Original subtitles

I don't like getting stung in the face.

Are you telling me that the queen being there would help

reduce the chances of stinging?

Yeah, I don't know.

Coyote: I'm in the swarm. 10,000 bees.

Stung on the neck.

Chris, I'm getting stung on the neck.

Aah!

♪

my name is coyote peterson and I've traveled the world

seeking out the most fascinating animals on our planet.

Look at that.

No matter the location,

my mission has always been the same.

To get up close and uncover the secrets of the creatures

that we often misunderstand

even worse, fear.

Every animal has a story and I brave the wild to tell.

-- Captions by vitac -- www.Vitac.Com

captions paid for by discovery communications

killer bees.

It's a term that swarmed united states in the early '90s,

blanketing the nation with a fear that being covered

and stung to death by africanized honeybees

was a possible and very painful doom.

And while people do die from these things every year,

the term killer bee is nothing more than a media headline.

On this episode, my mission is two fold.

First, I will introduce you to the killer bee.

And for the grand finale,

I will prove that bees are not out to sting us

as I attempt to wear the ultimate bee beard.

♪

♪

♪

there was once a time when only calm, friendly,

pollinating european honeybees were bumbling and buzzing

across the arizona landscape.

Then in the early '90s, the arrival of aggressive,

not-so-friendly africanized honey bees

completely changed the genetic makeup of the bee colonies

that previously existed.

The sonoran desert located in tucson, arizona

is one of the harshest environments

found in north america.

Yet during the rainy season,

its multitude of flowering plants

make the perfect place for pollinating honeybees.

♪

today I will be meeting up with bee conservationist

chris brinton.

I have known chris for many years

and the first time we worked together

I attempted to wear a bee beard

composed of friendly european honeybees.

By using a pheromone lure,

I was able to draw an entire colony to my face.

But when a handful of curious africanized bees got mixed in,

things didn't exactly go to according to plan.

Smoke me, I'm getting some on my --

oh, my gosh. Dude, my face is so much pain right now.

♪

this looks like it. This is the ranch.

Hey, there he is.

-What's up, buddy? How are you? -Good to see you.

-Good to see you. -As always.

-Hey, what's up, chris? -Good to see you, buddy.

-Doing good. -Good, good.

You guys ready to do some bee stuff?

Let's do some bee stuff.

For many years, chris has dedicated his life

to honeybee conservation by capturing aggressive

africanized colonies and restructuring them

into calm european colonies.

In doing so, he moved swarms away from humans

and prevents them from being exterminated.

Chris uses his own custom built bee traps,

baited with a special pheromone

to draw in and capture swarms of wild

africanized bees.

He then relocates the africanized colony,

removes its queen and introduces

a non-africanized european queen.

This new queen will pass on her dna,

genetically resetting the hive's composition

and in turn will create a swarm of friendly

european bees.

So to better understand, I'm going to spend a few days

working alongside him to see how this fascinating process works.

♪

brinton: Right here is our first trap.

Coyote: Oh, look at that.

Perfectly camouflaged into the tree.

So I can definitely see there's bees flying around that box.

Is this one that we would want to check?

We're gonna get a closer inspection.

Okay.

So what's a safe distance?

I mean, how far do we need to stay back

without them feeling threatened?

Well, right now, we're a good distance away from them.

We're not in their flight path.

So what I'm looking for is just to see if this is a nest.

Now you see those bees coming in and they've got pollen on them?

Mm-hmm.

You'll actually see these come in, boom, right there.

You've got the yellow pollen coming in.

That's a telltale sign right there that that's a nest.

Okay, so there's thousands of bees inside of there.

It has a swarm that came in.

It's 3,000 to 5,000 bees on an average.

Wow.

That food right there is important to the bees

and also the bees that are out there getting that food

are all the forager bees that need to be back at night.

So we come in in the evening time to pull these traps.

Okay, well, I'd say that's a successful first run at it.

First trap, first swarm of bees.

All right, let's keep scouting.

Before we get any further,

it's important that we understand the difference

between european bees and africanized

or as they're commonly known, killer bees.

