Judy Santerre shares this with us. She observed a black bee go into convulsions and die right before her very eyes in her butterfly garden. She was horrified because she never uses pesticides in the garden and it looked like a traumatic death and not a natural one. She was so concerned that she carefully packaged the little bee body and mailed it off to A&M, which does a lot of honey bee research. Dr. Roy D. Parker, Professor and Extension Entomologist (Emeritus), sent Judy the following email.
“There are numerous reasons why you observed the bee dying to include (1) internal parasitic insect attack, (2) disease, (3) age, (4) injury, (5) insecticide probably unlikely, or (6) other assorted causes. Some worker bees only live in the summer about one month. Insects make up for their relatively short life spans by their tremendous reproductive capacity and short life cycles. They can recover from very low numbers that occur due to lack of resources to very high numbers when more resources are available. They do confront a host of natural enemies to include predators, pathogens, and parasites. My point is you do not need to be concerned seeing the death of one or even more bees.
One example dealing with reproductive capacity of insects that I observed near Corpus Christ on corn involved the fall armyworm. There were about 30 fall armyworm caterpillars per corn plant x 20,000 plants per acre x 700 acres of corn which adds up to 420,000,000. The total time in the larval stage was about 16 days. These caterpillars consumed every leaf on all the corn in that 700 acres during that short period. Furthermore, 85% of their damage to the corn occurred during the last 4 days in the larval stage.
I hope this information gives you some insight into the insect world.”