🐝 African Bees and What They Demand

Almost every beekeeping book available in Africa was written for European bees in a temperate climate. Applying it unmodified is the commonest cause of failure, and of injury, for new African beekeepers. So begin by knowing what bee you actually have.

Apis mellifera in sub-Saharan Africa is divided into a number of geographically and ecologically distinct subspecies. Three are worth naming first.

Apis mellifera scutellata is the bee of East and southern-central Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and northern South Africa. It is a savanna and lowland bee. It is also the subspecies exported to Brazil in 1956, and it is ancestral to the Africanised bees now found across the Americas. If you keep bees in East Africa, this is very likely the bee in your hive or a close relative of it.

Apis mellifera adansonii is the West African bee: Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Benin and the wider West African forest and savanna belt. It is a lowland bee.

Apis mellifera monticola is the high-altitude bee of the East African mountains: Mount Kenya, Kilimanjaro, Mount Elgon and the Ethiopian highlands. It is the classic gentle mountain bee of the literature.

There are more. Depending on your country you may meet Apis mellifera litorea on the East African coast, Apis mellifera capensis in the Western Cape of South Africa, Apis mellifera lamarckii along the Nile, Apis mellifera jemenitica in the Sahel and Arabia, and Apis mellifera sahariensis, intermissa and simensis elsewhere.

Now the honest position, and it matters more than the list. A definitive, current subspecies-by-country map for Africa was not available for this course. If you want country-level assignments as fact, you will need a specialist reference such as Ruttner's Biogeography and Taxonomy of Honeybees or a current morphometric or genomic review. This course will not print a map it cannot verify.

What you should take from that is not disappointment but a change of method. Do not trust a subspecies label from a book. Learn to identify the behaviour of the bee in your own apiary.

There is a second and deeper reason for this. Boundaries between subspecies are clines, not lines. Subspecies grade into one another across altitude and rainfall gradients, and intergrade populations are entirely normal. The boundary between monticola and scutellata on an East African mountain is an altitude gradient, not a fence. Your local bee is probably an intergrade, and no label will describe it accurately.

So what should you record instead of a name? Behaviour, and specifically the three behaviours that decide how you manage a colony: how defensive it is, how readily it absconds, and how much it swarms. Those are what you will score on your colony cards, and they are what you will select on. A colony that is calm, stays put and produces is the bee you want, whatever a taxonomist would call it.

One special case deserves a warning, because it is not a management problem but a legal one. The Cape honey bee, Apis mellifera capensis of the Western Cape of South Africa, has an unusual reproductive biology in which workers can produce female offspring. That allows capensis workers to become social parasites inside scutellata colonies, taking them over and destroying them. This is the Capensis calamity of South African beekeeping.

Every quantitative aspect of it is beyond what this course can verify: the geographic boundary of the capensis zone, the rate of colony loss it causes, and the current South African movement-control rules. What can be said clearly is this: South Africa restricts the movement of bees between the capensis and scutellata zones, and a South African learner must obtain the current rules from the national Department of Agriculture. Do not take a boundary line from this course or from any general book.

That leads to a rule that applies everywhere on the continent, not only in South Africa. Do not import bees or queens across borders. Movement of bees is how Varroa, small hive beetle and Tropilaelaps spread between countries. In most countries the movement of bees is regulated and is often licensed or prohibited outright. Ask your national veterinary or agriculture authority before you move a colony any distance, and buy your bees locally. Local bees are adapted to local forage and local disease, and transported bees abscond.

Here is the thread that runs through the whole module. African bees are defensive, abscond readily, swarm heavily, propolise heavily, tolerate Varroa better than European bees, and migrate with the rains. Every one of those traits is an adaptation to an environment with long dearths, heavy predation and no beekeeper to treat them. Management must be built around those traits, not against them. The rest of this module is how.

Read this lesson before you open any hive, and read the first part of it carefully, because it is about what nobody can tell you.

Defensiveness in African bees is real and it is documented. A comparative Ugandan study concluded that Apis mellifera adansonii is the most defensive honey bee in Uganda among the subspecies compared. A Ghanaian study found that defensive behaviour in adansonii varies with time of day and with season. Review literature describes African honey bees as notably defensive, with historical reports of bees being more vicious in East Africa. Studies of scutellata-derived populations in Brazil and California also report seasonal variation and variation with the degree of admixture.

Now the part you must hear plainly. For every one of those studies, only the title, the abstract or the conclusion was available for this course. The underlying numeric results were not. That means this course contains no number for how far African bees pursue, no number for how many stings they deliver, and no number for how long they stay agitated after a disturbance.

