A Bee’s Life

A honeybee’s life is quite full as they spend their days caring for their colony. Each day is full of purpose as queen bees upkeep colonies by laying upwards of 2,000 eggs a day (some rare cases speak of 3,000); drone bees actively seek to mate and pass their genes; and worker bees take care of the hive with responsibilities that evolve with age.

Today, we are going to focus on the life cycle and roles of a queen, worker bee, and drone in a healthy hive (we will save colony collapse scenarios for another day so this article may focus on the specifics of bee life cycles). The queen’s section will be split into four focal elements; the worker bee section will have a day-by-day evolution of responsibilities; and the drone will focus on their singular, significant importance. As a conclusion, we will address how urban beekeeping affects the bees’ lifestyles.

Prelude: Perspective

Over the next couple of minutes, you will get a walk through the life of all three castes of a bee: queen, worker, and drone. To give some perspective on their roles, we will first address their life expectancies.

A drone will live three to five weeks. A worker bee will live five to seven weeks in the summer; a winter worker bee can live up to six months, though (there is a difference in workload and biology). A queen generally lives three to six years.

Headquarters

A queen is the central role of a hive; she is the central signal that a hive revolves around. The queen produces pheromones (chemical substances secreted and detected by smell, in the case of honeybees) encoded with important messages and influences, such as making workers disinterested in mating. Overall, a queen’s pheromones maintain the hive by affecting the behavior of her colony.

Beyond her central signal of control, her primary purpose is to reproduce. The queen is the only bee who will reproduce in normal circumstances (the exception is a laying worker in a colony collapse scenario). To keep up with the needs of the hive, a queen will lay upwards of 2,000 eggs a day! This massive egg output compensates for the six-week life expectancy of a worker bee during the spring and summer months and the massive need for foraging and hive maintenance.

Largely, a queen spends her days solely laying eggs–being the literal life of the hive. Naturally, what comes next is questioning how? So, let’s talk about the nuptial/mating flight.

Flight of the Mating Bee

The birds and the bees.

A virgin queen bee will leave a hive for her mating flight as soon as five days after emerging from her cell. On a sunny afternoon with favorable weather conditions, she will then head to a drone congregation area two to three miles away to avoid mating with one of her brothers (drones only travel to local congregations). As she arrives, her pheromonal presence attracts drones hopeful to mate.

The congregation area is up to 650 feet across and 16 to 160 feet high; unlike other bees, honeybees actually do mate in mid air–and at heights higher than their usual flight height. During this mating flight, a virgin queen will mate with up to 50 drones, with a mating average of 12 drones.

A drone inserts its endophallus (genitalia connected to the abdomen) into the queen, with this romantic mating only lasting three to five seconds. After successfully mating, the drone attempts to fly away, but the endophallus remains in the queen; the lower half of the drone’s abdomen consequently is ripped, killing the drone. The endophallus is left behind, left as a “mating sign,” which the next drone will attempt to remove the endophallus to mate with the “virgin” queen.

The queen’s spermatheca stores between five and six million sperm for fertilization usage, taking multiple mating flights to fill such if necessary. The initial mating sperm will be used over the course of her life until a new queen is made to replace her (in which, the new queen may kill or spare the old queen, if she is still alive).

Gender Determination

The queen has complete control over the gender of her eggs. As an egg passes through the ovary to the oviduct, the queen can choose to fertilize the egg with sperm or not. Fertilized eggs become female, worker bees (or queen bees, as discussed in “Royal Reproduction”); unfertilized eggs become male, drone bees.

After the egg is determined, the gender and caste determines its development time table. Drone bees need 24 days to grow from egg to adult; worker bees grow over 21 days; and queens become mature after only 16 days!

Workers bees also have control over the gender of the colony too, though. Workers carry the responsibility of making hive cells, and each kind of bee needs a specific size for its respective egg. Drone bees are much larger than a worker bee, so their egg cells need to accommodate their size; meanwhile, smaller cells are made for worker bees. The queen approaches cells of proper sizes to lay eggs in, therefore the workers influence the gender distribution of the next generation with their work.