The name of killer bee is a term created by the media,

which was used to describe the swarms of european bees

who interbred with invasive east african lowland bees.

This breeding created aggressive swarms

of what are now known as africanized bees.

Visually, there's very little difference

between a european and an africanized bee.

The key difference is the africanized bees

are far more aggressive and respond in greater numbers

when their nest is disturbed.

So when provoked, they respond by sending up

to 60% of their hive to swarm and attack the intruder.

Whereas european colonies will send out

only 10 to 20 guard beans.

The sting of a killer or africanized bee

isn't more potent than that of a european bee.

But because they attack in greater numbers,

this equates to more stings and the chance of death

hence the nickname killer bee.

Okay, so we've got a couple more back here.

Okay.

Oh, look at that. We've got another hive of bees.

-Oh, wow. -Fascinating little creatures.

All right, well, that's one more full swarm.

Yeah.

So what we're gonna do now is ride out the heat

that's here in the middle of the day.

Chris said that the best time for us to come back

and actually extract the traps is closer to sunset

and the reason for that is that right now

all the bees are out doing their work, right?

Collecting pollen, bringing it back to the hive.

At night, the bees will be in there.

So just before sunset, we will come, block up the entrances,

and then, extract the traps.

In total, we have identified four traps that are full of bees

and ready to be pulled.

These insects do all of their pollination

work during daylight hours.

And chris has a firm motto

that no worker bee shall be left behind.

Waiting until sunset is fine by me as the sonoran desert

has reached the scorching temperature

of 105 degrees fahrenheit.

This extreme heat brings with it the building of massive storms

and as dusk sets in,

an ominous monsoon is rolling in full force.

My day in the life of a beekeeper

certainly isn't getting any easier.

Darkness has set in.

We've met back up with chris,

but the problem we now face is a massive monsoon

coming over the mountains, which is full of lightning.

Chris, what's this gonna do for us tonight

when it comes to collecting these bees?

We're not gonna go out there.

We're not gonna brave lightning, things like that.

I don't want to get anybody struck by lightning.

That's dangerous.

This is not something you want to fool around with.

[ thunder crashes ]

coyote: A massive monsoon has swept across the desert.

Lined with countless lightning bolts,

it has greatly delayed our ability

to extract the four bee traps we located earlier in the day.

It's now after midnight

and we can finally finish up today's work.

So the rain has stopped, which is fantastic.

Now we can go out and collect the traps.

The problem is that so much rain fell,

the desert is completely saturated.

We'll stack the traps on the back.

But this truck is too heavy to drive across the saturated sand,

which means we need to collect the traps on foot,

which is gonna make tonight more difficult

than originally anticipated.

And we need to do this in a very narrow window

because there's actually another monsoon storm coming.

So chris, you ready to go out and start picking up the traps?

Ready to go skiing in the mud. [ laughs ]

it's gonna be one muddy mess,

but we've got four traps to pick up.

So let's get some bees.

So chris, we're not wearing any bee suits to do this.

Is there any risk of us getting swarmed tonight?

Well, hopefully I can just sneak in there real quick.

Get a screen over the door and get it stapled shut

before they even know I'm here.

Okay.

With a monsoon looming, we work quickly and carefully

to ensure that we don't put too much stress on the bees.

For each trap that we collect,

an empty trap takes its place to hopefully catch

another swarm of africanized bees.

Okay, there we go.

All four traps are now collected.

Four swarms removed from the environment.

Now to actually take them out of the traps

and into their new bee boxes,

we're gonna do that under the brightness of day, correct?

Do it tomorrow morning, yes. You can do that at night.

Right. And that's gonna get a bit more dangerous.

We're gonna have to put on bee suits

for this next procedure and at first light,

these bees are gonna have brand new home.

♪

the next morning, we transport our swarms

to a remote plot of trust land

that chris leases from the state of arizona

for the purposes of honeybee conservation.

This is only one of his many bee yards

and it's these protected areas far from humans

where he actively reworks aggressive

africanized swarms into calmer european swarms.

Brinton: Stick that down close to their front door and puff

on them a little bit.

