‘Robber bees’ invade apiarist’s shop in attempted honey heist
cbc.ca156 points by lemonberry 2 days ago
156 points by lemonberry 2 days ago
Thinking about it from the bee's perspective, this is like raiding the lair of an eldritch horror for gold. A beekeeper is just a funny looking bear-thing that takes honey sometimes, but the shop of a beekeeper is full of devices beyond a bee's comprehension, more honey than a bee would ever see in its lifetime just all sitting around, its own sun which can turn on and off. To find yourself in such a place by accident must be a crazy experience, convincing your brethren to attack it by shaking your butt is on another level.
Is there a genre of fiction or collection of stories in this style that presents a fairly normal thing from a horrifying perspective? Maybe the story describes the thing in this horrific manner, and the reader slowly realizes what the "normal" thing actually is, all the while using factual basis for the phenomena. In the case of honey bees, I'm imagining the worker bees selecting a female to become queen, per wikipedia:
>"Queens are developed from larvae selected by worker bees and specially fed in order to become sexually mature."
This has much horror potential.
I wondered if "slender man" was this. An unnaturally tall and thin figure, it doesn't have hands, but some sort of tentacles growing from its back. It doesn't strike at you, you're just likely to feel a sudden, crippling pain if you catch its attention and it comes too close, followed by your certain death. It does not move quickly, but it is relentless - you thought you had outrun it, and then it's suddenly right behind you again.
It occurred to me that this could be how a savanna predator views a human hunter. Our hands wouldn't register as hands (forepaws) for them, they would be some sort of super-flexible grasping thing, like a tentacle. Standing upright we would seem impossibly tall and thin. The animal doesn't understand throwing, let alone guns, all it knows is that getting the attention of this creature is related to sudden pain and death at a distance. Endurance hunting is pure horror - you thought you had outrun it, but there it is again.
I realized a few years ago that cuttlefish were actually little Cthulhus, in behavior, not just form. What does Cthulhu do? His mere presence drives you mad, then he devours you. When cuttlefish hunt, they "flash" their chromatophore-laden skin in writhing patterns that daze or hypnotize the prey, preventing it from escaping or attacking when the cuttlefish moves to devour it.
Not fiction but I love this part in Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:
“When he was very small we used to rock him to bed … and tell him stories, and I’d make up a story about little people … they lived in the ventilator; and they’d go through these woods which had great big long tall blue things like trees, but without leaves and only one stalk, and they had to walk between them and so on; and he’d gradually catch on [that] that was the rug, the nap of the rug, the blue rug …”
I can recommend "The Bees by Laline Paull". It attempts to show the world from a bee's perspective. It is terrifying, confusing, and horrific. An excellent story.
Terry Pratchett had some books kind of like this.
The Carpet People has characters that live in the fibers of a living room carpet and are subject to mysterious phenomena they don't understand (such as a vacuum cleaner).
The Bromeliad Trilogy is similar, although the characters are a few inches high and at least have a concept of full-sized humans. They have to move their tribe from a department store that's closing down to somewhere else, which means they have to learn about the outside world.
you may also enjoy
"Same mama, different species" - "Iberian harvester ant queens clone males of a different species in a never-before-seen case of reproduction and domestication. "
https://www.404media.co/the-biological-rulebook-was-just-rew...
Not quite the same, but in anthropology this is known as Nacirema. "Body Rituals of the Nacirema" was the first example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junji_Ito%27s_Cat_Diary:_Yon...
Junjie itonhas a funny one about cats
I can't recall a whole story or genre that plays with this concept to such an extent, but I've seen it pop up from time to time in all kinds of fiction.
First example that pops to mind: If you read that completely enthralling and wonderful novel Watership Down by Richard Adams, its told entirely from the perspective of Rabbits, and beautifully so. There are several scenes, especially one featuring their first encounter with a colossal freight train and its engine, described completely from their perspective, with no knowledge of what these man-made machines are. It's right up the alley of the horror concept you mention.
> that takes honey sometimes
To them it's stealing the life blood of the hive.
> more honey than a bee would ever see in its lifetime
Bees move around the hive. They see all the honey. They individually _produce_ very little of it, but the total extent of it is surely known to them in some way.
> an eldritch horror
That's unironically how I view small winged creatures that follow their own rules and then inject me with venom, without warning, for not following them.
