Zombees

There are many things we beekeepers do that no one really thinks about. Sure, we harvest honey. And sure, we look cool using our smokers to calm the bees. But one thing we do that I bet you’ve never thought about is move entire hives to new homes in the dead of night. It’s that specific activity that can lead to encounters with zombees.

The reason we move hives at night is pretty simple: it’s the only time we can be sure all the bees are home. During the day, half the colony is off foraging, so moving a hive at that time would mean losing half the population. Bees don’t fly well in the dark, and they get sleepy after a hard day’s work (it’s been documented that honeybees sleep while in their hive at night*), so they all prefer to be inside their hive at night, meaning we can be sure we’ve got the whole colony when it comes time to move.

Let me reiterate: honey bees prefer to be INSIDE their hive at night, and we prefer to MOVE their hive at night. If we don’t do it just right, cranky, protective bees will do what they must to defend the hive. Because they don’t fly in the dark, their crawling, defensive attacks look more like the terrifyingly slow shuffle of a zombie hungry for brains, and they’re just as singleminded. Any unlucky beekeeper who failed to seal up the hive properly before attempting the move can tell you their own horror story of the night they met the zombees.

Image from the Hum, a comic book by Thomas Kovach. Read more about Hum here.

* In 1987, Walter Kaiser and Jana Steiner-Kaiser published a conference paper titled “Sleep Research on Honeybees: Neurophysiology and Behavior,” in which you can read more about sleep behaviors of honey bees.