The gender distribution becomes a game of balance between the actions of workers and the queen as they work together on the upkeep of the colony. The queen can force the gender she sees fit, and the workers work with her to shape the colony for what’s best for their survival.

Royal Reproduction

Queen bees are an exception when it comes to their birth. The defining differences are that the other castes of bees are born in hive cells, fed royal jelly for the first three days, then fed pollen and nectar for the remainder of their larval state. Queens, on the other hand, grow in queen cells and are only fed royal jelly.

Let’s talk about what these differences imply. Firstly, a queen egg is a female, fertilized egg that is solely fed royal jelly throughout its entire larval state and life, instead of nectar and pollen. Now, what is royal jelly? Royal jelly is a protein-rich excretion from honey bees’ glands–the excretion is akin to milk from a mother, except the substance is more like white snot than milk.

Secondly, the queen cup is designed to raise a queen–either made when a queen bee is nearing her end (end of her life, or end of her reproductive usage) or when a colony becomes queenless. With a cup prepared, an egg will either be laid by a living queen or a fertile egg will be moved into the queen cup. Though, a fertile egg has to be younger than three days old to raise a proper queen.

Why? After three days, fertile larvae are fed the pollen and nectar mixture–which inhibits their ovary (so a queen avoids nectar and pollen like the plague); queens are determined more by the lack of pollen and nectar in their diet than by the pure diet of royal jelly. The queen’s ovary will grow to its limit as it develops in its larval state, and the queen will end up 1.5 the size of the other bee castes.

To touch on the queen cup’s design briefly, the cup will always be built vertically with the opening on the bottom, and the cup is designed to be built upon and lengthened for the queen’s elongated size. The cup is made out of wax that is produced by the honey bees’ wax glands, which the bees develop in the abdomen between 12 and 20 days old.

A Life’s Worker

The survival of a colony rests on the workers (aside from survival relying on a queen’s reproduction). Workers largely nurse the hive and forage for resources, filling key roles with designated tasks that evolve with age. Below, the exact responsibilities will be outlined with the age of a worker that performs the task.

As soon as a worker bee emerges from its larval state, she unconsciously detects the pheromones of the baby bees, and those pheromones kick in the worker’s instincts to nurse their younger sisters.

• Days 1-2: Worker bees will start off responsible for cleaning the hive cells and keeping the brood warm.
  • All cells are kept clean and sterile before laying eggs or storing honey, and they are responsible for capping the brood cells and securing the larvae. These young bees are responsible for keeping the hive free of disease for the health of the colony.
    • This also includes getting rid of diseased or deceased larvae as quickly as possible, taking the carcass as far away from the hive as possible. In the event of a large carcass (like a rodent) stung to death inside the hive, the worker bees will simply cover the carcass with propolis–a sticky, antimicrobial substance collected from trees.
• Days 3-5: Worker bees will feed older larvae.
  • Nursing bees will check on their larvae over a thousand times a day!
  • Older larvae, eight days before hatching, will be fed 10,000 times a day to satisfy their hunger and let them grow plump before emergence.
• Days 6-11: Worker bees will feed younger larvae
  • Habits are similar to their younger nursing sisters feeding older larvae, but the younger larvae are not as hungry.
• Days 12-17: Worker bees will produce wax, build combs, and transport food within the hive.
  • During this period, workers will develop wax glands (as previously mentioned). They will use these glands to produce beeswax, build combs, and support the hive’s structure. At this age, workers are also responsible for transporting food within the hive to various honey storing locations, organizing what their older sisters forage.
    • A worker has to consume eight kilograms of honey just to produce one kilogram of wax.
• Days 18-21: Worker bees will guard the hive entrance.
  • At this age, her stinger will fully develop, and her duty shifts to guard the entrance. Guardians detect nearby intruders using their senses, primarily by smell. If an intruder gets too close and poses a threat, the guardians will rush to protect the entrance and sting any threat–doing so, as discussed in the Language of the Bees blog, will release a pheromone to signal the threat to nearby workers.
    • This pheromone signals other guardians to charge towards the target with the aim of stinging it to death; this pheromone alarm is a potent defense as the threat will receive numerous incoming stings, killing the threat if not deterring it first.
  • A worker bee can actually stab other insects or thin-skinned animals multiple times without dying (other bees, wasps, rodents, etc.). However, a bee can only sting an intruding, thick-skinned mammal once, dying as their stinger stays behind.
• Days 22-End: Worker bees are now classified as field bees, instead of hive bees.
  • These field bees will travel to flowers and perform the key foraging efforts. Field bees are the ones to thank flower pollination; field bees are also the ones to collect pollen, nectar, propolis, and water in key foraging routines.
  • Worker bees have a general life expectancy of six weeks, with the range spreading between 35 and 45 days old.

