I was living near the Ban Nong Chok Village behind the mountains there in Ampoe Sikhio, right up the road from the beautiful new King’s Park that they just put in last year. Anyway, I went online to order bee hives in SE Thailand. I was stunned when they came in by courier because they were tiny in comparison to the Langstroth bee hive boxes that we use regularly in the USA. I had ordered a few cases of Langstroth frames online. I didn’t realize that I was getting the stingless bee boxes. And, the ones I got were not even good for stingless bees. I ended up storing the frames under the house there at the garden and cutting the bottoms off of 4 of the box frames so that the bees would have room to build their nests inside there. I figured they would need 2 full sizes of those small boxes just for their nests and to have enough supplies for themselves, and I could then take a plexiglass top, drill a tiny hole in that to allow for the tiny bees, but not the queen to crawl up into the top section. Then I could place an upside-down jar up there for them to fill up with honey as a honey super. When I left Thailand, I had still not caught any of the stingless bees that were flying all around the trees in that garden. I did have 6 swarms of regular stinging honey bees come through that garden and some of them stuck around, but their queens were too aggressive for my taste. Every time I would get anywhere within 30 feet of their nest they would attack and sting me several times. I bought myself a bee suit, but they must have been smarter than me because the day before it arrived, they swarmed out of the garden and I never was able to catch a queen from the two swarms that had built nests in the bushes in that garden. Anyway, I am back in the States right now and will be coming back to Thailand. I plan to ship a Langstroth bee hive from the USA to Thailand so that it will be there when we do finally settle down, where I can use all of those frames that I had purchased. I am hoping to discover that stingless bees have moved into those two bee hives that I had setup there. I made sure that they had been wiped them down really good on the inside with bees wax and put some drops of lemon grass in those. If the stingless bees don’t take to them, the wild stinging bees might. If they have the stinging bees, then I will have to requeen those so that it settles them down enough to not get dive bombed by stinging bees just for walking around in the garden.
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