We closed them up and moved them about a foot forward. This is one step in a long process of moving bees in a beeyard. We need to move our bees into a sunnier spot for next winter. Right now they are in the coldest dampest shadiest part of the yard in winter. In summer it is hot and sunny, but in winter the sun does not clear my landlord's house and that section is a cold sink all winter. Damp and cold is the worst environment for the bees and it makes them more susceptible to every disease and bug out there and probably has a lot to do with why the other colonies got so sick this winter and last.
You can move a bee hive if you move it more than 2 miles from the original location but you can't just move it across the yard or even 10 feet away without totally messing them up. The reason is that bees use landmarks and the sun to get back to their hive. If you move it a few miles away, they reorient themselves to the new location without running into any of their old landmarks and heading back to the old location since a bee's range is only two-three miles. If you move a hive across your garden they will use the old landmarks and head back to the old location instead of where their hive now sits. This can kill a hive because eventually the lost bees die and there are not enough new bees to take their place. But they do tolerate a slow day by day foot by foot move across the yard to the new location.
With the recovering hive on its way into a sunnier spot we moved onto the next hive. This one is the hive that was super productive and aggressive last year. We split it once to try to keep it from swarming but it swarmed twice anyway. It made 30 gallons of honey for us and gave us the three extra colonies. This year it is much calmer so it must have a new queen with different genetic material and a calmer disposition overall. What a relief. It was so hard to work with that hive. They would just come pouring out of there like an angry volcano and make it nearly impossible to do even the simplest maintenance.
Everything looked good, a nice brood pattern, lots of calm working bees and a nice looking queen. We considered treating them with the antibiotic, too, but decided to risk it and leave them alone since they looked so healthy. We closed them up and moved on to the original hive that started this whole endeavor, the ones that are my favorite because they moved into my house two summers ago.
This colony was very calm and productive last year. It had a hard first winter but did a lot better this winter. The first winter the top blew off in a big rainstorm and it got all moldy and wet while I was out of town. When I got back I saw what had happened and put them in a new dry box with a better lid but it suffered from nosema, which is basically bee diarrhea. You can still see the little splats of bee poop on the outside of the box.
We smoked the bees through the vent and along the front entrance and waited a minute for them to settle down. We took off the lid and the inner cover and they gave us a loud warning buzz. This is unusual. Normally, if you smoke the bees, they calm down and get back to work. Especially if it is a sunny day. Bees are always happier on a sunny day. Cold wet overcast windy days? Don't go near the hive, they are grumpy. AND, they are all home. On a sunny day many of the bees are out in the field so it is a nicer experience to open up the boxes.
These bees were not having it. We took the two honey supers off, they were almost full, but not quite ready to harvest. The bees went NUTS. They poured out and started pelting us with their little angry bodies. I could smell the angry bee pheromone, which smells a lot like a very ripe banana. Usually, you only smell this if you get stung. Maybe one of us did get stung but could not feel it. They sting and release the pheromone and the other bees are then drawn to the location and they sting too. These bees were seriously overreacting to a very simple hive check. Something was wrong in there.
My friend suggested we just have a very quick peek at the upper brood box to make sure there was a laying queen, since if it is not "queenright" (without a queen) the hive can become unsettled and aggressive. We could see larvae and capped brood and that meant the queen was laying, so we closed them up and walked away. We were covered in about a hundred bees each with hundreds more flying around our heads. We knew that if we kept walking they would go back to the hive. We walked down the path and through some shrubs to get them off us but they did not all go back to the hive like they should have. Now there were about 50 bees angrily ramming into us and buzzing around our heads. We stood there for 15 minutes waiting for them to give up and calm down but they would not settle down. I had never seen anything like it. They were so aggressive and persistent. Normally, if you walk away from a hive, even just 5 feet or so, the guard bees will return to the hive. There may be one or two really pissed off bees that follow you ten feet but I have never seen so many pissed off bees follow us 100 feet from the hive and stick around so long.
We had a conference and agreed it was not acceptable behavior. The colony has a queen so that is not the reason it was so aggressive. Bees should be calm and easily soothed with smoke unless we really are aggressive towards them. Like, if we smash their hives and throw the frames around and dance on their baby bees. All we did was open the box and they went nuts. This means there is a new queen in there and she is producing aggressive honeybees. The only way to deal with it is to get rid of the queen and her aggressive genes and replace her with a gentler queen. No small task, considering that in order to save the colony we would have to open them up and find the queen and kill her. It is hard to see anything when 20,000 angry bees are flying around you and looking for a way into your bee suit and veil. My friend thought the best thing would be to kill the whole colony and start over. My landlord and I wanted to try to save the worker bees and just replace the queen. My friend clearly thought we were insane, and was probably right since he has way more experience than we do.