Winter bees, classified as diutinus bees, are a bit different than their foraging season counterparts, though. As the temperature drops, the queen will halt all reproduction efforts, and the workers’ biology changes with this adjustment. The lack of pheromones from baby bees means a worker’s nursing instincts won’t kick in, so their biology adjusts to a long-living variant; the winter season demands less strain from a worker bee, so their bodies adjust to thrive and care for the queen for the duration of winter.

These diutinus bees will then be the first to fly out and forage as winter thaws, and the cycle starts all over with new six-week patterned bees being laid.

Drone: A Simple Importance

A male drone’s role is much simpler than the worker’s; a drone’s singular purpose is to mate. Only present in the spring and summer, a drone will emerge from his egg and continue to eat three times more than workers as he matures. After a week of maturing, he will start to become sexually active and begin to take flight. His first flights will last only 15 minutes as he simply loops around the hive to become oriented with the hive’s location.

Once oriented, a drone will fly to a drone congregation area on sunny afternoons–with a heavy preference of temperatures above 66 degrees Fahrenheit, no rain, and wind speeds less than 60 miles per hour.

He will spend 30 minutes or more at a time on a mating flight at a drone congregation area with many bachelors like him. If he is lucky and successful in mating with a queen, he will die in the process (see Flight of the Mating Bee), and his genetics will be passed on. If unsuccessful, he will simply keep trying as long as he lives, taking flight multiple times a day for every day he can.

While drones do not perform useful hive labor like their female counterparts (even lacking a stinger for hive defense), drones are considered crucial for the genetic diversity they bring in the mating process. Studies show that a colony’s chances of survival increases with the number of mates the queen had; genetics are the key factors in determining a colony’s size, temperament, and quality. Drones have the key responsibility and purpose to improve the survivability of bees abroad.

Important as they may be, a surplus of drones may stress a colony due to resource consumption–as they continue to consume three times as much as workers throughout their lives–so most hives limit the number of drones at a ratio of one drone for every 100 workers.

As the warmth gives way to sweater weather, any drone still alive will be kicked out of the hive and left to starve as the hive prepares to survive the cold. The hive cannot afford to support a drone’s diet during winter, so this banishment is for the greater survival of the colony. Besides, a drone cannot become diutinus, so he could not live for much longer either way.

Current Day

Urban beekeepers make the best efforts to save the bees while encouraging their natural cycles to remain consistent. Our beekeepers, amongst others, create homes and make space for our buzzing buddies, especially with habitat loss being a major problem. In addition to providing a stable habitat, beekeepers will either create a feeding frame or grow plants to help with foraging efforts so our bees may have proper resources in our urban areas.

Another way urban beekeepers may help out the bees is by queen grafting. A practice we here at Bee Safe use, queen grafting is the technique of building queen cups and placing fertilized eggs inside. The bees are naturally led to build up a queen cell around the cup and properly raise queens. This technique is used to prepare queens in the scenario that a queen may disappear or die for various reasons; this queen grafting provides a saving grace for queenless colonies that would otherwise fall apart. Now, bees can save themselves if they have the resources; but, if they lack young, fertilized eggs, the colony would die off without our intervention.

Truly, not every beekeeper keeps their bees the same–some only check on their hive twice a year to leave the colony’s survival to nature. No matter what though, us beeks are making every effort to save bees out there by making homes in our urbananized world, and we could use your help doing so!

