Welcome to the forum and the wonderful, wide world of bead collecting!
My opinion on these -
Neither one is natural amber. If they were, they would have cost you many thousands of dollars per strand, and I suspect you did not pay that kind of money for them.
The bottom strand looks like new plastic resin of some sort. I've read that polyester resins are used to make a lot of beads nowadays.
The top strand looks like some sort of wood or horn. Can you say any more about them - are they heavy-feeling, chipped around the holes, etc. Maybe a good close-up would help. But, they also could be a plastic resin material made to look like wood, horn, bone, etc.
Many plastics will carry a static charge, so that is not a good test of synthetic vs. natural amber. I'm not aware of whether any wood, horn, bone, etc will carry a charge. It does make me suspect that the first strand is plastic as well, though.
As to what they are worth - no clue - sorry. I use EBay a lot to research prices. You can search there on African amber and check the SOLD auctions, not what people ask for the item. That can give you an idea about similar items, if you can find them. it can be time-consuming but you will learn a lot about what's out on the market and for what prices.
Note: It's unfortunate, because plastic resin beads are neither amber nor copal, but you will find them listed under "African amber" and "copal amber" in the on-line market places.
http://beadcollector.net/cgi-bin/anyboard.cgi?fvp=/openforum/&cmd=get&cG=130303535353&zu=313030353535&v=2&gV=0&p=Here is link to a discussion about what is going on in the amber market, from just last year. Some of the beads look just like yours. In this thread there is a link to a post by Red, that is very interesting (and disturbing) as it talks to the problem of identifying some beads that are being sold as amber, but are not natural Baltic amber, but may be some sort of plastic resin / amber concoction.
The Search feature of this forum may get you some other interesting material to study. Note that when using Search, you enter the older date first, then the more current date. An example would be, "search from 400 days ago to 30 days ago".
