ST. GEORGE — Honeybees are social insects with an extraordinary work ethic and produce a number of products, honey being the most well known, but they are also the super-pollinators of the planet, and without them life on Earth would be very different.

With spring in full swing in Southern Utah, honeybees are busy gathering pollen and stocking their hives and can sometimes be seen forming giant, somewhat alarming clusters which are often found on tree branches or on houses, and while this swarming behavior may seem alarming, it’s necessary for their survival.

There are two types of bee swarms, said Casey Lofthouse, a commercial beekeeper and former Washington County bee inspector.

The most common type is a reproductive swarm, which happens when a colony of bees outgrows its nest or hive. A new queen will be hatched, and the original queen and about two-thirds of the worker bees will fly off together. The bees will cluster together for a time, and this mass of bees is what is commonly found hanging on a tree limb or other structure in a large ball.

“What they’re doing in a cluster is waiting for the scout bees to find a place for them to call home,” Lofthouse said. “Like in a tree, in a house, or wherever.”

Reproductive swarms are usually quite docile, and will not attack. However, swarms consist of thousands of bees, and if the swarm is in a populated area, the flying insects can get tangled in people’s hair or clothing. If bees get trapped or stuck, they can become alarmed and may sting.

The other type of swarm happens when an established bee colony is disturbed or threatened. When this occurs, guard bees will attack anything they perceive as a threat to a hive, which Lofthouse says is a bee attack, not a swarm.

Whether Africanized or European, all bees will attack if their home is disturbed or threatened, he said, but the main difference is that the Africanized bees are more aggressive, and will chase you farther.

Bees where they don’t belong

Sometimes, bees will build a hive in an attic or walls of a home, water meter boxes or sheds. If this happens, do not disturb the nest, just call a professional beekeeper for help and advice. It is in these situations that honeybees go from being an asset to a pest, Lofthouse said, and can place the hive at risk of being exterminated.

Bees can get agitated by loud noises such as weed cutting machinery and lawn mowers, St. George Fire Chief Robert Stoker said in a previous interview, so sometimes residents doing yardwork will disturb a nest of bees.

Sometimes the colony can be collected, but other times the bees will need to be destroyed. When this is the case, Lofthouse said the hive should not just be sprayed with pesticide, otherwise, he said, it kills the bees and also contaminates the exposed wax and honey that are still in that colony.

Then, he said, bees from neighboring colonies will enter the abandoned hive and take the wax and pesticide-laden honey back to their hive – which then kills that colony as well.

In the event a hive or ball is found near or attached to a home, Lofthouse said, then residents can call the St. George Communications Center’s emergency dispatch that has a list of beekeepers in the area that will come out and remove the bees at no charge – unless the hive is inside of a building.

Honey bees – the global super-pollinator 

Pollination is critical for more than 250,000 species of flowering plants that depend on the transfer of pollen from one flower to another to reproduce.

This task is accomplished when a bee flies on a flower and the pollen from the male reproductive organ of the flower sticks to the hairs on the bee’s body. When the bee visits the next flower, some of the pollen is rolled off and onto the female reproductive organ of the flower, a cycle that repeats itself.

To explain further, once the bee lands on a flower, their feet are placed in a groove that contains the flower’s pollen sacs, and when the bee is finished and on to the next flower, it carries this sac with it on its feet. Then, when they land on the next flower for its pollen, the pollen sac falls off the bee and then falls out of the sac, according to Pass the Honey, an outreach and research organization.

Once the bee lands on the flower, it sucks up the nectar, which is the basis for honey, and then stores it in their honey stomach, since bees have two stomachs; one for honey and the other for food, and then carries it back to the hive.

It is the bright and beautiful colors and the flowers’ scent that draw them in, and they prefer single flowers with one ring of petals – since they provide more nectar and pollen than double flowers do. They also prefer blue, purple and yellow flowers that tend to have the most nectar, which is loaded with sugars – the bee’s main source of energy.

Bees – the barometer of Earth’s ecosystem 

Bees also serve as indicators of the state of the environment, since their absence, presence or quantity is an indicator that something is wrong or what is happening with the environment, which is crucial and ascertaining those changes so appropriate action can be taken in time.

If all the bees went extinct, it would destroy the delicate balance of the Earth’s ecosystem and affect global food supplies. In fact, bees and other pollinating insects are responsible for pollinating nearly three quarters of the plants that produce 90% of the world’s food.

In essence, every third spoonful of food depends on pollination, according to World Bee Day.

Bees’ impressive product line beyond honey 

Bees produce six hive products used by consumers for a variety of nutritional and medicinal purposes, which include honey, pollen, royal jelly, beeswax, propolis and venom. Honey, of course, is likely the most well-known product they produce – in fact – honey bees made more than 157 million pounds of the material that was valued at more than $339 million in 2019, according to the Food and Drug Administration. 

Aside from honey, beeswax is the second most important product produced by bees economically, and bees are of great historical importance since beeswax was a unit of trade for taxes and other purposes during the beeswax trade that dates back to ancient Greece and Rome, and continued into Europe during the medieval times.

The same holds true today, as beeswax is a popular ingredient in candles, wood polishes, cosmetics and in leather production, and is also used in the pharmaceutical industry  as a binding agent for time-released medications, and also serves as a proficient carrier of the drug throughout the body. While the United States is one of the major producers of raw beeswax, it also exports refined beeswax throughout the world.

Most significantly, however, honey bees are the master pollinators and the agricultural benefit these fuzzy workers contribute through pollination accounts for roughly $15 billion in added crop value.

“Honeybees are like flying dollar bills buzzing over U.S. crops,” the FDA says.

Honeybee populations on the decline 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, pollinators contribute more than $24 billion to the U.S. economy, with $15 billion coming from honeybees alone, and considering this dependency on these fuzzy workaholics, any drop in honeybee populations pose a considerable risk to not only agriculture, but to the ecological health of the planet.

Pesticides can also contribute to another danger to the honeybee population that scientists have dubbed “Colony Collapse Disorder,” which was first reported in 2006 and is a syndrome that describes a dead colony with no adult bees and with no dead bee bodies present, but the colony still has a live queen and honey and immature bees still present, the agriculture department says.

The queen and immature bees that were found in the nearly abandoned hives still had plenty of food stores, but inadequate staffing – meaning the number of worker bees was insufficient to keep the queen and baby bees alive.

These industrious insects are significant for many reasons and play a crucial role in the supply chain wherever hive-related products are concerned, and they contribute to not only human health, but also play a role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

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