36 minutes ago, Nyleve Baar said:I keep bees myself and there is a LOT of misunderstanding about these creatures. First of all, most people can't distinguish between bees and everything else that flies around - like wasps and yellowjackets. It's almost always a wasp or a yellowjacket that is the culprit when someone gets stung, yet everyone says they were stung by a bee! My honeybees are reasonably docile and can't be bothered to sting unless provoked. Yellowjackets and ground hornets will sting for no damn reason at all - you're just walking past and boom! Last year I got badly attacked by ground hornets just because I walked past their hole. On the other hand, I might get no more than one or two stings a year from my own bees, and I'm right in their hive messing with their stuff. They have work to do and unless you get them upset, they mind their own business.
Urban bees are not a menace to anyone. They forage in gardens and park spaces and are important for the ecosystem. You'd be surprised at how much there is for a bee to do even in a city environment - look around and you'll see all kinds of flowering stuff everywhere. I don't know what the local by-laws are, but many municipalities do permit beehives on private property as long as they're situated a certain distance from the property line. If anyone gets stung, I imagine it would be a difficult thing to prove where, exactly, that creature came from - a domestic hive or a wild colony. And as I said, most of the time it would have been something other than a bee anyway.
We have a little black bee here that doesn't sting at all, it can't. I have been told that it is one of the major pollinators of the mango crops.
