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Elephants are scared around bees
41–50 of 108 posts
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the average human nose is at least big enough for two bees to fly up and sting.
The average human is pretty scared of bees.
If you're not wearing appropriate protection then bees can kill you easy.
De minimis you need a) a smoker, b) a veil for your face, head, and neck, c) a long sleeve shirt and long pants both made of fabric they can't easily sting through, and d) preferably tall boots with the pants legs cinched over them so they can't sting your ankles. You need gloves too if you don't know what you're doing. That's if you're beekeeping, but if you're not and you happen upon a beehive you may be in serious trouble.
Bees fly faster than you can run. They fly farther than you can run when panicking from tens of stings. When they give chase they're committed to dying for the colony, so they will sting. So don't approach beehives if you're not prepped for it. Bees will warn you before they attack, unless they're already attacking someone else, in which case they'll just attack you without warning.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The buzzing of a hive is what drives them away. When a hive becomes queenless, it begins humming differently (demonic chords). This sound change is a good indicator (to an observant beekeeper) that it is in chaos and should be left alone. Drives mammals away — the sound is EERIE (think of a cheezy 1920's vampire movie's soundtrack).
For anyone else interested in how each one sounds: https://youtu.be/QDIapC2_Ptg?si=BldfTZuMf3DVnmIn
I know I'm anthropomorphizing the bees, but the queenless hive almost sounds like it's in mourning.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elephants have very sensitive ears. The buzzing of a hive is what drives them away.
>The buzzing of a hive is what drives them away. When a hive becomes queenless, it begins humming differently (demonic chords). This sound change is a good indicator (to an observant beekeeper) that it is in chaos and should be left alone. Drives mammals away — the sound is EERIE (think of a cheezy 1920's vampire movie's soundtrack).
It's not that different. If you're doing a split then you can either find the queen and put it in the new hive, or you can just split the hive without looking for the queen then listen to hear which hive is queen-less -- you can hear the difference in that case. But it's not that huge a difference that if you open a hive you can instantly say "oh oh, this one is queen-less".
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
For anyone else interested in how each one sounds: https://youtu.be/QDIapC2_Ptg?si=BldfTZuMf3DVnmIn
I know I'm anthropomorphizing the bees, but the queenless hive almost sounds like it's in mourning.
They're fanning their wings to try to spread the [missing] queen's pheromones -- they're searching for their queen. This also serves the purpose of informing the other bees that they don't have a queen. This in turn will cause nurses to look for eggs they can raise queens from by feeding them royal jelly.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Random bee fact: each workerbee trip returns ~40mg nectar to the hive. And it takes them approximately 1 hour and 1,000 flower visits in order to collect enough nectar or pollen to fill up for the return trip. It is so taxing that the muscles in their wings wear out after around 2 weeks.
Bees live 30-60 days it seems. Queens live up to 5 years but 2-3 on average, just spawning new ephemeral pods to do work.
It depends. Winter worker bees live several months. Summer worker bees live only a few weeks. (I'm referring to honeybees here, not other types of bees.)
Winter bees have to live longer because the colony has to "hibernate" through the cold winter months, doing nothing but keeping warm, then in the spring it needs enough bees to reboot the cycle. On the other hand winter bees don't have to forage. Summer bees live less because a) they don't fatten up, b) they fly a lot.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#47My cats have been bitten by various insects more than once and are still not at all "scaredy" around them.
My cat has had close calls with various mammals but is never afraid of them.
Buzzed by a bumblebee or fly? He won't go outside the rest of the day.
Screeched at by flocking birds? Hiding under the table, inside.
He likes to eat ants, though.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average human is pretty scared of bees.
If you're not wearing appropriate protection then bees can kill you easy. De minimis you need a) a smoker, b) a veil for your face, head, and neck, c) a long sleeve shirt and long pants both made of fabric they can't easily sting through, and d) preferably tall boots with the pants legs cinched over them so they can't sting your ankles. You need gloves too if you don't know what you're doing. That's if you're beekeep…
I thought you were only at risk if you were allergic?
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're not wearing appropriate protection then bees can kill you easy. De minimis you need a) a smoker, b) a veil for your face, head, and neck, c) a long sleeve shirt and long pants both made of fabric they can't easily sting through, and d) preferably tall boots with the pants legs cinched over them so they can't sting your ankles. You need gloves too if you don't know what you're doing. That's if you're beekeep…
I thought you were only at risk if you were allergic?
If you're allergic then one sting can kill you. If you're not allergic then 200 hundred stings can kill you. There can be a quarter million bees in a large colony.
Hundreds, even thousands of stings is a pretty common thing to happen to -for example- tree trimmers who find themselves disturbing a colony in the same tree.
Here's a few examples:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/texas-swar...
https://www.kktv.com/2022/08/31/man-coma-after-stung-by-bees...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/bees-sting-tree-cutting-parks-work...
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#50My son befriended one of the leading African elephant researchers who is now one of the big wigs at Disney's Animal Kingdom. When we met him, he explained how researchers used this knowledge to teach African villages how to become beekeepers. Elephants would often trample their crops or other areas of the village, so they taught them how to keep bees around the perimeter of the village. The elephants stay away and th…
Dr. Soltis?