The Red Bee
first appeared in Hit Comics #1 (1940). His name is Richard Raleigh, an
assistant district attorney who decides to dress up in a puffy shirt and fight
crime using bees! Red Bee uses lots of trained bees to fight Nazis and
gangsters, but his favourite bee is called Michael. Michael lives in Red Bee’s
hollow belt buckle and will only come out for special missions. The character
starred in 24 issues of Hit Comics before fading into obscurity. He was brought
back in the pages of All Star Squadron in the early ‘80s, only to be killed off
straight away.
Rick Hoberg |
Let’s talk
about Michael. Surely bees hang about together in huge swarms and inhabit
hives - they don’t sit on their own in some bloke’s belt buckle? Well, there are in
fact certain types of bees that do prefer a solitary existence. For example,
there is a type of bee found in the UK called Osmia bicornis, or more commonly,
the red mason bee!
Steven Falk |
Red mason
bees are usually found in gardens and parks. They nest in existing holes or
cavities, such as mortar joints, window frames, or dead wood, and prefer holes
in sunny south facing locations. It’s not a massive stretch to believe that
Richard Raleigh could have tempted such a bee into his belt buckle, provided he
was thrusting his hips towards the sun.
Michael is
probably a female, as male mason bees
tend to hang around the nests where they first hatched from their cocoon,
waiting to have sex, before dying soon after the deed is done. That’s very much
what the kids call a “big mood” for me.
When the
females have chosen a place to make their nest they harvest mud which they use
to seal up their nest cells, allowing their young to safely develop, keeping
them warm over winter. Red Bee’s belt
buckle would probably be full of mud.
Once
Michael has been released from her mucky belt buckle, she may be more useful in
distracting criminals than actually hurting them. Red mason bees don’t sting
unless they’re threatened. The venom in a female red mason bee’s sting is
similar to the venom of a honeybee sting, but the red mason bee sting contains
fewer barbs than that of a honeybee. This could explain why the red mason bee’s
sting does not penetrate human skin.
While
Michael wouldn’t make much of a weapon, the Red Bee’s other bees could
potentially be a tenacious foe for any criminal that crossed their path. Africanised “killer” bees from Central America
have been known to chase a person into water and then patiently wait for them
to resurface before stinging them. These bees can recognise the chemical scent
of the breath of their target as air bubbles break the surface of the water.
The Telegraph |
Honeybees
in the UK are less aggressive but are still known to be pretty tenacious. In
2016 a grandmother from West Wales returned from her shopping to find a swarm
of over 20,000 bees covering the back of her car. She called some local
beekeepers, who were able to remove the bees and she returned home. Over 24
hours later, outside her home she found the bees had returned to the car! The
beekeepers theorised that the queen bee may have become trapped somewhere in
the car.
So bees
could potentially be an effective weapon against anyone who provoked them, but
how could the Red Bee control them? How could he make sure the bees attacked
the gangsters and not him? Smoke can be used to make bees docile, but dopey
bees might not be much use in the war against crime. Is there an alternative?
The answer
is smells!
A queen bee
secretes a combination of chemical scents in order to communicate with the
worker bees. The queen’s scent can help control swarming, it can inhibit the
development of ovaries in the worker bees, and it can tell the workers whether
a queen has mated or not. The queen’s scent can also give workers the cue to
gather around the queen and form her own little entourage, or retinue to look
after her.
In 2007
researchers in the University of Otago found that a queen bee can manipulate worker
bee’s behaviour by releasing a pheromone that blocks aversive learning in young
bees. This means that the queen can stop her offspring from learning from bad
experiences. This is necessary because being exposed to a chemical scent that
stops you from growing ovaries can be pretty unpleasant for a worker bee. By
preventing the young bees from developing aversive memories against her odour
the queen is ensuring that they will continue to tend her. Basically, she
smells bad but she makes the other bees forget how bad she smells.
If The Red
Bee could harness these chemical scents, perhaps he could use them to convince
a colony of bees that he was their queen! If they ever decided that they didn’t
like the life of a crime fighter, he could make them forget that decision! A
real life Red Bee would perhaps be, not a man in a domino mask and a puffy
shirt, but a stinky, insect drag queen, armed with water pistols full of bee
sweat!
But being a
queen bee is not all it’s cracked up to be. When a queen bee gets too old to
give off the right smells they are replaced by the workers in a procedure known
as "supersedure". The workers rear a replacement queen and when the
new one is ready the workers will kill the old one in a gruesome fashion. The
workers cluster tightly around her, “balling” her until she becomes so hot she
dies.
If the Red Bee is a man who would be queen he must ensure he never runs
out of scent, lest he is balled to death by his insect minions!
Click here to read part one!
Click here to read part two!
Click here for the Reading List!
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee#Supersedure
Many thanks to insect experts Jade Hailes and Antonia Forster.
No comments:
Post a Comment