An easy step is to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube @beesafebeeremoval. Every interaction helps get our content out there to actually make a difference. We hope to educate people to make way for truly saving the bees! Though, if you want to do more than interact with our content, feel free to DM us on Instagram or Facebook and ask about what you can do.

The Benefits of Wasps

Before you swat a stinging wasp away from your next picnic, pause to consider the delicate and beautiful hammer orchid.

The Australian flowers evolved to resemble the rear end of a female thynnine wasp. It’s a ruse to attract male thynnine wasps.

When a passing wasp makes his move on the flower — tries to have sex with it, in other words — he inadvertently deposits pollen on the orchid’s stigma. Without amorous wasps, these remarkable flowers would never bloom again.

That intricate relationship between flower and insect is one of many ways stinging wasps, or aculeate wasps, benefits ecosystems, human health, and the economy, according to a new review paper by scientists at University College London and the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Do Wasps Benefit the Environment?

Published in Biological Reviews, the journal of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, the study is the most comprehensive meta-analysis of aculeate wasps to date, drawing on more than 500 scientific papers.

These insects, however, have a PR problem. They’re unpopular with the general public and researchers alike. That attitude has resulted in gaping holes in scientific knowledge about wasps’ role in ecosystems, the researchers said and limited our understanding of threats posed to wasps by urbanization, climate crises, and more.

Since spring is when queen wasps start founding colonies across temperate climates, it’s the perfect time to take a second look at insects that, researchers argue, have been overlooked for too long.

“Everyone just kind of associates (wasps) with annoying them at barbecues or beers gardens,” said lead study author Ryan Brock, a doctoral student in evolutionary ecology at the University of East Anglia. “It’s always like: What is the point of wasps?”

Brock explained that the 33,000-odd varieties of stinging wasps included in the new study do more than hover, menacingly, near the potato salad.

“The two main things that wasps are doing for our ecosystems are as pest controllers and as pollinators,” he said. Nearly 1,000 plant species may be pollinated by stinging wasps, found the review, including 164 species, such as the hammer orchid, that rely on wasps alone for pollination.

Should stinging wasps disappear overnight, those 164 plant species would be lost.

What Benefit do Wasps Provide?

The insects are also agile predators. “Wasp species that live in large colonies are fantastic at hunting other insect species,” Brock said. Without wasps, Brock said there could be an explosion in caterpillars and aphids. That, in turn, could decimate backyard gardens and crop yields.

Insects eating other insects contribute an estimated $417 billion to the world’s economy each year, the study said. Insect pollination, meanwhile, adds more than $250 billion to the global economy.

While pest control and pollination are stinging wasps’ most prominent roles in the natural world, coauthor Seirian Sumner explained that wasps’ other behaviors — what she called “ecosystem services” — are just as fascinating.

“They can strip a bird clear of meat within a few hours. They disperse seeds,” said Sumner, a professor of behavioral ecology at the University College London, noting that both of these behaviors contribute to thriving ecosystems. She pointed to wasps’ potential to contribute to human health, too.“They can strip a bird clear of meat within a few hours. They disperse seeds,” said Sumner, a professor of behavioral ecology at the University College London, noting that both of these behaviors contribute to thriving ecosystems. She pointed to wasps’ potential to contribute to human health, too.

“Wasps have medicinal properties in their saliva. Mostly, it’s antibiotics,” Sumner said, explaining that wasps’ saliva helps preserve the paralyzed prey they feed their young. The medicinal value of wasps, though, is mainly unexploited, she said. “Their venom sacks are essentially a pharmacy cabinet waiting to be opened.”

The Almond Catastrophe

Based on a The Guardian’s article, the almond industry in California has exponentially grown to a $11 billion dollar industry over the past several years, with Central Valley’s orchards spanning an area the size of Delaware (yes, the size of another state). With this enormous-scale orchard, you can’t help but have some awe about the size.

You can thank the honey bees for the 2.3 billion pounds Central Valley annually harvests; Central Valley cannot operate without the pollination of two million hives’ worth of bees. But, is this mass production too good to be true?

The short answer is yes. The more important question is why?