I sometimes wonder when we see their weird behaviors like this, if there isn't a new dance "word", that just happens too infrequently to have been documented. The syntax/grammar for butt-dancing is pretty simple, and I don't think there's any documented that could lead them to sneak in through a broken door and search interior spaces.
They have excellent smell. Not only foraging for plants but hive smells and pheromones which are socially important. I’m sure that would be enough to get them to follow the smell inside a building.
"Bob's over by the entrance. He's sweaty and agitated. He's furiously pointing to a place in the field near our home."
What would any social creature do?
"Nah, I checked that place out 20 minutes ago... there are no flowers. It's not a real place at all!"
I mean, given how little study bee dance language has gotten, if there's another unknown word and was only performed once a year by a typical hive, no one would have ever seen it. And their vocabulary isn't taught, it's instinctive, so low frequency usage wouldn't be an impediment to transmission.
What communication occurs to draw bees to the location of a fallen hive member? They seem to do that without the dance at all. So there's clearly multiple communications layers. I'm assuming that those layers work in concert to convey more complex ideas.
It's not just the finger pointing, it's the look on his face, and the smell of his sweat.
>What communication occurs to draw bees to the location of a fallen hive member?
Pheromones. Some people claim to be able to smell those themselves, some of them at least.
Can confirm. When you’re removing honey frames or hive parts that have had honey spilled on them you have to be on the lookout for scouts. One or two can quickly escalate into dozens. And they have no qualms about coming indoors.
We always leave our harvested frames outside until after dark because (a) the bees go to "sleep" at night and (2) at the time of year we're usually harvesting the temperature drops into the single digits (Celsius). But the problem is not usually robbers, it's defenders from the hive you just harvested.
Don’t you find cold stowaways hiding between the frames the next day? I have in the past, when I’ve missed one or two.
There's always stragglers who stuck with the honey rather than going home. It's sad.
Basically protecting their strage from the real robbers, from their perspective.
> And they have no qualms about coming indoors.
Bees don't like small, dark indoor spaces. But a honey house can easily be large and well-lighted, and they might not notice that it's indoors.
In a bakery like 3 block away from my home, most days there are like 20 bees trying to steal the sweet cover over the pastries. But the front wall of the business is almost completely made of glass, so they can't escape.
From a bee's point of view humans are the robbers.
Humans provide a sturdy, safe place to build hives and all they ask for in return is some of the excess honey. Bees make way more than they can use. Humans will also cart them around to food sources so they never have to worry about finding it. Seems like a sweet deal.
This is a bad take on the farming of an invasive species.
Bees don't make more honey than they can use. They make what they can and have reserves for Winter and growing in the Spring. Do you pay your landlord everything you'd otherwise save?
I've never seen a bee colony "worry" about finding food. They'll travel within a one mile radius for foraging, and four to five miles for water. Colonies will also leave a hive, or swarm (split into 2 colonies) if there is not enough resources for them.
It's not a deal. They don't understand what's happening. If you're going to take their honey, at least don't make up some weird fantasy where they're happy about it.
Honeybees are domestic animals that have been selectively bred over millennia to overproduce. It's like dairy cows. If a dairy cow produced that much milk naturally, either her udders or her calf would explode.
The rest I can agree with.
I don't remember my hives overflowing or bees exploding when I didn't harvest the honey.
> at least don't make up some weird fantasy where they're happy about it.
Fine, as long as you don't make up a fantasy that the bees are sentient enough to be sad about their life in an environment with significant stressors, predators or disease.
I agree with everything you're saying. But I am a bully who likes the taste of honey. A prisoner to desire, no doubt I will not be liberated from saṃsāra anytime soon.
> It's not a deal. They don't understand what's happening.
So what? Mutualism happens all the time in nature, even if neither party is consciously aware of it. The relationship between humans and bees is very similar to the relationship between coral polyps and algae; the algae make sugars for the polyps, and polyps provide protection for the algae.
I take issue with the framing of the industrial-scale farming of introduced species that outcompete native pollinators as a pact between equals. That the bees choose anything.
In your comparison, neither the algae nor the polyps have the capacity to reason about or alter their arrangement.
In a fair deal, both parties must be able to reason about and/or withdraw from the arrangement.