You will hear such numbers repeated constantly. They chase for half a kilometre. They stay angry for twenty-four hours. This many stings will kill a person. Every one of those figures is unverified as far as this course is concerned, and this course will not repeat any of them. A safety number that is wrong is more dangerous than no number, because people plan around it.

So safety here is taught as procedure, not as a threshold. Procedure does not need a number to work.

What is genuinely established, and useful, is qualitative:

1. Defensiveness is real, is documented, and differs between African subspecies.
2. It varies with time of day and with season. The practical consequence is important: the same colony is not equally dangerous at all times. Work late in the day or after dark where local practice supports it, and never on a hot, still or thundery afternoon during a dearth.
3. It varies between colonies. That variation is your most powerful tool, because it means you can select. Propagate from your calmest colonies and requeen or remove the worst. Lesson 5 is entirely about this.

Now the procedure. These are not suggestions.

Full protective equipment is not optional with African bees. A veil alone is adequate for a gentle European colony and is not adequate here. Suit, gloves, sealed ankles, sealed wrists. Every time, including the quick look you were only going to take for a moment.

Understand that alarm pheromone escalates an incident. It is released with the sting and it marks the target for further stinging, so one sting recruits more. The correct response to being stung is to scrape the sting out immediately, smoke the site, and withdraw. Do not keep working. A stung glove is now a beacon, so change it or wash it before you go back.

Never work an apiary alone if you can avoid it, and never without a plan for a mass-stinging emergency. Know before you start how you would get an injured person away from the site and to medical help, and how you would summon that help from where you are standing.

On the medical side, this course stops and points elsewhere, deliberately. There are two distinct medical emergencies with bees: anaphylaxis, which is an allergic reaction that can occur after a single sting, and mass envenomation, which is the effect of a very large number of stings. Their clinical management, the sting counts at which danger begins, and the correct first aid are outside what this course can verify. You must obtain that guidance from a qualified medical authority and build it into your practice before any practical session with bees. This course will not invent a number of stings that is dangerous, and you should distrust any course that does.

Site the apiary away from people and from tethered or penned livestock. Position colonies so that flight paths are directed away from traffic, humans and animals. Put a barrier at least 1.8 metres high a few feet in front of the hive entrance, so bees are forced to fly up and over the heads of people: a hedge, a woven screen or a fence all work, and the point is simply to lift the flight line above head height immediately.

Tethered and penned livestock are the highest-risk casualty and the commonest serious one, because they cannot run away. Never site an apiary upwind of, or next to, a kraal, a boma, a tethering post or a milking area.

Legal minimum distances from dwellings, public roads, schools and boundaries are set nationally or by local by-law in many African countries and vary widely. This course states no distance. Ask your national or county agriculture or livestock department, or your national beekeeping association, before you site an apiary.

Finally, smoke is a control, not a magic wand. Cool, thick, continuous smoke. Running out of smoke halfway through an inspection is a safety failure, not an inconvenience. Lesson 6 covers smoker craft properly.

The honest summary: the hazard is real, the numbers are not established in the literature this course can verify, and the answer is a procedure you follow every single time regardless of how calm the colony looked last week.

Absconding is when the entire colony abandons the nest, brood and all, and leaves. It is not swarming, and confusing the two will cost you money.

Here is the difference laid out plainly.

Swarming is reproduction. One colony becomes two. The old queen leaves with a prime swarm, and what she leaves behind is brood, stores and queen cells. The parent colony continues. Your loss is half the bees.

Absconding is escape. One colony relocates. The queen leaves, and what she leaves behind is an empty or near-empty nest. Nothing continues. Your loss is all of the bees.

Absconding is characteristic of African honey bees and it is the single largest cause of colony loss in African apiaries. That is the thing this module exists to prevent.

Be honest about the evidence. The behaviour is confirmed qualitatively by the sources, but published absconding rates, meaning what percentage of colonies abscond per year in African apiaries, were not available for this course. Nobody can tell you what to expect. So measure your own: count your occupied colonies at the start of a season and count how many walked out by the end. After two seasons that figure is more useful to you than any published average would have been, because it is about your site, your bees and your management.

Now the triggers, with the management response to each.

Dearth, meaning no forage. This is the structural, universally reported cause. A colony with nothing coming in and nothing stored will leave to find somewhere better. The response is to feed, or to move the hive to forage. Never harvest a colony that has little sealed honey, however tempting, and harvest at the end of the flow before the dearth bites, not into it.

Pest infestation. This one is explicit in the sources: small hive beetle adults can cause colonies to abscond entirely. Wax moth infestation likewise causes colony loss, absconding and reduction in the size of migratory swarms. The response to both is the same and it is not chemical: keep colonies strong, and do not give a colony more comb than it can cover. Unattended comb is beetle and moth habitat.