Give a good puffs there. Get it inside of that nest.

What we're gonna do is we're just gonna pop this lid off.

-Wow. -So what you got here,

is you got a colony of africanized bees right here.

So now what we're gonna do is we're going to pull this back

and we're gonna start pulling back and finding out

what part of these is the nest.

So you start seeing...

-Oh, yeah, right there. -Oh, yeah, see that?

That's all honey right there and some pollen.

So this is the outer frame. So it stays as the outer frame.

Yeah, we want to try to keep the hive as similar

as it was within the trap.

Absolutely, we don't want to mess them up too bad

because they just, you know, they know what's home

and we just made a new home for them.

And right now what we're looking at --

-wow. -...Is we got brood.

The brood is basically the cappings over top

of all the larva that she has laid.

So now we've got another frame here

that has yet again a lot of brood on it.

And you can see just how many brand new bees

are gonna be coming out of this.

Every single one of these things right here is a brand new bee.

How long does it take for them

to build each one of these little cells?

Multiple cells per day?

You know, honestly it depends on their food source.

So if they have a lot of feed,

they could build this frame in a day.

I'm not seeing a queen on this one,

so we'll go ahead and set this in the box also.

So we're gonna go through here

and we're gonna slide this one straight up also.

And I think a lot of people don't realize

is that the majority of the bees

in a colony like this are actually female.

The only ones that are males are the drones

and there's usually only a couple hundred per

entire hive, correct?

Exactly, they don't want to make too many of them

because they actually are resource drainers.

They have to feed them, they have to do everything.

-The drones that is. -Yeah, the drones.

And the drones just sit around all day, drink up the honey,

and wait until it's time to breed with the queen.

-Exactly. -Not exactly the toughest life,

but they die immediately after breeding.

Yeah, they do and that's a very, very harsh death.

Now this is the frame that has the most amount of eggs on it.

Uh-huh.

This is the one where we find the queen.

Oh, there she is. You're right. Look at that.

You could see how when she starts moving around,

she pretty much demands her space.

Mm-hmm.

So that's your girl right there.

That's the one that's laying all the eggs.

-That is an africanized queen. -Mm.

But we need to get her into that hive, too.

Okay.

So we'll go ahead and set her in there.

You're just gonna be real careful

when you set her down and keeping an eye on her.

And then you bring her back so that way we don't smash her.

Now just make sure

there's not a lot of bees standing up on top.

We don't want to smash a whole bunch of bees,

so we'll just set a lid on them and I have a new colony of bees.

And there we go.

Coyote: The queen in this hive is africanized,

but will be replaced with a docile european queen

in the coming days.

The reason it's not done immediately

is because this swarm must acclimate to its new home

before the queen is replaced.

That's pretty crazy.

Transferring four colonies of africanized bees

to their new homes and being a part of the swarm.

Want to do something else crazy?

What'd you have in mind?

Want to try the bee beard again?

♪

coyote: Today I'm gonna attempt to wear a beard of 10,000 bees.

Worst case scenario here is that a single sting

sends me into anaphylactic shock.

The last time I did this it was with 3,000 bees

and I was stung 60 times.

Maybe wondering didn't you learn your lesson the first time?

Guess we'll see what happens.

♪

you look like a man who's ready to build a bee beard.

You ready to do this again?

I guess.

10,000 bees. I go from 3,000 to 10,000.

It's a pretty extreme jump.

So what's gonna be different about today?

Today we're gonna try

a little bit of a different technique.

I'm gonna put a queen's necklace on you.

Okay, that is different. What is the queen's necklace?

It's actually a mated queen.

-Okay. -And she's in a cage with them.

Now what it is those bees are getting used to her pheromone.

So these are young bees that are gonna want to crawl to her.

She's gonna sit right about there.

Oh, that sounds like a really safe spot

right on the edge of my neck.

Putting 10,000 bees on your face sounds like a really safe idea.

Yeah. Round two. Here we go. Okay, so same thing.

I'm gonna take off my vest and this shirt.

I'll have on just a basic t-shirt.

We'll get me into position and get everything started.