If only one party is able to reason about and withdraw from an arrangement, the other party is being used.
In this case, bees are tools being used. I'm not willing to say that it's a great moral evil for that reason, but bees not only don't have the capacity to understand the arrangement, they will die trying to kill to defend their honey.
So my only appeal in this case is not to pretend that they choose.
If only one party is able to reason about and withdraw from an arrangement, the other party is being used.
This is our relationship with all other life on earth. We use plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals to survive. We've invaded every continent on the planet (including Antarctica) and like some kind of mega-beavers we've radically reshaped environments to suit ourselves, destroying habitats for some and creating new ones for others (squirrels and many species of birds seem to thrive like crazy where I live in the city, with few predators to endanger them).
What survives and what doesn't survive is largely our choice. No other animal on the planet has this capacity for choice. Whether we favour one species over another or vice versa, it's our choice in either case. Many people do try to frame this as a moral choice but neglect the human side of it. Making real change to help wildlife requires scaling back human society, reducing food production, reducing housing and other infrastructure.
Well, it's not exactly their honey, because they have no notion of property or propriety. They'll just as soon die trying to kill to take your sugary snack.
If they don't have the capacity for considering themselves wronged, and won't get it, can you really wrong them? Are there really even two parties here?
Now it may still be wrong for other reasons to keep bees, like destroying nature by wiping out native pollinators etc.
I dont think keeping bees is morally wrong. I eat meat too and some animal had to die for that.
But I do think that comment up thread trying to frame it as some service to them or "sweet deal" is ridiculous. It reminds me when management/politicians make chances strictly for own benefit and puts out manipulative memo trying to make the situation sound as anything but that.
It is ok to use bees for honey. We dont do it for bees and they are not getting all that much value from that.
Protection from predators and (as best can be managed) from disease. Supplemental food when foraged resources are insufficient. Protection from extreme weather. We spend millions of dollars researching how to combat bee diseases. They've been glorified since antiquity (go look up all the old manuscripts where they've illustrated people dressing up like bees). Nothing weird about it even if it is a fantasy. Humanity likes the honey bee.
>It's not a deal.
We will spend fortunes and invent new science to prevent their extinction. Whether they understand it or not, they grabbed a real bargain.
> Supplemental food when foraged resources are insufficient.
Foraged resources are generally sufficient. We are taking away honey before winter and that is why they lack foos in winter and have to be supplemented.
I mean, big threst to bees are pesticides and other human generated threats. They only reason extinction could be an issue ... are humans.
What do they do with all the honey? Is there any downside to us taking it? I don't know anything about bees.
They use the honey for:
- feeding themselves during the summer dearth
- feeding themselves during the winter
- to feed themselves in an emergency (think forest fires)
- to feed a large portion of them who will leave the hive due to lack of space and/or to reproduce the hive (swarming)
- to feed the whole hive ahead of abandoning it due to lack of space (absconding)
Honeybees have two stomachs, one that is basically a bag in which they can carry nectar (and honey) which they can deliver into comb cells and to feed larvae and the queen (who is too busy to feed herself), and one that they digest in and which they can't vomit up from. When they swarm/abscond they gorge themselves, filling both stomachs, and fly off with the queen to a new place, then they use all that stored up honey to make new comb in which to start making honey and new bees.
Feral honeybees need every drop of honey they make.
Domesticated honeybees -which are the same as feral honeybees, just in captivity- overproduce only because the beekeeper will manage their desire for space and reproduction so as to make them need much less of the honey they make, and therefore they have a large surplus that the beekeeper takes.
(Well, not all beekeepers produce honey. Some of them also or instead produce queens, nucs, hives, and/or propolis.)
They use it to keep warm and alive over winter.
Or a cold or dry patch. A weekend of torrential rain can put a dent in the honey stores.
Beekeepers typically replace it with sugar syrup which obviously lacks the nutrients they are evolved for. So you can buy sugar with additives.
Or unhappy about it.
I can tell you that they were always angry when I opened the hives. Plenty of stingers left in my beesuit as proof.
> Do you pay your landlord everything you'd otherwise save?
A bad take. Do you get from your employer as much as the value you produce? And if you want to anthropomorphize further, how do bees pay the “rent” for the convenient hive accommodation or the access to plentiful food sources?
