Of bird and bees

The numbers of bees in my Port Hills garden, and my interest in the hive surrounds, is influenced by a familiar garden occupant – a blackbird.  A blackbird that eats the bees, deliberately and systematically, day after day.

It is invariably a  female blackbird taking bees.  So not a black bird at all but a dark soft brown one.  And she may be several birds for although always on her own, her year on year attention for this smorgasbord seems likely to have outlasted any individual blackbird’s lifespan.

Bee meals arrive in two ways, one for leisurely selection and the other demanding some skill and agility. The leisurely meals are autumn evenings and winter days of pollen or nectar laden bees.  This selection is of exhausted and chilled workers which lie in an apron in front of the hive where they have fallen short of the landing board. Their hard work on the hive’s behalf lost through too great a commitment.

For this meal the blackbird is a ground bird stalking the hive apron with hurried darting hops, head cocked to check and select the most recently fallen, almost lifeless, plump morsel.  Not taken are the older fallen, the discarded aged or broken bees swept from the hive floor by young hive confined workers. Those that have died naturally and others dead from clumsy beekeeping too roughly lifted or replaced frames.  Each selected portion is shaken for no discernible reason except perhaps to check that no last dying contortion might bring the bee’s thorax end’s stinger into a feathered cheek.

The second form of meal is for observation delight.  Bee selection on the wing – the bee’s not the bird’s.  The routine seldom varies.  About one metre from the hive, the bee flight path flattens its steep decent from a compass spread of nectar and pollen sources. Here, flying low towards the hive entrance the bee ‘presents’ itself to the blackbird to be plucked  from the sky.  But that scant description sells well short the entertainment.

The bee snatch is preceded by a ritual dance, or so it seems. The blackbird scuttles to and fro for several minutes possibly gauging the speed or direction of the bee’s flight or perhaps in anxiety around the possible risks of this audacious act. And when the snatch is done the bird scuttles off on foot with wings flapping like some unbuttoned gabardine raincoat on an errant youth fleeing the scene of a neighbourhood misdeed.