AFRICANIZED HONEY BEES: FACTS AND FICTIONS

hi everybody welcome to the natural history institute's youtube channel i'm jordan and i'm a honeybee researcher and today i'm going to be talking to you about africanized honeybees otherwise known as killer bees so africanized honeybees what are they well first i'm going to tell you a little bit about our honeybees the ones you know and love the european honeybee so european honeybees are non-native to the united states they're actually from europe as the name implies they are apis mellifera and they were brought here to help pollinate our agriculture and the reason this is necessary you're probably thinking why can't native pollinators help pollinate our agriculture which is a great question and something that we do need to consider in our culture today however the reason we need honeybees is that in america we tend to lean towards this mono crop agriculture system which means that we plant a bunch of one crop over a huge area of land and the thing about crops and the thing about bees is that bees pollinate flowers bees eat nectar bees eat pollen and so they want the flowers of these plants and if you have all the same plant they're all going to flower at roughly the same time which means that bees can't get enough food so they would only be eating for maybe two or three weeks of the year which obviously isn't sustainable which is why we have to bring in honeybees so honeybees as you know and you can see behind me um or can be kept in colonies they can be quote unquote domesticated which means that we can keep them and we can move them wherever we want to move them and so say if you have a big bloom in california in february with the almonds you can take a commercial bee keeper can take all of their colonies to california for two weeks and then they can move on you know move to the next crop move to the next bloom so this is really you know helpful uh because we can pollinate these mono crop agricultures and that's why everyone is scared about losing the bees is because with our agriculture system today it wouldn't work if we didn't have a pollinator that we could carry around to these blooms however if we did have a more pollination system like would be naturally present uh where you have a lot of different flowers kind of these like flower strips that have a bunch of different native flowers around your crops it would be more sustainable for native pollinators which is one thing to think about when we think about pollinators because the pollinator decline isn't just worried about honeybees honeybees are important to us but honeybees are not native and there are over what 20 000 species of bees and a lot of these bees are native like here i am in what texas and that means that we have about 400 different species of native bees that we're not using because they're not domesticatable but they're also declining and so we're worried about all of these bees so you know if you at home want to plant any native flowers to help out the bees that's a good thing always a good thing um but back to the main story so we have these colonies of european honeybees like you see behind me um so why european honeybees um european honeybees are there are actually seven different species of honeybees i should mention that european honeybees are relatively nice they collect a lot of honey and they like to stay in one place and they're good at overwintering so in colder climates european honeybees 10 out of 10. um but when we came to america obviously we have some cold climates here but we also have some warm climates especially in south america so when honeybees were brought over to the americas south america didn't have any of these pollinators because it doesn't have as cold for winter so in brazil they decided well maybe we can engineer our own pollinator so they brought over african honey bees which are the same species as european honeybees they're just a different quote-unquote race of honeybee so the africanized honeybee actually faces more predators than the european honeybee such as the honey badger which i'm sure you've heard of um so this leads to the fact that these africanized honey african honey bees need to be better at dealing with predators which means that they're more aggressive because the more predators you have the more aggressive you're going to want to be the other thing that it means is that these bees are much more likely to up and leave their hive they just abscond they just get out of there because if a predator is attacking they want to leave they want to get out of there so they're much more likely to do that and they don't keep as much honey in their hive because they don't overwinter so they don't need the honey stores that european honeybees do which is all fine and good it's working well for them right but brazil we in south america wanted to have some honeybees that could pollinate there and not need to have a winter not need to overwinter not be european honeybees right so they brought over some african honeybee queens and they were setting up a breeding program to breed with european honeybees to create maybe a kind of bee that would work better for warmer climates and as some science experiments are want to do the queens actually escaped from the facility in brazil and got hybridized with the european honeybee males so this actually led to this kind of it was it was surprising how successful these europe these african honeybee queens were so they made it with european drones and managed to move northward and southward in south america and they've come all through the like panama and up into mexico and in the 80s they got to the united states so that's where all the hype the like old 80s films about killer bees come from is from these africanized bees and we call them african eyes because they're hybrids the african bees come from africa european bees come from europe and africanized bees are hybrid european african bees so it's a lot of fun um and if you just want a little bit of background here in the united states we tend to keep this is what the race is called apis melifera legustica and the africanized honeybee race is called uh apis milifera scudolata just for reference so africanized bees actually look no different than european bees because they're the same species so on inspection visual inspection you cannot tell the difference um they don't live in hives any differently than european bees do do they're just really not any different except for that they are more aggressive they swarm more frequently and they are more resistant to some honeybee parasites and pests which is actually really important so these africanized honeybees tend to be much more resistant to the parasitic mite varroa destructor so varroa destructor is a hugely detrimental mite in the honeybee systems um and one of the biggest stressors they face today and these africanized honeybees are actually much better at dealing with it which is something that comes into play maybe later um so these africanized bees got to the united states and they've been hybridizing with european bees ever since um so here i'm in like i said texas and in our apiary we do have africanized colonies and the interesting thing about our apiary is some of our africanized colonies are actually nicer than our european colonies so this just means that the hype is a little bit overstated right you're not going to get killed by africanized honeybees unless you go knock their home down and stand there right so maybe just don't do that um but other than that you have to look at the mitochondrial dna to tell the difference between these kinds of bees so they're really not that crazy dangerous but they are harder to keep in beekeeping because they are much more likely to leave the colony and they're meaner on average so there is this pushback from beekeepers that don't want to keep africanized honeybees which is understandable but there's also this reason that you want to which is these varroa this rural my resistance so it would be interesting is if we could engineer some sort of hybridized line that is maybe not quite as mean but as maybe uh more resistant to mites so don't be scared of africanized bees um the biggest thing that they're gonna do to you is maybe get a little sting in which isn't very fun but you'll be fine nobody thinks that you should be worried about africanized bees um be nice to the bees the bees are important and you know plant some wildflowers for the native bees while you're at it and with that i just want to say thank you for watching this video and for watching the natural history institute's youtube channel go ahead and give it a subscribe and comment and all that good stuff because uh the natural history national natural history institute is amazing and doing really big things um so yeah they can they deserve all the support they can get and i hope to maybe see you again sometime to talk more about these so thanks you

Channel: Natural History Institute

Views: 18,587

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Id: q0tmEEIXVy0

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020