The Angie Bee And Climate Change

Come on, it's easy, I'm an outdoor type! You wouldn't be so naive as to answer winter, would you? I love spring. Do you have any idea what the cold represents for us bees, or do you think that even for Angie the problem is just: "Oh my God, it's snowing, I can't wear that cute pink leather mini today either, I have to wear trousers with thermal socks underneath!". Let's not joke: bees have only one dress, the brown fur coat, but it is not enough to protect them from the weather. I wasn't born in the summer, otherwise I wouldn't be here telling my story, which is precisely why, you know, I am so strong and combative. Winter bees are different from those that are born at other times of the year. In autumn and winter, bees are born that nature programmes to be longer-lived than the others and help the hive survive even in frigid temperatures. In spring and summer, the average life span of the bee is no more than three weeks.

Come on, now, don't pull out your handkerchiefs and start crying. Animals have a concept of time very different from you humans. Rest assured, I will be bugging you for a while longer, and for a very good cause: saving the planet. Still on the subject of winter, male sailors be warned: if we bees are not normally very supportive of gender equality, in winter we don't want to know about flies. We kick them out of the family, because we only think about staying warm and having enough food to make it to the new flowering season. Since no queen bees are born in winter and there is therefore no need to mate, the drones would only consume stocks without even doing their duty. He who does not work, does not make love, we turn it this way: he who does not make love, does not earn his bread. We females stay at home, snug in the warmth of sisters, with the queen bee.

Again in the series 'we are the most intelligent animals in creation and we feel sorry for others', think what we came up with: we make the glomere, a kind of ball composed of all the bees of the family. We gather in a small part of the hive, the central part, where we can best maintain the temperature necessary for our survival, i.e. 10 to 20 degrees. The queen lays very few eggs at this time, and for a few days, when the cold is unbearable, she does not lay eggs at all. What a bastard life! And it doesn't end there: you know very well, don't you, that there are no longer the seasons of the past? We no longer understand each other and we make a lot of mistakes, but you try going from Siberia to the Maldives in a few seconds, from the air conditioning of a New York supermarket in August to the heat of Death Valley! When an early spring arrives, bees start collecting and consuming resources.

Um, we bees do not use contraceptive methods and growing, of course, means creating new generations and perhaps swarming, i.e. reproducing as a family unit elsewhere. There are more mouths to feed and beekeepers have to contain swarming in order not to lose their families. Then, winter arrives and the accumulated resources are not enough. The rain damages the flowers, the nectar is diluted, the pollen is lost. A crazy mess! There is also wind, and I remember like it was yesterday a day when I saw my sister Irene struggling to fly like a helicopter that had run out of fuel. Food is so scarce that the beekeeper has to feed us artificially, with candy, a mixture of water and sugar. Between you and me, it tastes much better nectar!

Even a winter where all of a sudden come warm days can be terrible. My mother, poor thing, no longer knows when and if to lay. It's a very critical time of year, as I told you, we all usually stay very close together to keep warm, so the danger of exchanging diseases doubles. Besides, you humans also fall ill with influenza in winter. Therefore, already in the autumn, the beekeeper has to start treating his bees against varroa. As if such an evil enemy were not enough, here I also have to arm myself against nosema, a single-celled fungus that affects the intestines of us bees. It's a bit embarrassing to talk about, but who cares: the damn fungus causes us crazy dysentery attacks, which contaminate the other bees in the colony if we can't expel the excrement out of the hive because of the cold temperatures. Oh, there's no point in being squeamish: life is a dirty business.

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