Jeeze Becky… That’s like adding insult to injury! What Queen wants to be treated like a spider???
I think a tiny guillotine would be most appropriate. With a tiny queen cage in a tiny tumbril to get her to her beeheading…
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If you have chickens…it would be quick. Personally I beheaded a queen only once with pointy tweezers but that was long ago. I have since decided to let the bees sort it out. I observe their crankiness as indicators for pests, queenless, etc.
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I have Irish Setters so I do NOT have chickens to do the dirty work for me!
We like your ploy and let the hive take care of the issue.
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I think you need to start a category called Bee Humor!
I’m going with Rodderick’s method.
“They” say that freezing to death is one of the nicer ways to go if you have to… I think this would be my choice. She might have to go, but it doesn’t have to be violent, she did her job for as long as she could…
I started Bee Humorous in the Lounge catagory. But I realized too late that not everyone can get there yet.
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I’ve been thinking a bit more about this. Could healthy drone populations in more peaceful varieties such as Italians etc help to create a “bubble” of non Africanized bees by putting out a larger group of desirable drones into the breeding pool for the local area? So in theory virgin queens would be more likely to mate with a more desirable drone. Are a couple of hobby hives not going to make a big enough impact to make a difference or could this help my local area?
Well, it’s true that we created the problem. We purposefully bred European honey bees for centuries to be reproductively challenged. We bred them to not swarm (how the colony reproduces) and bred them to make less drones (how the colony passes on their genes to other colonies) and we bred them to be bigger (slower). So we have less drones, and since they are bigger they can’t fly as long nor can they fly as fast and our hives don’t swarm nearly as much. And so, the AHB quickly take over.
On the other hand, I’ve worked what people tell me are AHB in the Caribbean and in CA, AZ and NM and they were workable bees. Occasionally one is unworkable. Most of them are not quite as nice as I like my bees but if they were the nicest bees I could get, I would keep them. On the other hand I’ve had the F1 crosses of both AHB and the old German black bees (AMM) that were not workable. If those were the nicest bees I could find, I would give up beekeeping. The biggest downside to the bees in places like the Caribbean is that they swarm and abscond too much. On the other hand the ones I’ve seen in AZ are in large hives and do neither of those things any more than EHB. AHB will abscond or swarm in a drought. but the ones I saw in AZ did not.
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I’ve had & still have some bees here in Australia that I’d swear were/are AHB