so hello and welcome I'm Frederick Dunn and today I'm going to show you a little
bit about the life of the honeybee and how it's often put in jeopardy
by something that you don't find out in the environment as often as you find it right at home
in the bee yard now we're talking about honeybees here apis mellifera this one's
out on raspberry plants this morning and it's June the 7th and what I want to show you is the
environment here in the state of Pennsylvania Northeastern United States in North America
honeybees fly everywhere and you know what they're in Jeopardy everything wants a honeybee it seems
birds can eat them spiders eat them look at this web here this is a tiny web cobwebby looking
stuff so it's an itty bitty spider in here that really can't do anything about the honeybee so the
only risk of the honeybee here would be the web itself that's not too bad kind of like a cobweb
but here in the apiary we have 30 colonies of bees right now and every single honeybee
colony as a resident Hunter of bees what do you think that is well if you read the title
you're probably going to be clued into the fact that we're going to talk about spiders today
but first I want to show you the activity on the face of a beehive this particular one is
a nucleus Hive or a resource Hive lots of pollen going in there's all kinds of great activity this
time of year there's a nectar flow on you can see that there's a bee in the entrance Fanning away
and they're pretty oblivious because right here at home this time of year
there isn't a lot of hostility towards the honeybees so they're not terribly defensive
if you look at the entrance area here there are not a lot of guard bees guard bees here
would be the females all the bees we're looking at here are females look at the
pollen right there on the corbicula of that forger there goes more pollen right there
so they're just taking care of their brood inside they're not thinking wow I wonder
if there's a predator just outside the hive but I'm telling you ahead of time there is
and if you're at all sensitive and you don't want to see it in this video fair warning bees are
going to die and it's because today we're going to focus on one of the Predators that are residing
as I mentioned before at each and every beehive they seem to have their own resident bee killer
foreign
things are here once again going on business as usual in and out I'm going to swap out this
entrance by the way this is a mouse guard style entrance that comes from APPA may but they have
a new entrance design so I'm going to unscrew these and replace them with the ones that are
open to 3 8 of an inch I just think I like them better but I'm showing you the different Hive
configurations for a reason it doesn't matter what style or design of beehive
you have whether it's got a landing board whether it's just a entrance through the front
this Predator can get in there and get your bees now they don't hunt inside the hive that would be
a waste of time for the spiders they're going to catch them on the outside and has with many
things in beekeeping if you're taking photos or capturing video sequences it's all about being
in the right place at the right time or in this case the wrong time when it comes to the bees
they already have short lives how bad is it when it gets shortened by a predator like this little
rascal right here now this one is on the piece of wood that supports an APA May bee hive and what
kind of spider is this anyway this is a jumping spider and if you look it up you'll find out
that jumping spiders the many species of jumping spiders outnumber all the other spider species
this is the most common species of spider in fact there are jumping spiders they're so tiny you can
barely even see them little gray ones and if we make our comparisons between bees and spiders for
example look at this jumper it's also known as the Bold jumping spider or sometimes the daring
jumping spider and that's because look how perky it is it's got big eyes it stares right at you
it turns on a dime it has jerky movements so it's very alert look at that how many eyes does it have
well like all spiders it's got eight but these eyes are big especially those in the front but
you can see these very proud standing eyes on the back of it's thorax there you can't sneak
up on a jumping spider you make a movement behind it when you pinwheels right around
and they can jump that's why they're called jumping spiders no big surprise how far can
they jump up to 50 times their own body length and then that lets you know well how big does
their body length get you know so half inch to the recorder these are Big that means they're bigger
than bees or as big as a bee and in this case you're going to really see
because yes the jumping spiders grab kill and eat honeybees look what's going on right up above
where this one's sitting unbeknownst to these bees that are just doing their normal daily routine
they have a resonant spider living underneath the hive now sometimes they
might live underneath the hive itself other times they're down underneath the hive stand
in some cases I've seen two or three jumping spiders within just a few inches of one another
so even multiples can be on the same Hive these things are pretty smart too
no I don't mean Smart in the way you know people smart supposedly they've used some tools to get
their prey to come out things like that leaves and so on but I don't know anything about that
what I consider Smart in this case is that this spider knows where the food is it doesn't have
to do a lot of hunting around now spiders that live in webs they rely on vibration to interrupt
the web and they go out on the web and then they get their food so they have to wait for things to
come to them but if you're a jumping spider you're an active Predator you're a roaming predator and
in this case they go after their food they don't have a lot of patience you can tell
just look at this thing he's nervous he's jumpy he's not going to sit around all day
waiting for a bee every time he pinwheels by the way and looks behind him or to the left
or to the right is because the honeybee flew nearby they have fantastic eyesight
and they see things in very interesting ways so all eight of their eyes work in unison to
provide a big picture and look what happened this female jumping spider ran right across the face
of that nucleus Hive body and there's a guard bee trying to chase her down but that's futile
