@TopangaBees Jeff’s ideas sound worth giving a try but that robbing is going on
so strongly gives me concern that there might be very little for the bees to forage on. It might be a good option to relocate the bees to where you know there is a nectar and pollen available. You certainly need to increase the weak hives numbers by adding from the stronger hive but that alone will not stop the robbing.
Keep us updated.
Regards and good luck.
Thank you gentlemen, oddly enough, my week your colony does not seem to have a problem until I open up their box and invite robbers.
I will absolutely adhere to Michael‘s suggestion about a tiny hole in the screen. I don’t have the luxury of being able to move my hives anywhere, and my property is an acre. However, today is misty and damp, a rare occurrence in SoCal in late may! I’m going down, hoping they’re quiet, spending the day inside…
I assume it is dearth, even though it seems to me like stuff is in bloom… don’t know my SoCal wild bloom-cycles so well.
Btw, I have given my weaker hive a frame of brood to boost their growth, but the stronger to bbed hive was the ‘giver’ of this gift…
I have no idea of So Cal flora but here in Aussie there are some flora that when flowering are not good for nectar or pollen in large enough quantities to benefit the hives, while there is some that do supply quantities worth while in some years and not in others.
My thinking is that robbing is more a last resort for honey so that indicates a dearth to me. When I had hives and was working honey flows that was well known and reliable robbing was never seen.
Certainly opening up a hive is when robbing a hive is easier for bees to attack so it should be kept to a minimum.
Don’t give up on your hives and keep us up to date, it won’t last.
Regards.
Anybody on here tried open feeding well away from the hives to stop robbing? I have no experience of it, just read about it on Beesource.
I used to have a colony that one year brought in three times as much honey as the others. They were robbing them silently. Italians! Notorious robbers.
Haven’t tried open feeding, but with some hives having supers on, I wouldn’t want to go that way.
But if all hives would be at stage of no super, I think that could work splendidly.
Just a note: the only hive in my apiary doing robbing is led by a splendid Carniolan Queen by the name of Jazza (Jasmine).
In this case, the Italians are great defenders.
When they started the robbing, there was no total dearth, but I had a couple of weak nucs. That’s inviting enough.
My exposed hive is doing well since I plugged up every crevice. I went down to inspect at 6:45 AM today, before all the bees start foraging (robbing?). I smoked the hive and opened the inner cover, out came 60,000 bees at once, going for me! I had not taped my FlowHive mesh suit with duct tape on the chest this time (turns out I should have…)
I methodically inspected the hive. The lower brood box has about 2 to 3 frames of brood, with nectar and pollen. The middle brood box, underneath the flow frames, was hopping. Every frame except the two outsides were brimming with brood, larva and all the other good stuff. I didn’t see queen cells but there are certainly drone cells.The bees were so agitated, they placed themselves in a line in every crevice on my suit trying to sting, they were planted in the line between the actual goatskin glove and the mesh ‘arm-tube’, and on my leg, and on the hands. In lines.
Suddenly 4 to 5 bees were buzzing inside(!) my veil. Note, I was wearing the FlowHive mesh suit and the goat skin gloves.
I got stung on my side of my neck and on my palms and the top of my hands. Luckily the venom didn’t get in my hands (much) because the stingers got stuck in the goat skin. I can’t emphasize how unpleasant the experience is of sharing the inside of a bee veil with 4+ bees! I found myself serpentining up our hill, trying to undo my veil to get rid of the bees. Long story short, I had bees in my hair and in my collar. While running between rooms have in my house, hearing the buzzing ON me, I frantically brushed my hair up and away from my scalp and body in a panic, as to slide/push them out that way, every time I stopped brushing/shaking my head, I could hear the buzzing in my hair. (I have to credit myself for the quick hairbrush thinking in the middle of buzz-hell!) It was truly horrifying!
After catching my breath and calming down, chewing a couple of Benadryl and suiting up again, this time with duct-tape around the boots and at the face veil zipper on the chest, I ventured back out to close everything up. Unfortunately I had run away from a half open hive. When I got back out, they were bearding on the front of the hive and I took one minute (no more!), just to put things back in place (not double checking and insulating cracks in the hive this time). The bees were persistently following me the 400 yards to my house, actually sitting:climbing on me while I walked.
The experience of having to inspect and maintain an Africanized colony is beyond unpleasant.
I didn’t even open the weaker hive that’s still sitting there with one brood box only, because it was way too nuts down there and I was done.
I pinched one of my queens late last summer and installed a new one, that didn’t work and in September 2017, the whole colony had vanished.
At this point with these two hives, I feel like I wanna just leave the bees alone and hope that nobody goes close to the hive… Yes, I’m making signs!
I am well aware of that robbing may start up again as there are probably some cracks open between brood boxes on the hive. At this moment, I still hear aggressive bee-buzzing in my ears and I’m itching all over and I got to go to work, so I’m not in the position, nor in the right mindset to spend another half hour to an hour in that frenzy plugging up crevices. Am I wrong? I feel like I wanna just l leave them alone and hope hope for the best…
Thoughts?
️
I understand your feelings, but it won’t solve the problem. If they are Africanized, their drones are also putting more aggressive genes into your local bee populations. Not a good thing. They are not going to get better with time, either. I think you have a couple of possible choices:
- Contact your local bee club and ask for help. Somebody may be willing to manage the bees for you until they are successfully requeened with a known mated queen (I recommend Big Island Queens or Olivarez Honey Bees for good queens). If they reject 2 queens, you are probably not going to be able to requeen them, according to my mentor, who is a professional beekeeper. In that case, you may need to destroy the hive.
