Elephants are scared around bees
51–60 of 108 posts
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#52Just a few days ago, a 27-year old elephant died at the St. Louis Zoo when a dog got loose outside his enclosure. The elephant was inside but heard the alarms of the other elephants which caused it to panic and have heart failure.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> crops were better - fertilized. You had my hopes up that I could keep some bees to apply fertilizer to my crops for minute.
Rest assured that workers bees do shit upon your crops.
Occasionally while passing through, perhaps, but being wind pollinated crops you are not exactly going to find swarms of bees in said crops.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#54Earlier 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).
This kind of over dramatizing is tiresome. "Demonic chords" (what's a demonic chord, anyway? Are bees buzzing in a tritone? Are bee hives playing chords?), talking about it sounding like a 1920's vampire movie, etc. Sure makes it sound like nothing in the world could be more creepy.
Then you go and watch a video demonstrating this effect, and it's more like the humming/buzzing sound from the hive is... slower. That's it. It's just slower, lower frequency.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#55There’s a brief mention of a study that found that “merely playing recordings of angry bees through speakers in the field was enough to cause the elephants to flee” but it seems like that would be a far cheaper solution than putting actual beehives all over the border.
The elephants would get wise to that though.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#56Earlier 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…
All sensible advice.
But if you’re careful you can go without PPE, and I have done so for years. The heat and discomfort of a suit and the additional crushed bees from clumsiness is not for me.
I don’t have Africanised bees, just nice suburban ones.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#57> dry seasons, too, can dampen bee populations in hives as they flee and search for moister climes.
This seems unlikely. The bees likely died. Bees don’t just leave their brood and fly off.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#58More than once I had flies flying full speed into my nose and get trapped there! If I was an elephant with a nose bigger than a Henry hover sucking stinging flies I would be scared too!
Yeah - that was my first thought .. A bee sting inside your trunk would be no joke !
The actual stinger of bees doesn't hurt that much, it's the venom that really hurts.
I always wondered whether a bee stinger would get deep enough in an elephant's (presumably very thick) dead skin layer to inject venom.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#59Earlier 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?
Even if you're not allergic, a few stings in the wrong place can still kill you, e.g. if your entire neck swells up that it constricts your airways. If you get more than a couple stings to the face or neck I'd recommend you make a dash to the ER and chill out there for a while just in case.
Re: Elephants are scared around bees
#60> dry seasons, too, can dampen bee populations in hives as they flee and search for moister climes. This seems unlikely. The bees likely died. Bees don’t just leave their brood and fly off.
Bees don't just leave their queen and fly off. If there's a queen there's brood but if the queen dies the workers begin to disperse, and also start to lay (haploid) eggs that only hatch into drones which also disperse.
On the other hand, colonies will migrate if their environmental conditions are not ideal. It's a phenomenon called "swarming" and it happens all the time even with domestic livestock.