Okay, so it was just one bumble bee, but it is a pretty cool story…
I was tending to my crickets on my micro farm during one of my thrice-daily agri-therapy sessions, just relaxing to the soothing sound of the steady chirping of both acheta domestica and gryllodes sigillatus (I currently raise both kinds), observing a male Banded dancing around a female in full chirp, when I heard a sort of weird buzzing sound.
Then it was gone.
A few seconds later I heard it again. I recognized it as a bee of some kind and it sounded trapped. Have you ever heard a bee trapped? They buzz a certain way, and it almost sounds like a phone set on vibrate.
I stopped paying attention to the crickets and started seeking the source of the buzzing. Sure enough, up in one of the corners of my cricket farm, there was a bumble bee. It was caught in a spider web, and there was not one, but two spiders trying to get at it to wrap it up for a few weeks’ worth of spidey-snacks. But this bumble bee was having none of it, and was trying to crawl up the ceiling beam to escape, all encumbered by a netting of sticky spider web.
With two spiders in pursuit.
It was almost surreal.
Just FYI, I have never raised crickets for human consumption. It was always for reptile food sold live in pet stores, and now I do it just for therapy, and also because I love to do it. So, super-sanitation in the farm environment isn’t exactly a concern. Besides, I use spiders as a biological control. I let them live up in the ceiling beams and corner cracks, and they help keep invasive insects at bay. The trick is keeping the spiders away from the cricket bins, and that really isn’t a problem.
Spiders aren’t going to bite your crickets to death, there are too many crickets. It’s like a single human beef-consuming family living amongst 1000 cows. What they will do, however, is weave webs inside your habitat (in my case today, egg crates), and that causes a problem because the crickets won’t go in that area, and then you have an overcrowding issue.
No good.
Back to the spiders. I have never seen two spiders going after one prey before. Ever. But they appeared identical in size, as if maybe they were twins, I don’t know. Anyway, they were the kind with the long black legs and round, shiny brown bulbous bodies. The kind everyone in my family freaks out over.
What to do. What to do.
I went and got two bamboo shish-kabob skewers, you’d be surprised how handy they are in cricket micro farming, and gently shooed away the spiders. The bumble bee was buzzing and crawling along the wall, all wrapped up in spider webbing. He was just a little too big for those spiders to ever get the gumption to try and bite him, so I don’t think they ever actually got a hold of the bee, and he was slowly making his getaway. All tangled up in webbing.
I got a small plastic container and got the bee inside.
He was mad, you could tell by how he was buzzing. He had this webbing tangled all around his legs and he was doing everything he could to untangle himself, to no avail. I gently utilized the two bamboo skewers and carefully removed the webbing from the bee, I tried so hard not to hurt him, and I didn’t! There was no visible injury to the bee at all!
As I was walking the container outside, the bee inside was buzzing furiously. My guess was that it was mad, but who knows? Probably all panicked and in “fight-or-flight” mode. Hah! He can actually fly in flight mode.
I set down the container, opened the lid, and he flew out. At first he flew about three feet in one direction away from me, and then suddenly he turned and flew directly at me. I reflexively put up my hand as he was heading right for my face, but then he turned and sped off in the opposite direction.
I like to think it was saying “Thanks!”
~ Cricket Man
