths where hives were just empty. Like, most of the hive would just disappear and not come back, apparently slowly the bees would die outside the hive. And it wasn't due to mites. One of the possible suspects were new nicotine-based pesticides. People surmised that they would leave the hives and their navigation would get disoriented and they would simply land somewhere and eventually die, totally confused. There was major concern about pollination there too, especially if the cause couldn't be pinpointed! Been a while since I heard anything about that, though. I'm curious to see what the status is.
From a human point of view, perhaps it was feeling pain. If I was feeling pain, I would rub the place to sooth it.