- Contact a local live bee removal service and have them take the bees away. You can ask them to return your equipment - many will do that for a small fee, but I would not take the frames back. You can’t be sure what frames they are giving you, unless you have labelled all of yours with personalization.
- If you can get a nucleus locally at this time from a reputable beekeeper, with a known gentle queen, you could destroy the hive yourself and put the nucleus into it. Killing hives is not something I like to do, but with Africanization, we have to be prepared to manage our livestock, and this is part of the responsibility. Spraying the hive with 1:1 syrup helps make them too heavy to fly and attack, plus gives them a distraction in licking syrup off each other. Then you need to treat liberally with water containing dish soap. Horrible I know, but it works, and you can rescue the frames. Wash off the soapy water with a hose. Capped honey can be given to another hive. Brood frames I freeze if there isn’t much brood, or render if there is a lot. Drawn comb gives a new nucleus a golden head start, so after freezing for 48 hours, I might add it to a new nucleus.
Just a few thoughts. Hope your stings improve soon.
Edit: One more thought, wearing nitrile medical gloves over the goatskin makes it much harder for them to sting through the gloves. Buy nitrile gloves 2 sizes larger than the ones you usually wear. Costco, Walgreens and CVS all have them available.
Dear Dawn, I really appreciate your answer, it makes a lot of sense. I understand that requeening may have a low success rate, but I think I would be willing to try that. I completely understand everything you’re saying and I tend to agree. I am going to try to invest in a new queen if not once then twice, and take it from there. I’ll keep you posted! Also, I’m definitely going to suit up in a double suit and double gloves from now on.
Mimi
I have never been stung through my Brushy Mountain ventilated suit, even with Africanized bees. It is made of a material like running shoes, so it tends to give you the Michelin Man appearance, but who cares? The only time I have had bees inside was when I forgot to do up the zipper properly. Now hubby and I check each other like dive buddies - much safer. They do go through all types of gloves though, and I have found the nitrile glove layer is the only way to reduce that.
Good luck, my friend!
This sounds like a truly horrible experience and I will be careful about complaining when I think my bees are a ‘bit cranky’. The experience of beekeeping is so different in other parts of the world under different conditions! I have to say I think you are very courageous and resourceful.
If you get the Africanized bees sorted out you will become a good bee keeper. In Australia we don’t have that problem and most of my bee keeping is done in shorts and a T shirt for protective gear. If my hives are a bit angry then I look to see what the issue is.
I take my hat off to you for at least trying to fix the problem under such testing circumstances.
Regards
Hello Mimi,
Sorry to hear about your mean bees; I have only had to deal with ornery bees once or twice, not Africanized devils, but it was absolutely no fun at all.
I know you’ve been given tons of good advice already, but thought you might get some useful tips from Hillary on requeening an Africanized hive
Good luck!
Good morning, sitting here in my kitchen with a big bee sting-lump on my neck, which has swelled to my Adam’s apple over night… going to purchase more Benadryl. Fun!
I’m feeling unmotivated and sad. In one day I went from an enthusiastic and motivated beekeeper, to somebody who is truly dreading going close to that hive again. I’ve spoken to a couple of my mentors and the bottom line is, the more I get stung, the harsher I may react to the stings… it’s not like I’ll get more immune the more I get stung, but possibly quite the opposite apparently. This alone makes the prospect of requeening this nasty hive even more daunting! Both re-queening, and creating additional nukes from this hive would force me to open the hive again several times over the next few months, and I really can’t afford getting stung (through the suit) again. It’s dreadful, and I have a lot of contenplating to do.
Next, I’m reading BeePeeker’s article about re-queening.
Thank you all so much for your thoughts and advice.
Mimi
Hi BeePeeker, I love the article you sent, and I especially like the idea of that little isolating mesh queen cage that you put the queen in for the first short week, makes a lot of sense!
I still can’t say that I want to go down and risk being stung again though, I’m very much licking my wounds at the moment. I’ll consult with my mentor and see if I can get some help with this mess!
Hi Mimi, I understand your feelings; it is a lot to ask so soon!
I think consulting with your mentor is a smart plan, and maybe getting your local bee club involved too-as this could be a great learning opportunity.
I like Michael Bush’s saying “divide & conquer”.
I put the strategy that I would use & I believe it would work for you in Dawn’s thread, “Hypothetical re-queening”.
Totally agree with @JeffH, if you have the space to move the hives. I actually did something a little different, but similar - I split the hive into 2 nuclei and one 8 frame box. One nucleus went to my flat roof, one to my community garden and the remaining 8 frames stayed put. They were much easier to deal with once the big hive was split into smaller colonies. The only problem was that I had to go in every 3 days or so to look for queen cells, but having said that, they were much nicer to open when they were smaller colonies.
I highly recommend splitting up a really nasty colony to requeen and get control. Always. Period. Full stop. Exclamation mark/point.
Most people have reduced effects from a bee sting over time, my body has become accustomed and now I just get an itching and minor swelling, but yes, some will react worse but they are the minority.
I am feeling for you, it must be a bad time thinking “here I go again”. Maybe get a commercial bee keeper to help you out who has experience with Africanized bees, but it will cost you cash. Ultimately it is your choice to make, and whatever that is, we will one and all understand and agree.
Regards