Predation. Ants, honey badger and other predators are reported through the trade literature as absconding causes, though not quantified. The Kenyan response is practical: hang hives between posts set 2 m apart, 1 m from the ground, on wires greased to keep off crawling pests, and hang them securely so a honey badger cannot knock them down.

Excessive or rough interference by the beekeeper. Widely reported, not quantified. The response is the teaching rule of this whole course: with African bees, every inspection has a cost. Inspect less, inspect faster, inspect gently. A European manual's inspect every 7 to 10 days is a recipe for absconding here.

Overheating, direct sun and no shade. Structural. The response is to shade the hive over the hottest hours and orient the entrance to the morning sun. Remember also that heat and deep comb together cause comb collapse, which is itself a trigger, which is why hive depth is limited to 300 mm.

Fire and smoke from bush burning. Structural in African savanna. Clear a firebreak around the apiary before the burning season.

Comb damage during harvest. Structural. Harvest correctly, take only capped honey comb from the outside bars, and never cut comb containing brood, eggs or larvae. A colony whose brood nest has been cut into is a colony preparing to leave.

Notice what those triggers have in common. Almost every one of them is something the beekeeper controls: where the hive is, whether it is shaded, whether it is hung, whether it is strong, whether it has stores, how often it is opened, and how it is harvested. Absconding feels like bad luck. It is mostly management.

There is one more reason to take this seriously that has nothing to do with sentiment. A hive that absconds is a hive that produced nothing that year and that must now be re-baited and re-occupied, and your occupancy rate is one of the two biggest levers on your income. Going from about 50 percent occupancy to 80 percent is roughly a 60 percent revenue increase on the same capital. Every colony you keep from absconding goes straight onto that line.

One practical habit ties it together. When a colony absconds, do not just clean the hive and forget it. Write down on the colony card what you know: the date, whether it was in dearth, whether there was beetle or wax moth damage, whether you had inspected it recently, whether it was in full sun, whether the comb had collapsed. After a few losses a pattern appears, and the pattern is usually one thing you are doing to all of your hives.

Frequent swarming is a documented characteristic of African bees. It is their reproductive strategy in an environment where colonies are frequently destroyed by predators, fire, disease and drought. A bee that could not replace itself quickly would not survive here.

For the beekeeper this is not purely a loss. It is the free source of colonies that makes bait-hive beekeeping viable across Africa. A region whose bees swarm heavily is a region where you can stock an apiary without ever buying a colony. That is a real commercial advantage that European beekeepers do not have, and most African beekeepers do not exploit it as hard as they could.

Be clear about a third behaviour that is neither swarming nor stress absconding. Migration is a seasonal, directional mass movement of colonies tracking rainfall and flowering. It is reported for African bees and it is a distinct phenomenon. Quantitative migration data, meaning distance, timing and what proportion of the population moves, was not available for this course, so do not expect a figure.

Now the evidence that bait hives work. These are measured occupancy figures for hives set out to be colonised.

• Kakamega and Kirinyaga, Kenya: 40 to 70 percent.
• Kitui, Kenya: 30 to 75 percent.
• Gedeo, southern Ethiopia: frame hives 52.6 percent, top-bar hives 59.5 percent, traditional hives 48.7 percent, with about half of all hives standing empty.
• Kenyan extension regards 80 percent, meaning 16 hives out of 20 in production, as a good target.

Teach yourself those figures honestly, because they set expectations. A beekeeper who buys 20 hives and expects 20 colonies will be disappointed and probably in debt. Plan on roughly half your hives being occupied in the first year, aim for 80 percent, and count empty hives as a normal cost of the business.

How to bait a hive. Five principles, and note carefully which parts have numbers and which do not.

1. Set the bait hive before the swarming season, not during it. Swarming season varies sharply by locality: it was observed in July in Kirinyaga and in November in Kakamega, both in Kenya. There is no national swarming season anywhere. You must record your own, which means noting the month you see swarms every year until the pattern is clear.
2. The hive should be clean, dry, and smelling of bees. Rubbing the inside with beeswax or old comb is standard practice. The effectiveness of specific lures is unverified in this course.
3. Nasonov-based lures, of which lemongrass oil is the common proxy, exploit the orientation pheromone from Lesson 5 of the previous module. No dosage or efficacy figure was available, so treat lure use as an experiment you record rather than a recipe.
4. The optimal height, internal volume and entrance size of a bait hive were not available for this course. You will find confident figures circulating. This course does not repeat them. Set your bait hives at the height and in the places where local beekeepers have actually caught swarms, and record what works.
5. Shade it and leave it alone. A bait hive checked weekly is a bait hive that will not be occupied.