because she already grabbed a worker female honeybee right off the front it was too slow
to get that action but the bee is in fact being injected right now with the fangs of the spider
and you might be wondering what's going on well once they grab her and in this case this female
spider grab the worker honeybee right on the thorax and is in the process of injecting
the B with its venom now the Venom is also part of its digestive system so it subdues the B makes
it easier to control but the spider and you can see that it's using its four legs to hold on to
the bee's Wings there and it just keeps working its fangs around I know that seems kind of grisly
but it might benefit you to know that there's no evidence that honeybees feel pain
that they do have sensory responses but as far as pain and suffering
we don't know that they do that and look what's going on up above they've already
ignore the bee that's been taken unaware of what's going on down below here that one of
their sisters is being eaten and digested by the spider now you might be thinking Fred you're
showing us this video of the bee being eaten by the spider why don't you save the bee well
once the spider gets a hold of them and injects them it's pretty much all over with this bee is
being slowly paralyzed this spider is not as good as it as some as good added as some other
spiders have been because she's still wiggling her antennae she's wiggling her forelimbs
and this is a full-grown female jumping spider and look at her ability to grip underneath the landing
board here gets out of the sun gets in a private area where she can start her digestion process
so the process is really just called external digestion that just means by injecting their
digestive enzymes into the bee it breaks down the tissues in the dream drink it back out and
look here's another jumping spider who ran Brave as can be right on onto an active Landing board
with all the guard bees and everything else nabbed a worker
and is doing the same thing as the other jumping spider that we just saw so as I mentioned before
there seems to be a resident jumping spider at every beehive but this one did a better
job of paralyzing the forager because look she's already stopped moving her antennae or
steady her four limbs are not moving anymore and the digestive process has already begun
but it's amazing how powerful they are this one is definitely larger than the worker bee
remember a three-quarter inch spider is pretty darn big so if we're looking at jumping spiders
these are impressive and again it's the Bold jumper and if you want the scientific term it's
p-h-i-d-i-p-p-u-s-a-u-d-a-x I don't know how to pronounce it so I'm just spelling it for you and
here the spider is underneath the landing board taking its sweet time digesting the B now how many
bees a day would one of these jumping spiders kill and Digest well to the best of my knowledge about
one a day because it takes them a long time to do this and you might be wondering I'm sure you are
how much of the B does that spider eat well all the digestion and all the resources that it's
going to consume for this bee are on the inside of the exoskeleton so when it's all said and done
this B will just be unceremoniously dropped at the bottom underneath the hive and the Spider
goes on about its business the jumping spider doesn't make webs as I mentioned before like
some of the other species of spiders do they move around but you know what one of the funny
things is that the spider does when it does take a leap if it jumps off the edge and by the way
apparently they can jump from hive to Hive so some of my hives must be too close together
when it jumps it leaves a little strand of webbing a single strand of web as an
emergency kind of a catch web if it misses the other Hive when it jumps although I haven't
seen them Miss they seem very accurate that the jump and Miss they'll dangle from that
little strand that they ran out just as they left whatever platform or Surface they're jumping from
the other thing is when I get in close and I'm trying to get a picture of some
of these they look right at the camera and then they jump so fast they disappear
well they really didn't disappear they land right on the camera or sometimes they land right on me
now that leads me to another question that you might be asking are the jumping spiders dangerous
to people no so if you force the jumping spider to bite you and that's really the only way you're
going to get bitten by a jumping spider is if you push your finger down on it and make it bite you
which I highly recommend you do not do the proteins in the Venom are not especially toxic
to people so that would not be the end of the world although I don't recommend doing that this
really gives you a close-up look and I'm sorry for the sounds that it's making because I'm moving
the camera around trying to keep this spider in focus it eventually withdraws further underneath
the bottom board here and then I just can't follow it anymore it's too dark
I also apologize for the quality of this I wasn't prepared to catch jumping spiders eating honeybees
so two different jumping spiders a two different honeybees during the time here
and it was an opportunity for me to get video sequences and show you exactly what they do
and how they do it now the spider is moving the bee's body around because remember it's injecting
its venom and enzymes into all parts of the bee because it wants to liquefy the interior material
and there it is scooting up further see the little strand of webbing sticking out
of the rear end there I didn't even realize I'd caught that until I'm looking at this on screen
and they don't spin webs as I mentioned before but sometimes when you're pulling your hive covers off
you'll see a little ball of cottony material and that will be your jumping spiders
babies so there will be more so I hope that uh you enjoyed watching some of this because it is
interesting a lot of people wonder if they eat bees and I'm here to tell you they do
so the next time you see a little rascal like this jumping spider here you might have an
appreciation for its ability its ability to jump to move to hunt to spread that little strand out
as a safety net and have an appreciation for a predator that's not doing a lot of damage to
honeybees but it is catching honeybees and eating them right where they live thanks for watching
thank you