Dealing with Defensive Bees.

The wifi and phonelines have been down all week so I’m borrowing my bee buddy Cynthia’s internet and sending the blog out a day early.

We are getting into late summer up here with the ling heather coming into bloom and wasps on the lookout for easy entry into hives making the bees a bit shirty. The colonies are laying down stores for winter and I’ve seen some drones thrown out already. As I was clearing some hogweed out of a wilder patch of garden to make way for goldenrod, I was zapped on the forehead by a defensive bee upset by my digging vigorously and vibrating near the hive. This is a timely blog on dealing with difficult bees and the edited version had just been published in August’s BeeCraft magazine.

Wild Animals.

Given that honey bee colonies are basically wild animals, it is rather remarkable that we can handle them at all. The law around ownership of honey bees in the UK recognises that a colony belongs to the beekeeper because, even though many bees leave the hive for the day’s foraging, they all come home again to the hive at night. However, when a colony swarms it leaves the beekeeper’s care if it moves out of an apiary and into a neighbouring garden or space. The colony is no longer the legal property of that beekeeper. On the other hand, if domesticated animals such as cats, dogs and pedigree bulls stray from home, they must be returned to their rightful owners who can usually demonstrate proof of ownership.

The nest of a honey bee colony is expensive to build, fill with brood, honey stores, and maintain, so a colony cannot just fly away to avoid a predator. It needs, therefore, a good defence system. Honey bees have a wide range of predators, pests, and parasites. Not only do they have enemies in large animals and birds, but they have fungi, bacteria, and other insects to contend with, especially robbers from neighbouring colonies. They have a diverse array of defence systems and an arsenal of weapons including a painful sting and a small army of guard bees.

Defenses.

Some defences such as the sting and nest site are fixed and cannot be changed, but guarding behaviour is fluid. It increases as the numbers of predators living nearby increases ¹. The Downs and Ratnieks ² study of guarding behaviour demonstrates that colonies regulate this behaviour in an adaptive way in response to changing environmental conditions. When there is very little nectar to collect, the threat of robbers can be high, so the colony has many guard bees on constant alert and ready to die at the entrance to protect the colony. However, during a nectar flow, a colony invests less in guarding and sometimes off-course laden foragers from elsewhere are admitted to an unfamiliar hive.

 Natural selection favours an adaptive response because it allows colonies to deploy workers where they are needed most. For example, worker bees do guard duty before they become foragers, but many workers function as guards as well as foragers, and will switch roles according to need.

This will resonate with beekeepers who notice changes in colony behaviour throughout the season and especially in times of a nectar dearth. This article explores possible reasons for a colony becoming defensive and unmanageable and offers solutions.

Variations in Defensiveness.

We know that honey bees of some sub-species are innately more defensive than others. Take Apis mellifera scutella in sub-Saharan Africa as an example of a bee that has large number of predators, both large and small, and will immediately counterattack anything that threatens a colony. This is why these bees are used to protect crops such as maize from elephants. Log hives are strung up on ropes around the field like an electric fence and if a hive is bumped by the elephants, its residents pour out and seek to sting the interior parts of the elephant’s trunks, causing these giant beasts to flee across the plains, trumpeting in pain and leaving the crops to grow.

Buckfast bees, on the other end of the defensiveness scale, are renowned for their docility and easiness of handling, but I know a beekeeper who couldn’t stand the way they just hung about listlessly on the frames during an inspection. Christine likes a bit of attitude and action so she reverted back to darker bees.

Why So Narky?.

Most of us keep bees for pleasure and we are the lucky ones for we can easily get rid of a colony that stops being “nice” to handle. However, before we condemn a colony, we need to examine our own practices and handling techniques which may be the root of the problem. Are we using the hive tools correctly, to remove and replace frames smoothly? Are we using smoke appropriately, by using a fuel that is neither acrid not hot? Are we inspecting when the weather is too cold, windy or muggy with impending thunder? Are we leaving the hive open for too long and exposing stores to robbing? Are vibrations from lawn mowing, strimming, or hammering in fence posts near the colonies alarming the bees? Are wasps or robber bees gaining entry to the colony? Does the colony have sufficient stores? A starving colony can be very defensive. Once, I visited an inexperienced beekeeper with a highly defensive colony. He had just harvested spring honey but had done so without making sure that there were stores in the brood box. It was empty and the colony was starving and enraged. We shut up the hive and took shelter in the only available refuge, the middle of a jaggy hawthorn hedge, till their attack was over.

