If you’ve gotten the girls riled enough to sting, then they’ll keep coming after you whenever you get close, even days later. This is because they’ve associated YOUR scent with their attack/defense pheromone. Unfortunately, they’ll remember this and every time you get close (for me it was 5-7m) you’ll getting dive-bombed, chased, and stung. The only solution I had was to use the smoker. I’d get it good and chugging with lots of cool white pine needle smoke, then go visit the hives and cover me and the openings with the smoke for a bit. The bee’s nature took over and they went in to gather stores just in case it was a real fire 
Since then they’ve forgotten my smell, or associated it with the smoke, and I can visit them sans beekeeper outfit again.
They shouldn’t …If you have bees like this in your garden then they are the wrong bees.
OK for an isolated apiary.
IMHO
Talking of smoking the bees and the theory that they tank up with honey in case they have to leave in the face of a real fire.
Has anybody noticed that bees do this even if you don’t use smoke?
Looks like the bee sistas have forgiven the weekend’s transgressions, and are all happy once again. No defensiveness that I’ve seen in the past few days.
I grabbed another super box that I plan on putting on top this weekend, because the Flow super is starting to get more attention, and is almost full.
The super has wax foundation frames in it. Should I put the box on top with all frames inside, or just a few to start with?
Always add supers filled with frames. If you don’t, the bees will take that as an open invitation to build as much crazy comb as possible… 
i’m definitely no expert- but if I was you I am not so sure I would add another super at this time. If you plan to rob the flow frames shortly- the bees will be kept busy uncapping and refilling them? Considering your hive already swarmed- chances are it won’t again? Unless the numbers are exploding - two boxes may well be enough for them? We have been running a hive with a single brood and a flow super and so far (touch wood) it has all gone swimmingly. Coming out of winter the hive was strong- we made a small split- and perhaps because of this there was no swarming though it has been a big swarm year locally. Now the bee numbers have recovered well after the split- they filled out their three new frames and they have nearly capped all the flow frames. We will check and possibly harvest them all tomorrow. At this stage we have no plans to ever add any other boxes to that hive. Last season went well- and the bees wintered well.
perhaps a more experienced person can chime in…?
I haven’t noticed it- being relatively new to bees I almost always use the smoker if I am going right in. However it makes a kind of sense though- if you tear the roof off their house, and pull out their precious brood frames into the sunlight- it’s no wonder the bees might think a cataclysm is nigh and prepare themselves for a hasty flight to safety by tanking up on honey- in the same way they tank up when they think a bushfire and immolation is imminent?
I’m concerned they will swarm again, yep. At this point the brood box is pretty packed full of bees, as the capped brood left behind by the old queen is coming out. The workers are back up in the Flow super and busy finishing off on the remaining filling and capping.
From what I’ve heard, you’re supposed to give them more space when they’ve more than 50% finished a super. That way they realise they still have something to grow into and don’t prepare to swarm. Preparations start quite a while before they actually swarm.
Because I can’t rob the Flow frames until they’re capped, I need to give them more space. Even if they don’t use the space, I’d rather it were there so they didn’t decide to leave again.
An observation I made over the last few years:
Bees naturally collect nectar and pollen, raise young, pollinate, and swarm. I’ve stopped trying to thwart that which they do in nature (swarm). I didn’t see any extra honey yield in the years I tried to prevent swarming vs the years I let them swarm. In fact, this year was the best year yet. Yes there is less of a workforce after they swarm but I’m thinking that is more than offset with many less mouths to feed, especially during that brood-less time while the hive is between queens. During that time, the only thing they have to do is collect and store honey.
And the brood break slows varroa build up
I think it depends where you are and the historical pattern of nectar flows. Where I live the bees tend to swarm (if you do nothing about it) around 6 weeks before expected nectar flows (usable for honey to harvest) so the population is seriously declining just when you need the bees to forage
OK, so 2 weeks have passed and we did another quick inspection. Looks like we might just have a queen that has begun to lay about 5 days ago. Most telling was a bunch of very young larvae floating in royal jelly.
Her laying pattern seems a bit patchy, but we’ll check again in a few weeks to see if she’s getting better.
Time for an update!
By Christmas time, our new queen was laying like a gun - solid brood pattern. 4 of our 6 Flow frames were also full, so we robbed them. 13kg of honey!
We left the country on Christmas Eve for a 4 week holiday, and only just had a chance to inspect the hive again today. What we found has me a little confused:
- Very strong colony. So many bees. We had a lot of problems accidentally killing bees during the inspection because they were EVERYWHERE.
- Top 8 frame traditional super was chock full of honey. 6 frames were 90% capped, the remaining 2 probably only 60% capped.
- Flow super also looking good. 2 frames completely full (harvesting now), 2 more about 80% capped and the remaining 2 about 50% capped.
- The brood box is looking not so strong. There was very little brood. Probably about 20% of each frame was brood, some capped, some larvae and a few eggs. The laying pattern wasn’t “shotgun style”, it was reasonably grouped, just there wasn’t very much brood. Another 20% of the frames was pollen, another 20% was honey and the rest of the cells were empty.
- I spotted what looked like the beginning of a swarm cell on the base of one of the frames, and also what looked like a queen cup higher up one of the other frames. No eggs laid in them yet.
So, what’s going on? Is it possible the queen has slowed down laying because of an upcoming swarm? Or possibly the workers are planning on superceding her because she’s laying poorly?
We’ll probably do another quick inspection of just the brood box on Sunday if we can, just to make sure there are no eggs in the queen cells, and hopefully to take some photos.