Plain Talk: Honey Bees and Lawn Mowers (195)

Episode 195 – Plain Talk: Honey Bees and Lawn Mowers

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Jim Tew: Listeners, essentially, it's the same topic or a similar topic that I've discussed before, but it just won't go away. My discussion after today is not going to make it go away either. That's a somber opening. What is it with bees and mowers, lawnmowers? Why are they so resentful of my mower on some days, and on other days, they're oblivious to it? It's always so complex. Are there neighbors involved? How many bees are attacking me? Why is this happening? Is it the season of the year? There's a reason that this is on my mind, and I want to talk with you about it.

If you have some suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them. Stand by and let's talk about why exactly, if we can ever use the word "exactly", do bees come after lawnmowers? I'm Jim Tew. I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I do something, talk about something related to pertinent topics in beekeeping.

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Intro: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

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Jim: Before I even start, I need a high degree of honesty here. Maybe this segment, instead of being named, why do bees come after lawnmowers? Maybe this segment would more logically be called, do bees have an audio sensing system that we have not really commonly acknowledged in everyday beekeeping? You see, it's one of those things that just all through the years, I'm taught that insects don't sleep. No, insects never sleep. In fact, yes. Now all these years later, it does appear that insects go through a quiescent period that could be associated with sleep.

Drones are bad. In my earliest years, in my first beekeeping class, drones or laggards was the word the instructor used. They don't contribute to the colony. They tie up space. They cause the bees to build the wrong size comb. Get rid of those drones. I'm ashamed to tell you that I was told to do it. For the first two, three years of my bee life, I was hell on earth with drones. All these years later, drones are critical to the psyche of a beehive. A good strong bee nest of about 50,000 to 60,000 bees is going to want 400 to 600 drones as part of their reproductive program.

They really want those bees there. I was clearly taught on numerous occasions, inside beekeeping and outside beekeeping, that insects, ergo bees, don't hear. That they are just as deaf as a tree, which brings to mind the old adage, if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, yack, yack, yack. You know how that goes. That's almost what we're working with here. I'm going to have to probably consider hiring landscape people. I've always done this myself. Every year, another year has passed. Every year, I'm a year older. Let's don't harp on that.

Let's just see how we're going to adapt to it. I had an epiphany on my mower the last time I was cutting, that this is the last year I think I'm going to try to cut an acre of grass all on my own. I've got to buy a new tractor. I somehow have got to stay physically fit enough to do it, or I've got to lease it out. The common sense thing to do is lease it out. Here's the rub. I got bees back there. Let me tell you some stories I've told you over and over again on other segments, and see if it helps you understand where I am in this discussion. I had a solid neighbor, he's passed on now three years ago.

He was outside all the time when he was at home. He was a construction worker. He was dark tan. He was lean and lank. It wasn't a problem with my bees. He came to me one day just after he had finished cutting, and he says, "What's with the yellow jackets this year? They're just going crazy back there. I'm stung three or four times, and I can't even find the nest." Listeners, I knew that it was far too early for yellow jacket workers to be out. Only queens were still founding very small nests. Anything that was stinging him back there, you know what it was.

It was my bees. I've talked about the stress I felt at that moment. I'm reliving it right now. How much truth as a beekeeper do you tell? Literally, to what extent do you rat out your bees? I struggle for a second. I decided he was a good neighbor, a friend, and he could stand the news. I told him that it was my bees. When I discuss this, why do bees come after lawnmowers, you see, it's a bigger picture. Coming after me on my mower is one thing. Coming after my neighbor on his mower is another thing. Then can it get more complicated? It certainly can.

Because now, his widow, three years now, cuts the grass. Let me tell you, she's not going to have the same friendly decorum about having, "yellow jackets come after her" as my neighbor did. When I think about what I'm going to do with this ever growing grass situation and my country's penchant for constantly cutting and mowing lawns, what obligation do I have to commercial grass cutters? Clearly, just like I did with my neighbor, I'm going to tell them that those bees are back there and that they really shouldn't get that close. Now bounce back to the other topic.

