Читать книгу The World's Most Dangerous Animals - Kevin Baker Baker - Страница 11

An Africanized Bee.

Honey has been a precious substance ever since the ancient civilizations, and man has done its best to come up with ways to easily harvest this precious golden liquid without compromising safety. Earlier on in history there was no such thing as harvesting honey, just simply the theft of it from the bees in the wild. As man learned to deal with the honeybees though, we also learned to breed them and make the availability of honey supplies a lot more consistent. From there, the interbreeding began.

Honeybees are of different kinds, and they produce honey best when in their own natural habitat. However, some bees were too sensitive to being affected by their habitat, so bee farmers needed a hardier bunch of bees that could easily adapt to their surroundings. The idea was to create a crossbreed between the African honeybee and their European counterparts, hoping that the outcome would produce a bee that would be able to adapt easily to whatever surroundings they were in and remain productive at the same time. The Africanized honeybees that came out of the cross-breeding experiment were just that, and a bit more. The resulting breed had the following characteristics:

Aggressive – the Africanized honeybees had the capability of attacking and taking over other hives and totally exterminating the previous colony. Although this has been known to happen with other bee types, this breed is more prone to this type of attacking behaviour.

Frequent swarming – a swarm happens when a bee colony grows too big and creates two queens. When this happens, one of the queens will leave the hive with a huge percentage of the workers in order to establish a new colony. This is the bee’s way of perpetuating their species, and these Africanized honeybees were observed to swarm more often when compared to their European counterparts.

Different hive habitat – most European honeybees are known to build their hives on tree branches. Africanized honeybees displayed a different preference, going for cavities in the ground, leading to people being more unaware of their presence, which leads to more surprise attacks on people.

Higher security detail – bee colonies are composed of bees with different designations. You have the queen who lays the eggs, the drones who fertilize the queen once and then are killed off, the workers who work to keep the hive productive, then the guards who can be likened to security personnel. The Africanized honeybee has a higher number of security bees in their colony as compared to any of the other honeybees.

Larger defensive perimeter and more aggressive defence – just like most animals, bees have an area that they will guard against intruders. When compared to their European counterparts, Africanized honeybees have a larger area that they use as an alarm zone. This means that they do not just have a hidden hive; they also guard against intruders and attack sooner when compared to other bee types. Their pursuit distance is also longer, reaching as far as 50 meters from the hive. This has resulted in more stings for the poor passerby who has no idea that he or she is walking into a defensive parimeter set up by Africanized honeybee.

Despite this honeybee's increased aggression when compared to other bees, the Africanized honeybee is not the predator that its 'killer bee' name makes it out to be. This species does not go out each day simply to terrorize people in the surrounding area. They have just adapted to make sure that the hive is safe, and they will go greater distances to ensure that whatever has threatened the hive will not be coming back to do so again. The surprise attacks, the length of the pursuit distance, the higher number of guard bees dispatched to attack a potential threat, means that all these things come together for a more lethal defence of their home, which is what every animal in the wild would want to aspire for.