Central Valley is lovingly nicknamed ‘America’s salad bowl’ for its mix of pollution and chemicals–not the best nickname to have for a valley full of life. After all, pollution is proven to damage plants with stunted growth and necrotic lesions, among other signs.

As for our focus, pollution also sickens honey bees; a study has proven that pollution makes bees sluggish and could shorten their lives. Plus, pollution masks scents, which bees use as a major sense of direction.

But, pollution is just the secondary effect of the primary problem: pesticides’ heavy usage in the Valley. The almond crop has the most pesticides used than any other in California, at a whopping 35 million pounds a year! First of all, pesticides further worsen the pollution problem, which, secondly, brings harmful effects for bees (and humans; pesticide pollution can cause cancer and asthma in human lungs).

Pesticides are broadly lethal to the honey bee population. While Central Valley farmers spread pesticide to kill off crop-feeding insects, the farmers are killing off, on average, a third of each commercial beekeeper’s hives each year–the same hives providing the mass pollination. To make the threat worse, illnesses are spread rapidly throughout neighboring hives due to the proximity of the two million hives.

The honeybee population’s health is drastically at risk when pollinating these almond farms; beekeepers struggle to just maintain their population and repopulate bees for the next year. These beekeeper’s keep pollinating Central Valley due to the high profit margin (gaining quadruple the profit of pollinating any other fruit) so they may keep raising bees with financial strength, but this pollution and pesticide problem have to be fixed for the sake of the honeybees.

Central Valley clearly lacks care for the pollinators that keep the farms operational; they upkeep an environmental catastrophe, after all! At this level of pollution, all life in the valley is at risk.

So, Bee Safe Bee Removal asks you to stand with the bees! Tweet and shoutout to the Almond Board of California! We don’t need to shut down the Valley; we just need regulation on pesticides’ distribution. A little more care is all that’s needed to help fix America’s salad bowl, and save the bees! We love to do bee removals, but we can’t help people with their bee issues if honeybees are struggling to survive in the first place. We want to make sure bees are safe no matter what.

If you want to hear more of Bee Safe Bee Removal’s passion, feel free to follow our blog and socials as we aim to provide high quality bee removals that are eco-friendly. Bee Safe out there!

Why are Bees Important?

Imagine today is a Thursday in your typical fall, and you’re driving down Main Street in your city’s downtown towards the farmers market. As a kid, you watched Grandma pick her papaya and onions from a market stand; that was a time of bliss and memory.

Nowadays, that bliss is gone. The market is overrun with larger demand and fewer stalls. Knowing the stalls are already out of stock, you head to the grocery store to find the entire produce aisle also emptied.

This picture is in a world where we let our pollinating bees die. Now, is this picture exaggerated?

Let me draw you the best case scenario without bees: prices increase and we don’t starve. We humans sustain enough cereal grains–crops that can wind pollinate–that we likely would not starve; we would lose other crops, though. Without bees, the produce aisle either doesn’t exist or wouldn’t be so cheap. The loss of bees would require human or robotic labor to manually pollinate–with either labor being more costly and less efficient than bees’ work. Simply from a point of economics, crops that would cause a negative profit margin will not get the upkeep needed and will disappear from our markets, leading to a lack of produce.

So, here is your answer: the “fall” is the best case scenario.

Frankly, the worst case scenario would lead to food webs falling apart, affecting us and surrounding ecosystems with a loss of food; that is simple biology in its scariest sense. We really don’t want to imagine life without bees.

You see, thousands of bee species have co-evolved with the plants they pollinate over the ages–covering 80% of all flowering plants! Bee’s furry bodies, variance of size, seasonal tendencies, and some species’ ability to buzz pollinate (rapidly free pollen that’s stuck) make bees the perfect pollinators that cannot be easily substituted by human or machine power.

The real downer is how the population of bees is already diminishing due to several factors. Beekeepers worldwide recognize the bees’ decrease and the importance of our perfect pollinators, hence why we fiercely defend their lives.

So, we ask you to stand with us. Let this be a wake-up call to at least be mindful of our buzzing buddies, because this article is sadly not exaggerated; we just don’t know the timeline, so we must act now to keep the bees buzzing.

