I am allergic to honeybee stings. To lessen the probability of death by bee, as a child, I suffered through three years of immunizations. Despite the shots, I still carry a syringe of epinephrine for use should I ever get stung. To raise my daily thrill quotient. Lisa decided to raise honeybees, and now, next to my truck in the driveway, we have three hives harboring about two hundred thousand bees … any one of which could kill me. That’s my wife.
Trout don’t have my problem. For example, yellow jackets are well-known as trout food. In 1883, Charles McGinty invented the black-and-yellow pattern that still carries his name. It held its own for well over a century and faded into relative obscurity only within the past 20 years. Ted Fay and Lee Wulff always carried a few in their vests. Leonard Wright wrote about hanging a chunk of “lights” (lungs) just above the river near his deer camp. Yellow jackets laden with a piece of the meat would drop a few inches before whizzing off to their nest. Apparently enough of the wasps would hit the water to create a hatch, which Mr. Wright exploited with his own yellow jacket pattern.
Bees and wasps must taste pretty good for a trout to put up with the sting. Trout react so predictably to injected bee venom that it was used in fish-pain research. From an underwater vantage, I filmed trout selectively eating yellow jackets while ignoring the numerous emerging Callibaetis mayflies around them. After each wasp was eaten, and the trout stung, the fish would smack its jaws a few times then home in on another yellow jacket. In one video clip, the final wasp must have stung the fish in the soft tissue of the throat, instead of the hard mouth, because suddenly the trout abruptly spins a few violent donuts before racing into deep water. ( You can see the video at http://vimeo.com/36106498.) If there is anything to be learned from this, it is that trout seem to prefer bees to many other traditional foods and that the sting of a hook is likely an expected experience following the take of a bee pattern. This might give you the chance for repeated strikes before actually hooking a fish that would normally bolt at the first touch of steel.
Honeybees create one of the longest, most predictable, and most underrated hatches in California. A single hive contains roughly fifty thousand bees; the several dozen hives normally stacked on pallets can easily harbor in excess of a million bees. When was the last time you saw a million of any kind of insect hatching? Angling literature is replete with tales of ant and termite swarms, yet on a daily basis, honeybees dwarf their importance. When possible, beekeepers put their hives close to water, because a hive requires five to seven ounces of water per day to keep the temperature and humidity in balance. This translates into tens of thousands of bee laps each day between a water source and the hive. With each lap is a risk of the bee falling into the water or getting pulled in by a rogue wave.
The Sierra foothills are ideal honeybee habitat. During the winter, the air temperature routinely rises above 55 degrees, which is the magic number when honeybees can take flight. Unfortunately for bees, when they encounter cold pockets of air, such as the troughs of chill air immediately above a river, their metabolisms can fall so precipitously that they will drop out of the sky. In early February, Lisa and I sat in a raft on one of our foothill rivers and watched as bee after bee plummeted into the water as they tried to beat the night chill back to their hives. The trout were on them, and we were on the trout with honeybee patterns. The fishing forums were abuzz about the Skwala stonefly hatch, yet throughout the day, our bees outfished Skwalas four to one.
In the spring, the hives are disbursed across the state for pollinating crops, then returned to the foothills by late June. Throughout the summer and into late winter, the bees gather nectar from star thistles, blackberries, and blue curls to build stores of honey. These and other foreign invasive plants depend on the honeybee for survival.
Without honeybees, many of California’s invasive plants would not thrive. Most of our native plants start blossoming in January and are done by mid-June. Most plants in bloom after mid-June are introduced species, as are the honeybees that nurture them through pollination. California’s native bees, the mason bees and bumblebees, are naturally programmed to emerge from their nests in late January, and most go into hibernation by mid-June. Despite all the hoopla about how important honeybees are for pollinating our flowers, a few hundred years ago, before Europeans introduced honeybees to this continent, our ecosystems did just fine without them.
Unlike most terrestrial insects, which sink rather quickly when they fall into the water, honeybees seem to float forever. This is likely due to the dense coat of hair that envelops the thorax. Perhaps the fact that bees are constantly crawling into and out of beeswax cells might add a bit of waterproofing to their hairy covering . . . this is admittedly a wild-ass guess.
Honeybees float in a very predictable posture, which might make a difference when angling for trout keying in on such a repeatable silhouette. The shiny abdomen is completely submerged and points downward, while the furry thorax rides well above the film and the wings are splayed to the side. I couldn’t find a single honeybee pattern on the Internet, and the sky is the limit when it comes to concocting your own pattern. There are a few yellow jacket patterns on the market, but they will probably catch more anglers than trout feeding on honeybees. For the fish in my neck of the woods, a stick of orange foam with a parachute post or a fore-and-aft wrap of black saddle hackle seems to work just fine. For those who are smart enough to buy their own flies, rather than tie them, I might suggest a size 10 orange Stimulator.