When a swarm arrives or when you catch one, two pieces of Kenyan practice will save you time.

First: do not waste time with very small swarms, smaller than a person's head. A small swarm probably has a poor queen or too few bees to build comb before the flow ends. You will spend more on it than it returns.

Second: after hiving a swarm, wait about twenty minutes. If the bees return to the original site, you missed the queen and you must try again. That twenty-minute check is the difference between a colony and an afternoon wasted.

Work at dusk or after dark where local practice supports it, because defensiveness varies with time of day.

Now the biosecurity rule, and it is not optional. A caught swarm is of unknown health status. Never put a caught swarm onto old comb from a colony that died of unknown causes. American foulbrood spores survive dormant in colonies or used equipment for 70 or more years, and a single scale of dried infected larva may hold perhaps 100 million spores. A second-hand hive or a box of old comb is a permanent risk, not a bargain. If you do not know why a colony died, do not reuse its comb.

Finally, connect swarming back to your management. During the main flow, a colony with no space will either swarm or store nectar in the brood nest, so add space ahead of need. Queen cells along the bottom edge of the comb are the swarm preparation warning, and a capped queen cell means emergence within roughly a week, since a queen is capped about day 8.5 and emerges on day 16. A colony preparing to swarm usually leaves before the new queens emerge. If you find capped swarm cells, time is already short.

You cannot control mating. Queens mate on the wing with drones from a wide area, and those drones come from every colony, feral and managed, for kilometres around. That single fact decides your whole approach to breeding.

It means buying a gentle queen does not give you a gentle apiary. Her daughters mate with local drones and the temperament reverts within a generation or two. This is exactly the mechanism behind the Africanisation of the Americas, and it is not something a small-scale beekeeper can engineer around.

So the only selection tool actually available to you is culling and propagating at the colony level. Propagate splits from your calmest, most productive, least absconding-prone colonies. Requeen or remove the worst. That is it. It works slowly, it works only in one direction at a time, and it works only if you keep records, because you cannot remember across a season which colony was calm in March.

The colony record card is therefore the most valuable piece of equipment in the apiary and it costs nothing. On it record the date, a temperament score, brood status, stores and the action taken. Add the time of day and the weather to every temperament score, because defensiveness varies with time of day and with season, and a score taken on a hot still afternoon is not comparable with one taken at dusk.

What should you select for? Rank these, because you cannot select for everything at once:

1. Calmness. It is the trait that decides whether you can work the colony at all, and it is the safety trait.
2. Staying put. A colony that does not abscond is a colony that produces. Absconding is the largest cause of colony loss in African apiaries.
3. Productivity. Honey per hive, recorded per hive, stating crude or strained.
4. Hygienic behaviour and health. Kenyan bees have been shown to display Varroa-specific hygienic behaviour, and selecting hygienic stock is a sourced control recommendation for both Varroa and small hive beetle. A colony that cleans out diseased brood by itself is doing work you would otherwise pay for.

Now the split, which is how you propagate the colonies you chose. The principle rests entirely on the caste biology: a colony with eggs or young worker larvae and no queen will raise a new queen from them.

The method:

1. Choose a strong colony with eggs and young larvae.
2. Divide the brood, the stores and the adhering bees between the parent hive and a new hive.
3. One half gets the queen. The other half must have eggs or larvae young enough to raise one.
4. The queenless half needs 16 days to a virgin queen, then mating flights, then the start of laying. Budget several weeks with no new brood.

One detail that makes splits work better. Bees that cling hardest to open brood are the young nurse bees, and bees that fly off first are the older foragers. So a split made with brood comb and its clinging bees is a split rich in nurses, which is exactly what a new colony needs. Shaking the comb sorts them for you.

Timing is the part beekeepers get wrong. Kenyan practice is explicit: avoid making divisions during the honey season because it will reduce the amount of honey produced. Split before the build-up, so both halves are strong when the flow arrives. Harvest at the end of the flow. Working backwards, remember the six-week rule: whatever you want the colony doing at the flow, you must cause six to eight weeks earlier.

Be honest about what is not known. The minimum number of bars or frames of brood for a viable split, the minimum mass of bees, and the success rate of splits made from African bees, were all unavailable for this course. Teach yourself these by recording your own: how many bars of brood you gave each split, and whether it took. Ten splits recorded will give you a working rule for your own bees.

Two final rules on the buying and moving of bees, because they undo selection work faster than anything else.