-Absolutely. -Okay, here we go.

All right, chris. This is it. The point of no return.

We're gonna take the top of this bee box off.

It's gonna expose the bees

and we're gonna start putting them on my face.

We're gonna take the queen's necklace out first

and put her around your neck

because that's a new thing that we're just gonna try it.

Why not? You like getting stung on the face. I mean...

I don't like getting stung on the face.

You told me that the queen being there would help

reduce the chances of stinging.

Yeah, I don't know.

You never know. You never know.

All right, I'm ready. Let's do it.

So I will stand in position here.

Okay.

Okay, this time to wear a 10,000 bee beard.

The most important thing to note about this bee beard

is that these bees are the first generation

of a requeened colony that was once africanized bees.

These bees are younger and are less likely to sting.

And this means that the bees should be docile,

giving me the chance to prove that chris's process

of recolonizing killer bee swarms is working

or at least I hope.

Holy cow. Here they come.

Wow. That is a lot of bees.

Chris is preparing the queen's necklace.

This one will be tied around my neck

and inside this little cage is a queen bee.

That's what all these workers are interested in.

This is it.

It begins right here and you can't move it,

even if you are stung.

So if I take a sting,

I just have to endure through the pain

because if swat at the bees,

it's only gonna make them angry.

Just try to keep my body calm. Reduce that fear pheromone.

♪

so many bees.

Just calm down. They're not stinging you.

Okay.

Chris, how many bees would you say are on me at this point?

-Maybe a thousand. -Only a thousand bees so far.

I think there might be more bees in this box than 10,000.

Well, 10,000 is a nice round number for us,

but it feels like more than 10,000.

What this shows you is that bees

aren't necessarily aggressive towards humans.

Chris has on no bee suit. I have on no bee suit.

We got the royal highness is hanging around my neck.

All they want to do is get close to her.

They want to start making comb

so they can start producing honey.

We're going all the way. 10,000 bees.

Man: This is insane, coyote.

You have far surpassed the amount of the first time.

They're everywhere.

Feels like I can't move my body an inch.

The weight of the bees is incredible.

My entire body feels like it's crawling.

I'm doing everything I can right now to just keep myself calm.

Putting my mind in a state of relaxation.

♪

you get stung?

Stung on the neck.

Chris, I'm getting stung on the neck!

Aah! Ah, it's so much pain!

Coyote: Stung on the neck!

Chris, I'm getting stung on the neck!

Ah, so much pain!

Ah, one is stinging my neck.

Aah!

Stinging my neck.

[ groans ]

this is intense. I am covered in bees.

Chris, is this the biggest bee beard you've ever built?

I do believe this is the biggest bee beard I've ever built.

This looks awesome.

What would you guess the number of bees on me are at this point?

You have 10,000 bees on you right now.

So this is 10,000 bees.

10,000 bees, man.

Because it's all the way around the back of you, too.

Like from your hat to your shoulders all the way around you

is completely covered in bees. So --

so this box had more than 10,000 bees?

I'm assuming so.

I can feel the weight of the bees.

The sound is incredible.

♪

I'm the king of bees!

Aah.

We have done it.

We have achieved the ultimate bee beard.

10,000 bees completely covering my upper body

and all in the name honeybee conservation.

I'm coyote peterson, bee...Brave.

Stay wild.

We'll see you on the next adventure.

All right, I think it's time to remove the bees.

In total, I was stung four times.

Three of those stings happened in removing the bee beard

and was simply a result of the workers

not wanting to abandon their queen.

The reason I perform this seemingly crazy stunt

was to reaffirm and prove

that chris's conservation work to recolonize

africanized bees is working.

To date, he has captured

thousands of aggressive killer bee swarms,

which equates to millions of bees.

And once introduced to a docile european queen,

every single colony has been successfully reprogrammed

into what I consider friendly bees.

These buzzing insects are not something to fear,

and it's important for us to remember

that the pollination work they're doing

plays a massive role in the planet's ecosystem.

The plight of european honeybee

is a story that is steering toward a happy ending.

And with continued hard work, this conservation effort

will eventually be a complete success.

♪