Why are bees doing this? How do I tell these commercial grass cutters that, oh yes, this is July, this is August, this is April? What caveat do I put on this so that those professional people can have an idea of how intensive the bees are going to be? Bees can't hear, so how are they doing this? I hear it all the time, that bees come after lawnmowers, bees come after string trimmers, bees come after you when you've got some noisy system going. It's even been said that bees don't like my hearing aid frequency being given off. How are they sensing that, listeners?

Bees can't hear. If you look it up on the web, the web knows everything. Honeybees don't have ears when it comes to our sense of thinking what ears are, but they still have sensitive cilia that respond to vibrations and sounds. They detect these sounds through something called Johnston's organ on the second segment of the antennae. I'm having to broaden my scope here because I thought that Johnston's organ was only useful in very close proximity, nearness. When a bee was doing a dance, other bees could actually hear the buzz through this organ, but we couldn't hear it outside the hive and they couldn't hear it elsewhere in the hive.

Now I'm having to read that these delicate cilia react to vibrational frequencies and the bees respond to that. Here's my question. Isn't that just hearing? Is this another case in point where I've got to go back and change decades of old notes and concepts, and PowerPoint presentations, and add that to the list now? Yes, bees can hear. It makes sense, doesn't it? I know that bees have these small cilia between their body segments, and that when their abdomen hangs down, those segments, those cilia fire neurologically, giving the bees a sense of its position in its environment.

Is it going straight up? Is it going sideways? There's other places on the bee's body where we know they have the sensory cilia. In this Johnston's organ device, if those cilia are picking up airborne vibrations, it seems to me that that's just hearing in a different way. Bees don't have these things to hang off the sides of their head. Aren't those things on our ears called pinnas? P-E-N-N-A-S? I may not be right about that, but they certainly have hearing structures. At this point, without a lot of science, can we agree that in their own way, bees do have hearing?

When they hear that lawnmower, they come for it. Some bees do. Why do those "some bees" come for it? Why not all bees that are on the defensive spectrum? Why don't these bees do it on all days? What evidence, what information are they looking at that makes them decide that this is a day that we really want to come out and stop this lawnmowing silliness? Think about this for a while and see if I'm just totally out in the right field. Let's hear from our sponsor.

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Jim: It's always the big picture, isn't it? I suspect that those bees come for us on different days because of different stimuli, different factors. For instance, is it spring or is it late summer? In the springtime, the population is smaller. Statistically, you're going to have fewer bees that make the decision with their little super esophageal ganglions. Oh, here's a dumb guy pushing a lawnmower. I'm going to go out and do what I can to stop this foolishness. When that colony has a much larger population, then hypothetically, the reaction is going to be much greater and more bees are going to come out and attack me.

The spring of the season seems to have something to do with it. Why don't bees attack me in the dead of the winter? What am I doing? If I'm opening a cluster in the dead of the winter, some of those bees will come out and attack me. If I'm mowing grass, knocking down old weeds from last year, which would never happen, but if someone was doing that, I guess the bees have the ability during off seasons to realize that if you go out now, you're facing certain death. I think they were facing certain death before. There's that factor to add in.

There's a seasonal attribute to it that's important. Is it a strong colony or a weak colony? I got to tell you, I sat upright when I read that you need to look at the weak colonies probably more than the strong colonies. There's some research that indicated that the weaker colonies are more intensive about these sounds. Can we put an asterisk beside that? I got to get back to you later on that. I'm not sure that I'm ready to buy off on that right now. The strong colonies, certainly, the strength of the colonies, how many bees are there? Those things having a factor to do with it.

Plus, what's the environmental influence? Is it the availability of food resources? Are a lot of bees out in the field because they prioritize collecting nectar and they're not prioritizing punishing me for being on the lawnmower? Is the nectar all gone? Now that the colony's attitude has changed, we know that happens all the time, that bees are more fussy in the late season of the year when they're defending their stock than they are in the spring of the year when they're accumulating their food reserves. There's also a factor to do with what the bees are trying to defend.

What's their sense of this? This is good a time as any to say it's not just auditory vibrations that the bees are sensing. Those gasoline engines are also puffing away with exhaust fumes that probably in themselves are not harmful, angering to the bees, but they're just another indicator that something is not right in their environmental universe, and everything depends on them having that honey store and their nest cohesion to survive the upcoming winter. At that point, those bees would make the decision to come out and get me.