Buy only what you can inspect. A colony sold in a sealed log hive cannot be checked for disease. Inspect for brood disease before purchase, because American foulbrood is a permanent contamination of everything it touches.

Buy locally, and do not import bees or queens across borders. Local bees are adapted to local forage and disease, and transported bees abscond. Cross-border movement of bees spreads Varroa, small hive beetle and Tropilaelaps, and it is regulated in most countries, usually licensed or prohibited. Ask your national authority before you move a colony.

Selection is slow, unglamorous and cumulative. Two seasons of cards, one split from the best colony and one requeening of the worst each year, and in five years you will have an apiary you can work in comfort. There is no shortcut, and anyone selling you one is selling you a queen whose daughters will mate with your neighbours' drones.

Two pieces of equipment decide whether working African bees is manageable or dangerous. Both are cheap. Both are commonly used badly.

Start with the suit. Full protective equipment is not optional with African bees. A veil alone, adequate for a gentle European colony, is not adequate here. What you need is a suit, gloves, sealed ankles and sealed wrists.

The word that matters in that sentence is sealed. Bees do not need a hole; they need a gap. The commonest failures, in order:

1. The wrist. A glove that ends short of the sleeve, or elastic that has gone slack, gives a direct route up the arm. Tape it if you have to.
2. The ankle. Trouser cuffs must go inside boots, not over them, and be tied or elasticated. Bees walk upward.
3. The veil zip. Check the whole run of it, both sides, before every session. A zip that has jumped one tooth at the chin is a hole at face height.
4. The veil mesh. Hold it up to the light and look for holes. A veil stored in a shed gets chewed by rodents.
5. Old stings left in the fabric. Stung cloth carries alarm pheromone. Scrape stings out of the suit and wash it. A suit that has not been washed in a season is a suit that provokes.

Wear it every time. Including the quick look. The colony that was calm last week may not be calm today, because defensiveness varies with time of day and with season.

Now the smoker, which is the tool most beginners underrate.

Smoke works because it masks alarm pheromone, the chemical released with a sting that recruits more bees to the same target. Break that signal and an incident does not escalate. That is a real, mechanical effect, and it means smoke is a control and not a magic wand.

What you want is cool, thick, continuous smoke. Take each of those three words seriously.

Cool, because hot smoke and sparks drive bees to panic and can scorch comb and bees. If you can feel heat at the nozzle, the smoker is running too hot. Pack more slow-burning fuel on top.

Thick, because thin wisps do not mask anything. You want white smoke you can see, not a smell.

Continuous, because the moment it goes out you are working an open hive on hope. Running out of smoke halfway through an inspection is a safety failure, not an inconvenience.

Fuel is whatever burns slowly and cleanly and is available to you: dry grass, dry leaves, cardboard, dry cow dung, hessian sacking, wood shavings, dry maize cobs. Avoid anything treated, painted, plastic-coated or chemically preserved, because that smoke is going into your food. Light a small hot core at the bottom, then pack the chamber loosely on top with your slow fuel and let it settle before you approach a hive. Puff it every minute or so while you work to keep it alive, and always take more fuel to the apiary than you think you need.

The procedure at the hive is specific. Smoke the entrance of the hive with about 8 to 10 puffs, then wait before opening. The waiting matters as much as the smoking; smoke needs time to move through the colony. Then lift the cover slowly and give a little smoke across the top before you start lifting bars.

One discipline that protects your crop as much as your skin: keep smoke out of the honey. Smoke the entrance and the bees, not the comb you are about to cut. Smoke taint is a permanent defect in honey and no amount of processing will remove it.

Now the rest of the kit. A hive tool, because levering bars with a knife blade breaks combs and hands. A bucket with a lid for anything you take out. A brush or a bunch of soft grass for moving bees off a comb gently. Water and soap nearby for washing a stung glove. And a written plan of what you are going to do, because deciding at the open hive is how inspections become long.

Timing completes it. Work late in the day or after dark where local practice supports it. Kenyan practice puts harvesting between 5.30 pm and 7.30 pm, when the foragers are home and defensiveness is lower. Never work a hot, still or thundery afternoon during a dearth. And do not work alone if you can avoid it, and never without a plan for how you would get help to the apiary and an injured person away from it.

Run through this checklist before you walk to the hives: suit on and sealed, veil checked, gloves on and overlapping the sleeves, smoker lit and producing cool thick smoke, spare fuel in your pocket, hive tool in hand, bucket ready, a second person present, and one clear question you are going into the hive to answer. If any line of that fails, fix it before you start. Every one of them is harder to fix with the hive open and the bees out.