North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Jim Fruth" <jfruth@tds.net>]

See Bill Garthright's email, second below.

   I've had honeybees for alot of years and I have never seen them go after 
fruit!!!  I'd bet you have Yellow Jackets; they do exactly as you described.
   Honeybees get blamed for what Yellow Jackets do and it is not fair!!! 
If you had the two side by side, they only vaguely resemble each other. 
Another possibility....................there is a fly that mimics the look 
of a Yellow Jacket who feeds on Fall fruit.


Bill's post: By the time I got around to picking them, they were overly 
ripe - still
good (especially sweet, in fact), but badly split. They were also
covered - thickly covered - in honey bees. I've never seen so many bees
in my life! I don't know where they came from. The bees seemed to be
very docile, though, when I went out to pick the grapes. I carefully
reached in and grabbed each bunch of grapes (trying to avoid actually
grabbing a bee), cut the stem, and lightly tossed the bunch into a
plastic bin on the ground. Some of the bees just rode along the whole way.

But as I continued to pick, they seemed to become more agitated. There
was more and more buzzing from the bees around me. Of course, there were
fewer grapes left on the vines, too, so the bees became even more
concentrated. Eventually,... I lost my nerve. I figured I'd pick the
rest of them at sundown, when I expected the bees to leave.

Well, there *were* fewer bees as it started to get dark, I guess, but it
was also a lot harder to see what I was doing. Pretty soon, I was going
mostly by feel, and there were still a LOT of bees around. (I thought
they went back to the hive at night???) And note that, a few days
before, a man in Omaha had died of bee stings - from honey bees,
according to the news - while mowing his lawn. So I was kind of nervous,
still. Then I reached in, grabbed a bunch of grapes, and brought it out
to find the biggest bee I've ever seen in my life! It looked similar to
the honey bees, but about two inches long! Well, thinking about it, I
suppose it wasn't quite *that* big, but it really was the biggest bee
I've ever seen, no question about that. Maybe an inch and a half long?
It was a veritable giant of a bee, anyway.