Dwarf Honey Bees in Sun and Rain

#bees #nature #wildlife #Thailand #gardenwildlife #pob

Our coconut palm is in flower and is humming with bees in the sunshine. It's not only the sun's rays that warm me. Most of them are dwarf honey bees that have a bright orange base colour at the beginning of the abdomen and white rings. There are also a few Asian honey bees that have yellower rings and lack the obvious orange base colour. There is also a bit of a size difference.

Thirty metres away the dwarf bees have a nest in a "mayom" or gooseberry tree. The nest is a semi-circular comb about six inches in diameter hanging under a branch in the open but it's hard to see any of the comb itself as the structure is almost always covered by the bees themselves. This nest will be used for several months and slowly but continually grow with the colony size. Then one day the bees will all be gone leaving just the empty comb. I once found an abandoned nest that still had a tiny bit of honey in it - just enough for one slice of toast to share with our nephew. Apparently, without a hard winter to get through these bees tend not to store high quantities of honey so I'm never going to try to harvest it from an active nest. It's their work so they can keep it.

I don't know what triggers the bees to move, perhaps colony size, an attack by hornets or maybe a change in the best source of nectar, but at some point I will notice a new one somewhere in the garden hanging in a tree or bush. The one in the mayom tree must be about the tenth one I've found here.

One of those nests was in a mango tree during the fruiting season and led me to write this short poem:

Picking these mangoes, Comes with a test, Hanging so close, To a wild bee's nest.

The dwarf bees are tiny but still pack enough of a punch to get me dancing. And they know what to target. Three times I have pushed too close, either accidentally or once deliberately for the sake of photography, and I have been stung twice on the ear and once on the nose. But for the most part, they leave me alone whether at flower or nest - just don't knock the branch holding that nest!

The sight of the bees on their nest in the early morning sunshine, all busy and ready for the day, makes it look like they are loving life. So active, so motivated, so happy. Contrast that with the sorry sight of the nest in heavy rain. The bees all pushed towards the top and wedged underneath each other. They look so pissed off with their job as roof tiles.

I genuinely love our little dwarf honey bees and their absence would be very noticeable. Their hum as I walk passed a flowering bush evokes a memory of childhood days, hence:

That fading old-time tune, From a summer's afternoon, The song of flowers sunning, With a million insects humming.