Follow us as we share experiences and knowledge in our journey to keep bees safe at Bee Safe Bee Removal.

Language of the Bees

Humans were thought to be the only species to have abstract language in their movement, but we cannot claim to be the only species now. Abstract language is defined by the meaning from nonverbal messages. With this definition, honey bees have one of the most sophisticated abstract languages of all animalia–nearing human language.

The Waggle Dance

Honeybee workers perform a series of movements, often referred to as the “waggle dance,” to teach other workers the location of food sources more than 150 meters from the hive! Scout bees fly from the colony in search of pollen and nectar. If successful in finding surplus supplies of food, the scouts return to the hive and “dance” on the honeycomb.

The honeybee first walks straight ahead, strongly shaking its abdomen and producing a buzzing sound with the beat of its wings; the distance and speed of this movement communicates the distance of the scavenging site to the others. Communicating direction becomes more complex, as the dancing bee aligns her body in the direction of the food, relative to the sun–which changes throughout the day. The entire dance pattern is a figure-eight loop, with the bee repeating the straight waggle each time it circles to the center.

Honeybees also use two varieties of the waggle dance to direct others to food sources closer to home. The round dance, a series of narrow, circular motions, alerts colony members to the presence of food within 50 meters of the hive. This dance only communicates the relative distance of the supply, not the direction. The sickle dance, a crescent-shaped pattern of moves, alerts workers to food supplies within 50-150 meters from the hive, functioning similar to the round.

After performing the waggle dance, the scout bees may share some of the foraged food with the following workers, to communicate the quality of the food supply available at the location.

Discovery

The honeybee dance was observed and noted by Aristotle as early as 330 B.C. Karl von Frisch, a professor of zoology in Munich, Germany, earned the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his groundbreaking research and explanation on this dance language. Frisch’s The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, published in 1967, presents fifty years of research on honeybee communication.

Odor Communication

Besides the waggle dance, honeybees use odor cues from food sources to transmit information to other bees. Some researchers believe the scout bees carry the unique smells of flowers they visit on their bodies, and that these odors must be present for the waggle dance to work. Using a robotic honeybee programmed to perform the waggle dance, scientists noticed the followers could fly the proper distance and direction but were unable to identify the specific food source present there. When the floral odor was added to the robotic honeybee, other workers could locate the flowers.

Odor cues also transmit important information to members of the honeybee colony. The queen bee produces a unique odor that tells the community she is alive and well, which wafts throughout the hive from bees’ wings passing the scent along. When a queen is introduced to a colony, the bees must get familiar with her smell to recognize her as their own. To help with the transition, beekeepers will keep a new queen in a separate cage within the hive for a few days.

Also, pheromones produced and secreted by the queen control reproduction in the hive. She emits pheromones that keep female workers disinterested in mating,​ while also using pheromones to encourage male drones to mate with her.

Hive Defense

The waggle dance is not just used for pointing to food, though; they communicate incoming attacks. As a wasp approaches, the honey bees vibrate and perform round dances to warn of nearby danger. Workers will rush for any nearby foul odor-producing fauna; anything that would deter predators from approaching the hive will be smeared near the entrance. Their dance of beats, buzzes, and movement allows for quick dissemination of the warning, enabling immediate action when the hive is threatened.

Hormones play a role in the defense of the hive as well. After stinging, a worker honeybee produces a pheromone that alerts its fellow workers to the threat. That pheromone is why a careless intruder may suffer numerous bee stings if a honeybee colony is disturbed.

Linguistics: Waggle’s Sophistication

Why is the waggle dance so accurate? More so, does the waggle dance allow for more messages than just pointing to food? How close is it to language, as we humans see it?

Bees have “words” with the buzzing and length of dances; bees have grammar for the order in which they communicate, to get attention and walk through instructions in order; bees have rules for how they address others.

The only real differences between our languages and theirs is that ours is learned and limitless, while theirs is known from birth and has limits–though we are not exactly sure what those limits are (scientists thought the waggle just communicated food until they proved a bee warned its hive of a wasp).

