The Maltese busy bee has been saved from extinction as the lazy, fat Sicilian bee was increasingly bullying it.

According to veteran beekeeper Arnold Grech, who has been rearing bees for the past 65 years, the Maltese bee has been under threat from its Sicilian counterpart, imported up till last Wednesday regularly into the island by catamaran.

According to Mr Grech, within five years, had the importation of bees from Sicily not been stopped, with all the cross-breeding going on, the Maltese bee would have died out.

“If importation regulations are properly enforced now, that would mean we would have saved a species from being wiped out off the face of the earth,” he said.

For Mr Grech, who was given his first pottery jar hive as a reward for passing his Liceo exam, and has since spent a lifetime studying bees, this would have been a major disaster for Maltese bee keeping and Maltese honey production.

Mr Grech, 77, from Attard, said people were going overland by car, paying good sums of money – sometimes thousands of euro for package bees – and bringing them over to Malta without being stopped by anyone at the port.

When the Sicilian virgin queen is released to mate in Maltese fields, the Sicilian drones barely stand a chance

This has been endangering the Maltese honey bee mainly because of the dangers of unwittingly importing the African hive beetle: a deadly pest which wipes out whole bee colonies.

“We do not have it in Malta so far, but it is very present in Italy down to Calabria and Syracuse in Sicily. We have to be extremely careful to make sure it does not come in with any Italian bees imported here,” he said.

Mr Grech welcomed the Plant Health Directorate’s decision last Wednesday, to prohibit the importation in Malta of live bees, bee equipment beeswax and bulk honey from these affected areas, as there is difficulty in detecting the African Hive Beetle in these items.

“Just in time,” he said.

However, he explained that Sicilian bees have, up till now, been a serious threat in mating matters too.

The differences between the Sicilian bee, officially known as the Apis melliferea sicula andthe indigenous Maltese honey bee, the Apis mellifera ruttneri, are inherent.

The Maltese bee, lives up to the idiom: it is very busy. It forages 12 months a year, with a honeyflow from eight different flowers: orange blossom, thyme, eucalyptus, carob, asphodel, red clover, borage, white thistle  according to which flower is in season.

“You can see bees all year round thanks to the lovely flora, fauna and temperate climatic conditions of our islands,” he said.

The Sicilian bee, on the other hand, takes a break from honey production from November to March – when the weather in Sicily is too cold. During those months it does not go foraging and therefore does not waste energy in producing honey.

“Bees have no blood, so cold is their worst enemy – but Maltese bees do not have that problem,” he said.

Even the aesthetic difference is marked: the Sicilian bee has a very round abdomen, where its fat is stored; whereas the Maltese bee, has a tapered abdomen, is slim, and has no extra fat.

Problems arise when there is love buzzing in the air. When the virgin queen flies off for mating, the male bees, known as drones, fly from all hives in nearby fields to compete to father the baby bees.

But the queen is particularly choosy: she will mate only with the very fittest of them all. How does she carry out the selection process?

She hovers up in the air, gets the attention of all the drones, then starts flying, picking up speed and zooms away. One by one, the drones tire out and fall behind. The one which manages to keep up with her gets to mate her. (His elation is short lived – the drone dies after mating).

Mating never proved to be a problem for Sicilian bees, until they were brought to Malta. When Maltese beekeepers, owners of the Sicilian bees, release the Sicilian virgin queens to mate in Maltese fields, the Sicilian drones barely stand a chance: the Maltese drone wins the race hands down.

“The Maltese drone is stronger and faster by far,” said Mr Grech. Sadly this Olympian performance of our bee does not win it any medals. Yes, he impregnates the queen bee, but the baby bees born are hybrid.

“This results in cross-mating and the offspring is not pure breed, which means they are aggressive,” he said.

Hybrid bees are dangerous for humans because they are more prone to attack.

“It is happening already. You don’t have to be in the countryside – in Gozo, pedestrians on the Rabat main road have been stung badly,” he said.

How is honey produced?

A single worker bee will make around 20 trips in a day to flowers – a couple of kilometers’ radius from the hive – each time carrying about half of her body weight in nectar.

Inside the hive, other worker bees take the nectar from the foraging bees and make the honey.

To produce a 75-gram jar of honey, a bee travels a distance equivalent to three times the circumference of the earth. Professional bee keepers only take the extra honey produced by the bees. For every three kilos of honey the hive produces to feed its members and larvae, just 500 grams will be available for harvesting.

A bee’s life:

A colony of bees consists of three types of bees: the queen bee, some 40,000 female worker bees and a few hundreds of male drones.

The queen is the only sexually mature female in the hive and all of the female worker bees and male drones are her offspring. The queen may live for up to five years and may be capable of laying six million eggs from that only one time in her life that she mates.

Female worker bees live a frantic life and work non-stop, performing different work functions. The life of a worker bee may be as short as six weeks. They die after stinging.

Male bees (drones) do no work, do not forage for pollen or nectar and have no other known function than to mate with new queens and fertilise them on their mating flights. Their sole purpose in life is to procreate, but nature has played a cruel trick upon him.  To mate is to die: their genitals explode and snap off inside the queen.

Why are bees important?

They are not only important for the production of honey and propolis.

Bees are responsible for pollinating about one-sixth of the flowering plant species worldwide and approximately 400 different agricultural types of plant.

A few examples of food that would no longer be available to us if bees ceased pollinating our agricultural goods are: broccoli, asparagus, cucumbers, pumpkins, blueberries, watermelons, almonds, apples, cranberries, and cherries.

What is the African Hive Beetle?

The Small Hive Beetle, Aethina tumida, originally from Africa,  is dark brown to black in colour, about half a centimetre in length, and can be observed almost anywhere in a hive.

The adult beetle lays eggs in crevices and cracks in the hive that hatch into larvae. They feed on pollen and honey and cause extensive damage to the comb and brood. Beekeepers and their associations must immediately report any sighting of this pest to the Veterinary and Phytosanitary Regulation Department on 22925000.