London isn’t the only place that has been subjected to looting and pillaging lately.  It’s going on right here in California as well, and a form of scarcity is to blame.  

     In any apiary in Southern California, leaving exposed honey comb available to the outside world at this time of year comes with a price; hundreds, possibly thousands of hungry foragers zooming in on your location, desperate for anything they can get.  After breaking open the lid to a hive and scraping some comb off one of the frames, some nectar got on my hive tool. I set it down on the hive next to the one I was working on, and in the 10 seconds it took for me to look back to it, I found it literally covered with bees.

    I thought that maybe the bees had finally wizened up and knew that I couldn’t open their hives without my hive tool. Perhaps they were all going to flap their wings at the same time and take off with it, dropping it into a big tree somewhere a mile down the road.

     But no, they were just acutely aware that there was nothing in blossom for a five mile radius, and desperate times call for desperate measures. If they can’t find nectar in flowers, they have no problem taking honey from their neighbors if they get the chance. Beekeepers call this “robbing”, and it is exactly like it sounds. The colonies shift their general isolationist policies into opportunistic looting and pillaging, and will suddenly bully weaker hives if they sense they are able to get past their defenses and get at the honey.

   This accumulates into a chain reaction, which multiplies in intensity with relation to how many hives are in a given apiary. In my case, I had ten in this particular apiary, and even though I worked quickly and kept a wet rag to wipe away any honey that came exposed, it wasn’t long until all the hives were engaged in battle. Foragers from each hive were busy trying to rob another, and each hive was desperately trying to protect their hard earned bounty from intruders.

    As one can imagine, this dampens the mood of even the most well behaved hive, and I found myself squarely in the crossfire. The bees seemed to say “HEY! Get him too!  Yeah, the really big white bee with the stupid hat. He’s most DEFINITELY a robber!”  Smoke only went so far, and I just did what was absolutely necessary with the bees and got myself out of there.

    Robber bees are not delicate in their approach either. They subscribe to the method of “smash and grab”, completely ripping away the cappings on honeycomb, leaving behind a scraggly mess in their wake as they take off with a stomach full of honey. Normally, each cell is opened with utmost care to its craftsmanship, but the robbers couldn’t care less. It’s not their home, after all. So beekeepers always know what is going on if they come to a colony with bits of wax cappings on the porch of the hive, and, perhaps, several dozen dead bees on the ground from bee to bee combat.

    So, it isn’t just humans that have the capability of being savages when times are tough. Bees are just as capable.