The heat of a Texas summer presents a great opportunity for many to wind down in the outdoors–swimming and having a nice BBQ on the grill.

Nothing ruins that blissful bite of your freshly broiled hamburger more than some buzzing buddies getting all up in your business. After all, why do they insist on disturbing this sit-back second, of all times? Well, it’s their instinct.

Your BBQ simply attracts bees for the simple aim of food, as the smell attracts bees and neighbors alike. Furthering the attraction for the bees, a bright and sweet palette (like a side of watermelon) reminds honey bees of the flowers they forage.

Not all hope is lost though; you can still grill with some simple steps:

1. Seal your food.
2. Isolate the food.
3. Stay calm.

An easy step is to cover your food. Since bees are primarily attracted by the smell, blocking such masks the palette presence. Covering a plate with paper towels is the most basic step to disrupting the smell, but you really need a seal if you want to block off the scent. This step is especially simple with any side dishes, with proper preparation. Put any watermelon or potato salad in a tupperware before bringing it outside for the tightest seal; plastic wrap or equivalent would be the next best seal if tupperware is not available or convenient. Naturally, you can perform similar operations on your grilled items as you see fit.

The next step is to keep food away from your party. One way to help dampen the aroma of your BBQ is to leave the entrees and sides inside (the house has a pretty good seal). If you want to keep food outside though, just keep the serving table away from where you’ll sit for a lower chance of honey bees being your buddies.

The most important step is to stay calm. Do not aggravate the bees–especially do not aggravate a nest–and assess the situation. If the buzzing buddies become a problem, or you feel they are, get help. Do not try to kill a nest by yourself, else the nest left behind may cause future problems. Call up a bee removal professional (we would be happy to help) and properly say farewell to those buzzing buddies.

Are Murder Hornets in Texas?

2020 was a crazy year; what was even crazier is introducing the “murder hornets,” also known as the Asian Giant Hornet (Vespa Mandarinia). They are the largest in the world. On average, they can get up to 2-inches long and have a 3-inch long wingspan.

Native to Japan, Taiwan, and other Asian countries, these giant hornets are more aggressive with a powerful stinger. The venom of the Asian Giant Hornet has eight various chemicals making it more potent than any bee sting. Unlike a honeybee, the Asian Giant Hornet can give multiple stings because it is smooth with no barbs and challenging to perform a hornet removal.

An easy way to identify an Asian Giant Hornet is by its distinct orange head. The body has dark brown and yellow stripes all over its body. They are attracted to tree saps and are known to eat entire beehives. Asian Giant Hornets use their mandibles to attack prey instead of their stingers.

Honeybees play an essential role in the environment. This introduction of a new predator will bring a lot of damage to our ecosystem.
The misconception that this hornet can kill comes from the exceedingly rare cases where people die from anaphylactic shock. In Japan, these hornets are part of the daily diet being fried or used for cooking.

Fortunately, there have only been reports in Washington state. Other cases of the “murder hornet” have been different species of wasps and bees that people fail to identify correctly. In Texas, cicada killers are often mistaken for murder hornets because of their size. They are solitary wasps in the family Crabronidae and fly low to the ground.

How to get Rid of a Hornet’s Nest

If you ever encounter a murder hornet or another type of hornet, a hornet removal is your safest bet. You want to make sure to plan accordingly and be safe at all times. Even if you plan to do the hornet removal yourself, you have to make sure you are prepared and covered if there is an attack from the murder hornet(s).

So, plan your strategy. Make sure you have a thick garbage bag and thick clothes if you want to treat your area. An attack after sunset gives you a better opportunity to combat hornets because they will be less active during this time. While the sun sets, be careful to use any light source. Hornets can not see in the dark, so that a light source will frighten them, and they will start attacking.

We do more than Hornet Removals

While murder hornets do not relatively live in America, we will still do hornet removals any time. Any problems or encounters with cicada killers, wasps, honeybees, or hornets, call Bee Safe Bee Removal for a same-day hornet removal. We can take care of the issue, and you don’t have to risk your safety!