These are the factors, some of the factors that work into it; the vibrations, the smell, environmental time of the year, perceived threat. I haven't mentioned other stressors. If there's a raccoon or a skunk that's been harassing that colony all during the night, they're going to have a short fuse the next day, a very short temperament the next day. There was a bee guy, I wrote an article about it, and I put the pictures in the magazine. I even had to get his permission to do it. He said he bought a zero-turn mower. He had never used it around his bees before.

His wife was keen to use this nice zero-turn mower. He said that he cut two rounds in front of the entrances. On the second round-- he's an established, knowledgeable beekeeper. He said hundreds of bees came out and were attacking him. It flashed through his mind that he was in serious trouble. He jumped off that mower. He's wearing those Crocs, that brand of plastic shoe that you just slip your foot in. He stuck his foot in the belt, where it goes around the pulley on the mower deck, made him fall to the ground, ripped his Croc off, bees attacking him like crazy.

He got up and he ran to the house. When he finally got to the house and got the bee sting thing under control, he realized he had broken a toe and nearly cut another off. He had serious damage that required intensive medical attention and then physical recovery beyond that. That story came to my mind about a month ago when I was cutting on my little Kubota and I felt a thump in the back. Who knows what it is? I felt a thump on a shirt sleeve, felt a thump on my neck. Then I realized that 25 yards from my colony, from colonies that I had not opened in a month, that they had decided that I was a villain on that mower and they were coming for me.

I had that guy's story in my mind because my pulley belts were exposed too. I just gutted it out and drove the tractor out of there and thought I'll come back closer to dark to do this. I just can't get this subject out of my mind though. Why is it mowers? If I played loud music in my apiary, would that drive my bees bonkers? If I was working on a car engine and would rev the engine somewhere nearby, is that going to cause them to go quirky? Why do they zero in on lawnmowers? I'm going to have to leave that question unanswered. I suspect that they're not just zeroing in on lawnmowers. I suspect that it just looks that way.

What to do here? In previous articles, I've asked, do electric motors on these devices, electric mowers, electric string trimmers? Several people wrote back and said there was a distinct difference between using electric stringers and electric mowers, and using gasoline powered mowers. If I had to come up with a reason for that, they'll probably still come for you, but you don't have the stimulus of gasoline fumes coming off. You've cut that stimulus to it. I brought all this up because I'm going to have to talk to people about cutting my grass near that apiary, and sometimes as far away as 25 yards.

At some point, you think, you've got to cut so much of the grass that's left, why are you even paying to cut it all? I need help with this. I've got other issues now in my life that are demanding my time, and I need to unload some of these tasks that I can unload on someone else or some other company. Probably going to go with this, but I've got to find people who are hardened to being around bees, who, if they are attacked, will have some idea of how to get out, not cut a foot off doing it and then get my insurance company all riled up. I'm sorry to bring this up again, but it's just multifaceted.

Number one, do bees hear or not? Yes, they clearly hear in one way or another. They respond to airborne vibrations. Do bees come after me every day? No. They're decision makers. They come after your own days or seasons when they think you need to be gotten, probably related to food reserves. Is there some genetics involved in this? Absolutely. I would think that a colony that has a hair trigger anyway is certainly going to have a hair trigger on temperamental days when they're making decisions to come sting me for cutting grass. There is no one single thing, it appears to me, in this discussion here today that causes bees to come and attack me when I'm trying to trim grass.

Not right up around the colony, but just in the general vicinity of the hive. I would like to thank researchers Kirchner, Towne, Mickelson, and Winston for the information that I've given you here today. I researched the web a little bit, I found enough to get my thoughts together, and I'm using their work. It's not mine. If you've had some episode with bees attacking you while you're mowing and trimming, if you have found a way to reduce the incidences of bees attacking you while you're mowing and trimming, be helpful to the rest of us if we all knew what was going on. Until we discuss this topic again sometime in the future, and rest assured we will, I'm going to end it here. I'll talk to you next week. I'm Jim, telling you bye.

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