Was the Garden of Eden in Africa? – Scientists now believe that the earliest primitive hominids appeared in East Africa and as they continue to unravel the mystery of the origin of the first intelligent, “self-aware” human being, the clues drive them ever more southward. There is even a possibility that they may go further south than our present coastline and end on what is now the Agulhas Bank some hundreds of feet below the sea. A hundred thousand years ago this was above the sea level, a verdant land where two large rivers met and flowed into the southern sea.

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Was that perhaps the cradle of humanity, and did the race spread from there like a gossamer tissue to cover the whole world? Did it leave a detached fragment of that tissue in the South Western Cape to develop into the San (Bushman) peoples who were not closely related to the Negroid peoples just north of them? They lived in that land of flowers and forests, a simple, caring people with their bows and poisoned arrows for hunting, and with the natural beehives, in the rocks and the trees, which each finder claimed thereafter as his own, and trained honey-guide birds to lead him to more hives. That, for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, was the early history of the Cape Honey-bee and its contact with man. A unique variety of beeexisting together with a unique variety of man.

Apis mellifera sapiens sapiens var capensis is darker in colour than its distant cousins scutellata to the north of it. It is also less vicious, attributable perhaps to gentler handling, through the ages, by the Bushmen who loved them. Some colonies are very dark indeed and tend to be smaller. These were classified sometimes as a separate race the “Krantz-bees” until it was demonstrated that they were simply the result of very many years of successive hatching of larvae in the same cells where each generation left a fragile cocoon,to make the cell just that much smaller for its successor. This would happen in some huge colonies in high inaccessible krantzes and I could point out one, which I have known for over 80 years. Reproductive swarms from such colonies might have very small dark worker bees, which would however return to normal after a few generations in a modern hive.

he feature of the Cape Bee, which has made it famous, or notorious, is however the facility with which its laying-workers can lay unfertilised eggs, which hatch parthenogenetically into workers, or can be raised as queens. This was, and in their area of origin is, regarded as a good feature, in that it saved colonies rendered hopelessly queenless, by queens being destroyed on their mating flights by Cape Swifts or other birds. In the Cape Bee area in the South the only indication of this propensity may be a harmless worker larva or two appearing occasionally in a super, causing a beekeeper, new to the area, a little concern as to the efficiency of his queen excluder.

Around the Cape Bee area appears to be a neutral belt where capensis and scutellata seem to co-exist quite happily but if capensis is taken well beyond this area the results are disasterous. Cape laying workers appear to stray into scutellata colonies which happens to be queenless and assume the duties of queen for which they are accepted, with fatal results for the colony, as the rate of laying is far to low to maintain colony strength. Far worse however is the fact that straying capensis workers in a scutellata area appear also to be able to penetrate any number of colonies, and oust existing scutellata queens, and assume their duties with equally fatal results, causing tremendous losses. This Cape Bee Disease has become quite a serious problem in the northern areas of the country, and it is of course no longer permissible to move Cape Bees across a demarcated line.

Moving scutellata colonies into the Cape area seems to present no difficulties at all in spite of not being permitted as all movement of colonies over the line in either direction is prohibited. The present treatment in the infected scutellata areas seems to be to destroy any colony found to contain a single “black bee” identified as Capensis. What a tragedy!

The whole problem is, at present, a matter of intensive research , some of which will extend ,no doubt, to the analysis of the bee genome. This could quite likely promote the thesis that the parthenogenetic feature of the Cape Bee is in fact a primitive, not an advanced characteristic, an idea that might be further supported by the fact that certain solitary bees are known to possess this ability.

Such a disclosure might encourage the idea that the Cape Bee is an ancestral type, and it would be interesting, if we ended up with the idea that the honey-bee, like man, also had an origin (not contemporaneous of course) on these southern shores!