Domestic bees are bred and encouraged in every way to produce more than they need. From being offered the necessary accommodation in a convenient way including when a hive is split, to being placed next to fields of man cultivated crops. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship for both man and bee.
Unlike other man-animal relationships, the one we have with bees is on the humane, non-abusive side of the spectrum. As far as animal treatment goes, bees are almost on par with pets.
It’s not a deal but if it were, it’s as good as it gets. Bees get as much as they can get, and give as much as they can give (never more). Any beekeeper knows this. There’s no gain from abusing a hive.
> Bees make way more than they can use.
When in captivity. In the wild they make what they'll need to abscond or swarm when the time comes, and they do really take all of it with them in those cases.
If we're talking about North America, they don't belong in the wild here.
And how do you plan to remove them?
The varroa mite has been pretty effective at removing them so far. Today honeybees are essentially livestock, to the point where any given bee you see is very likely owned by someone.
I can't find any data to back that up. On the contrary, it seems there's about 1.4 colonies per square mile in the U.S. Varroa has not been an existential threat to feral honeybees, and almost certainly has hit them much less hard than commercial honeybees because feral honeybees swarm much more often, which means they reproduce more often (thus get to adapt faster) and abandon old comb more often (which helps fight lots of diseases).
I'm not sure if the comment you're replying to is ironic, since it's repeating almost word-for-word my own honeybee rant, but Varroa mites drove feral honeybees in the US to extinction in the 1990s.
(There are lots of escaped, unmanaged honeybee colonies in North America, but it's unclear how many true feral colonies there are --- true feral colonies overwinter and reproduce).
the good bees know it's symbiotic
The “good” bees are the ones we bred not to mind.
Yes, but also the bees make too much honey if they don't need to swarm because you manage the hives better than nature (which doesn't manage them at all), so yes it's symbiotic. We split them (reproduction). We give them room so they don't have to move. We help them stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer. We help them stay disease-free. We help defend them from predators. They don't "know" any of this, naturally, and we have bread them, yes, to be calm -- except of course for the recent africanization of bees which basically undid that breeding, though we still work with them anyways (and we're trying to breed the aggressiveness back out).
New word for me today: "apiarist"/"apiary". Never knew bee keepers had a more formal name, though it makes sense.
Dad joke: It would be more apt if instead of a-piary, it was "b-piary".
So a "swarm" is the collective noun for bees. But I couldn't find a collective noun for apiarists. I propose "stung" as in "a stung of beekeepers."
A swarm is actually a reproductive process. It looks like a mass of bees, but it has a specific purpose and composition.
(Although maybe you’re right colloquially)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarming_(honey_bee)
A load of bees engaged in robbing behaves entirely differently from a swarm, which is a magical thing to interact with.
I'm just repeating what I found on the intarwebs: https://englishgrammarhere.com/collective-nouns/collective-n...
It’s correct enough colloquially. It’s just so much cooler than that.
Just like specialists probably differ from the general population on how many legs / arms an octopus has.
Jason Statham in "The Apiarist" doesn't have the same ring to it
If you'd seen the movie, you'd realize that it couldn't have been more ridiculous even if that had been the title.
Bonus word: if you want to sound all fancy, beekeeping is also known as apiculture.
And soldiers who use bees in battle are called the apilry
Oh, like the way the cavilry use guinea pigs?
I think the Incas mostly used guinea pigs as incendiaries so technically it would be cavillery like artillery.
This reads like a future kids animated film. Look forward to it.
To the bee-mobile!
CBE 2025-833
Is it just me or would anyone else buy a video game based on this premise?
It sorta reminds me of "Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees."
there ought to be two versions.
in the adult horror version you are the shopkeeper being attacked by thousands of bees.
in the kids version you are a bee-general leading your bee-army on a heist.
Multiplayer version where the bee side is in a cutesy bubble primary colors bright animation style. And the apiarist side is grimdark raining gothic horror style. Release it as two separate games, tie the back ends together, never actually tell the players that the other side isn't AI.
brilliant!
and then dad comes out of his room: "damn! that bee stung me right on my nose"
at the same time the kid comes out of the kids room: "yay, i stung that shop keeper right on the nose!"
they both look at each other: "wait! what?"
Please tell me there's a video of this somewhere
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