To humor us he called another more experienced beekeeper and asked him what he would do in this situation. This guy recommended having a spray bottle of soap ready, bump the hive and get the guard bees out and spray them with soap and kill them. There are only so many guard bees so after enough of them are killed eventually the hive will become easier to manage while looking for the aggressive queen. That sounded like a plan. I hated the idea of killing all those bees, all life is precious, but it is our responsibility as urban beekeepers to make sure that we do not propagate aggressive honeybees. This queen was making very productive workers, but they were also going to hurt someone. The last thing I want is to have someone hurt by our bees and ending up in the hospital and maybe even making it so beekeeping in the city is restricted. I knew they would not be aggressive to people out in the city while collecting pollen and nectar, just when they were near their hive. But my landlord's elderly mother lives here and works out in the garden a lot and there are kids and pets nearby. No need to take a risk like that.
We decided to stick a queen excluder between the two deep brood boxes to isolate the queen in one box, making the search half as difficult since she would only be on 1 of 10 frames instead of 1 of 20. After two weeks all the new eggs will have hatched and we will be able to see which box she is in by the way the comb looks. Empty or capped and she is not in that box. Full of various stages of larvae and that is where the queen is. My friend and landlord had to leave so the job was up to me. I had them check my zippers and ankles to make sure there was no access for the bees and then headed back down there with the smoker.
I was nervous and worried I was going to get stung. They were already mad as hell and started flying at me right away. I gave them some long puffs of smoke in the front of the hive and in the back vent hoping it might calm them at least a little bit. I laid out the excluder, a thin flat wire grid in a metal frame that is spaced so the queen can't get through but the workers can, then strategized about what order to lift the boxes off to make sure I had as few moves as possible. The faster this happened the less chance I would have getting stung.
I took a deep breath and lifted off the lightest box and lid and put it on the ground. I could barely see through my veil the bees were so thick. Their buzzing was a roar. I lifted the two heavy honey supers partially full of honey and put them on top of the lid I had just set down. All the boxes were boiling over with bees. I pried the top brood box off the lower brood box and lifted it up and over onto the ground. Quickly grabbing the excluder from where I had placed it, I slid it across the surges of bees seething out of the lower box and then slammed the top box back down on that, accidently killing about 40 bees in the process. They were enraged by this and the banana anger pheromone smell was overpowering. The bees were in clusters all over my bee suit trying to find a way in so they could sting my skin and nose and eyes and ears. I could see them stinging my suit everywhere, the little bristles of stingers like cactus spines. I slapped the final boxes and lids into place and got the hell out of there. I was covered head to toe in hundreds and hundreds of angry dying bees. I tried the trick of walking through shrubs to brush them off and that worked pretty well. Now I was only covered with about 100 bees. The buzzing was so loud and I could hear some really close to my face caught in the collars and folds of the veil. I would have to be careful when I got out of the suit for any strays that were still on me. I kept walking around and around the garden through bushes and blowing the smoker at the clumps of bees still left on my suit. Eventually, I got it down to about 10 very persistent and angry bees. I went into my yard and took off the suit, careful to watch for bees in the folds of fabric. I stepped out of the suit feeling very vulnerable and exposed after that onslaught and sort of scampered away from it with my butt tucked in panic. I left it lying there on the sidewalk because some bees had found me and were angrily buzzing around the crumpled pile of gloves and jumpsuits.
image taken from an article on africanized honeybeesI walked in my back door with relief and went to the sink for a tall glass of water. I closed the living room an office window in case any stray bees decided to come in that way and then bent down to untuck my pant legs from my socks. This is an excellent way to keep bees out of your pants...and ticks, for that matter. I pulled one leg out and had started on the other when I heard one angry little high pitched buzzing somewhere on my shoe or sock. I looked closer but could not see anything. I was afraid to move in case it was close to getting into my pants. It could be on my sock somewhere and could sting right through it. It could be working its way into my shoe. It could already be in my pants. I could not feel anything but I could hear it perfectly. It was on my shoe somewhere. Then I saw it, burrowing into my shoe lace eye, trying so hard to get in so it could sting me. I walked outside and took off my shoe and shook it out into the air. It buzzed around and looked for something to take its anger out on and then headed off back to its hive. Close call.
After all this hysteria I was not so sure about trying to save that hive. Even at its worst, the other hive last year was nothing like this one. This thing was out of control To kill it I just spray soapy water into the boxes and the bees die pretty quickly. What a mess and a waste. And how terrible that my favorite colony has been taken over by a mean queen. I don't think I can live with the guilt so I will probably try to find the queen in a few weeks and kill her and either replace her with a new queen or let them raise their own. The problem with that method is that the mean queen's genetic material is in there and there is a chance the new queen will be just as bad.
I have two weeks to think about it.
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