Missing biscuits

What's she after?

Have you ever sat down with a mug of coffee and wondered where the biscuits are? And, then, why you’ve got crumbs down your front? Or how you got home on a Saturday night?

A bee’s life is a bit like that, but without the wondering. We know they can learn things. They can be taught to stick their tongues out in response to a certain smell, or to go to a certain place to find food, and it’s easy to suspect that shows an ‘intelligence’, but learning is only a part of intelligence.

I’ve been thinking about this because, over the last couple of weeks, we’ve had a couple of instances of ‘following bees’. Sometimes, when we’ve inspected the hives and left the apiary, we’ll find bees hovering about our heads for several minutes afterwards and, if we move away, they’ll follow us for 20 yards or so. It’s easy to think the bees have developed a grudge, or are being wilfully mischievous, or trying to drive us away, but I’m not sure that would be right.

The theory is that some colonies of bees are naturally ‘followers’, and the solution usually recommended is to replace the queen and hope that her children won’t follow us so much. But I’m not convinced by this, and there are seven reasons why:

1. out of several tens of thousands of bees in a colony, only a handful ever bother doing any following at all.
2. they only follow after the hives have been disturbed.
3. they don’t stop following if the beekeeper removes their protective clothing.
4. when they follow they tend to circle round the person’s head.
5. if you pass another person, they will often switch to follow them instead, even if they’ve not been near the hives and no matter what they look like or are wearing.
6. although followers can sting, they usually land on the person quite placidly, and it’s only after getting tangled in hair or swatted at that they will sting.
7. following seems to happen most in ‘non-ideal’ conditions – that is when it’s a bit cold, a bit damp, a bit windy. a bit late in the day or the hive has been open for longer than usual.

So, what can be tempting the bee to follow? It can’t be any smell left on the beekeeper, or their clothes, by the bees, or else they wouldn’t switch to another person. Nor can it have anything to do with clothing or hair-styling products. The distance they follow for isn’t great, either. Is that because they imagine they’ve driven off a threat? Or is it simply because, after a certain distance, they start relying on fixed landmarks for navigation, rather than heat or smell?

If you stand by the lake on a summer evening, watching the ducks or whatever, you will sometimes find a cloud of midges has sprung up around your head. And, if you move, the midge-cloud follows. This is, apparently, not because the midges like you, or enjoy being a nuisance, but because clouds of midges base themselves on visible landmarks. If you’re the landmark and you move, then the cloud will move also.

I think something similar is happening here. The books claim that, at short distances, bees rely on smell more than vision for navigation. But it might also be possible that returning bees might navigate by warmth. Perhaps some of the returning bees, attracted by the smell of the open hive, don’t fly to the usual hive entrance, but towards the top of the hive, where the warmest thing they’ll find is a beekeeper’s head, and that’s what they latch onto. After all, the brood nest of an active colony is roughly the size of a football, and 35C in the middle. A human head isn’t much different.

It’s just a thought, and I have no idea how I might test it.  We could, I suppose, experiment with refrigerated hats, or boil basketballs for bait. Any practical suggestions would be welcome.