A Terrace, B.C., beekeeper found herself in a nightmare situation late last month when “thousands and thousands of bees” filled her shop.
Call it an attempted robbery — the bees were trying to steal sweet, sweet honey.
Christine McDonald, owner of Rushing River Apiaries, said it’s the first time desperate “robber bees” — bees that try to take honey from another colony’s hive — have descended upon her indoor shop to hunt for food as resources get scarce in the late summer.
While she’s worked with bees for years and said she’s very comfortable around them, this situation had her frightened.
“I think that’s the most panicked I have felt.…There’s thousands of bees, I don’t know where they’re coming from, and I need to protect all of the honey.”
The multitudinous bees had found their way in through cracks in the shop’s older bay door.
When a bee finds a good food source, it returns to the hive and does a “waggle dance” to tell other bees where the food is, McDonald said.
After throwing tarps and lids over the equipment and products, and managing to save most of it, McDonald said she ended up “sacrificing her bathroom” to trap the invading bees: she left the light on, and lured the bees to the light where she could collect and then release them.
But it took four or five days until the bees stopped trying to return.
“I think they’ve learned that, nope, there’s no more food here. We can’t get in.”
McDonald has since taped up the shop’s door.
She said while she’s had robber bees attack her beehives before, it’s the first time they found her indoor shop.
“Fall beekeeping is very intense — trying to help bees hunker down against other bees and wasps and keep the food stores that they’ve worked so hard for.”
So-called robber bees are a fairly common phenomenon in the late summer and early fall.
Alison McAfee, a research associate at the University of B.C. and honeybee scientist, said when there’s fewer food resources, such as nectar-producing flowers, and the bee population is close to its peak, some forager colonies can invade weaker colonies to steal their food.
“It’s almost like they have a level of desperation, kind of like the way you can think about bears having a bit of a level of desperation trying to fatten up for winter,” McAfee said.
She said wasps can also attack honeybees — but for slightly different reasons. Wasps eat a sugary substance secreted from their own larvae earlier in the season, but in the fall, there’s fewer larvae and more adult wasps.
“They’re not getting that sweet treat from their babies, essentially, and so they’re especially motivated to get something sweet from elsewhere, because the adults actually really like to eat sugary things — and there’s a lot of sugary stuff inside a honeybee colony.”
But wasps aren’t the only bee-killer out there.
McAfee said a bee colony can die from robber bees, if it’s too weak to defend itself.
“We have a bad opinion of wasps,” she said. “We’re like, ‘Oh those wasps, they’re attacking our honey bee colonies, they’re killing my bees.’ But then a lot of the time, actually, the bees will kill our bees as well.”
McDonald is back to producing honey after a few days of cleanup.
She said the bees seem more desperate this year than in the past, and thought it might be due to the extended heat as it still feels like midsummer.
McDonald encouraged other beekeepers to keep their bees well fed, so they don’t feel the need to rob other hives.
