Hi everyone,
Due to landscaping works at my house I had to move my hives to a friends farm for autumn/winter. When I was able to bring them back at the beginning of spring I found out that one of my hives didn’t make it. I was able to put out a swarm trap and managed to catch a swarm a few weeks ago. Unfortunately it took a little while to source a new queen for the swarm and during this time the bees turned aggressive.
I re-queened this afternoon and it was an interesting experience. As soon as I opened the hive and started pulling frames, wave after wave of angry bees poured out of the hive with the intention of killing me. It was actually quite hard to inspect the frames for the queen, as the amount of flying angry bees in front of my suit were obstructing my view.
As it usually happens in these circumstances I didn’t find the queen until the last frame of the 2nd box. Also, as soon as I saw her I realised one of the thousands of bees attacking me had got into my suit and was crawling up my neck. Panic ensued. I grabbed a few bees around where the queen was and gave them a squeeze, as well as brushing the bee from my neck and headed inside to get the suit off and the bee out. Turns out there were four bees inside of my suit, luckily only one managed to sting me, which was on the top of my head and not near anything important.
I then went back out and managed to insert the new queen and her cage in the hive and put everything back together. I found what I hope is the dead queen on the ground, surrounded by a bunch of live bees.
So I’m jut after some reassurance. Do you think this is a dead queen? I hope it is, otherwise things are going to get nasty again. I’m also going to buy a new suit.