On a personal level; is the beekeeper wearing perfume? Just been horse riding? Sweating from mowing the lawns? Lucius Columella, the great Roman soldier turned farmer, in his agricultural tome, De Re Rustica, advises us on handling and smells. “Very great care must be taken by the man in charge, who feeds the bees, when he must handle the hives, that the day before he has abstained from sexual relations and he does not approach when drunk, and only after washing himself, and he abstains for all edibles which have a strong flavour and acrimonious stench such as garlic and onions and all similar things”.

Queenless or diseased colonies may be more defensive.

What to Do?

It is possible to change the temperament of a defensive colony by changing the queen and altering the genetic traits of the colony in a few weeks. However, if the colony continues to be super-defensive with unprovoked attacks, it becomes a danger to the beekeeper and the public then and immediate action should be taken. Euthanizing the colony might seem harsh but could be the safest course depending on many variables including where the colony is situated and the risk to passers- by. The supers should be removed during the day and in the evening when the foragers have returned, the entrance should be shut, the open mesh floor closed over with varroa board insert, and the colony sealed in. A ¼ pint of petrol is poured into the brood box via the hole in crown/cover board being mindful of the high dangers of petrol fumes and combustion if a hot smoker present. The beekeeper walks away and returns in the morning to clear up by which time the petrol fumes should have dissipated.

Alternatively, the colony can be moved to an isolated apiary, but the problem is transferred with the colony and so this may not be the best option.

Large colonies can escalate defensive responses to extremely high levels which is why aggression may not manifest when a colony is smaller at the end of winter. So, breaking down a large colony into several nuclei works well especially if the original queen is eliminated, and each nucleus is requeened with a queen from more evenly tempered stock.

Finding the Queen.

Finding the queen in a defensive colony is challenging but the following method of requeening the colony should work well for you. If you like working with other people, recruit 3 hardy experienced beekeepers and work in pairs wearing good bee-proof protection with reinforcement around ankles and wrists. Light at least 2 smokers and have one person responsible for keeping them going.

The best time of day is around noon on a sunny warm day, if possible, when the foragers are busy in the field and the hive less full. The aim of this manoeuvre is to remove and destroy the queen and requeen the colony using a caged mated queen, or one in a nucleus via uniting using the newspaper method.

Having delivered a lot of smoke at the entrance and given the bees enough time to take on board some stores, remove the shallow boxes/ supers having smoked the gap between the boxes. Place these on the upturned roof meanwhile. Leaving the queen excluder on the brood box, remove the box with the floor to another site in the apiary at least 10 metres from the original site. Take a long break of at least 2 hours; the longer the better as this allows more foragers to return to the supers on the original site. The foragers are the most defensive members of the colony and it will be easier to find the queen without them. Using a lot of smoke at this stage makes it harder to find the queen.

If you have not found her at first inspection then take an empty brood box and arrange the frames in pairs and go away again for refreshments bearing Columella’s wise advice on food and beverages in mind.The queen will hide from the light between one of these pairs and will be easier to find. She must be eliminated immediately.

If introducing the new queen via a cage, then it should be a slow release with the beekeeper in charge of opening the exit tab on the cage after several days and allowing the bees to chew through the fondant plug to release her. Return the brood box and floor with this queenless colony to the original site and insert the caged queen between the frames. Replace the queen excluder, supers, crown/cover board and roof and congratulate yourselves on a difficult job well done.

References:

¹ Seeley, T.D. 1985. Honeybee Ecology. Princeton University Press, New Jersey.

²Downs, S.G. & F.L.W. Ratnieks. 2000. Adaptive Shifts in Honey Bee (Apis mellifera l) Guarding Behaviour Supports Prediction of the Acceptance Threshold Model. Behavioural Ecology Vol. No. 3:326-333.