Hive Mind Bee Blog: Bees Behaving Badly

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Ow! Ow, ow, OW! The girls were aggro today. I was out turning the garden (tomatoes, strawberries and zucchini is the crop planned for this year), near the hives, granted, but not actually in their flight path, and they kept coming at me. Not just a quick warning buzz, either, but a full on attack. Bees in my hair, buzzing around my head, bonking into my face. Most odd, they even chased me around to the front of the house. Usually, they'll just nudge you enough to let you know it's time to move on, and leave you alone once you give them some distance, but not today.

Then, as if that weren't enough, I got stung on my ear when I wasn't even anywhere near the hives. I'm just sitting there on my back deck, talking about how aggro they're being, and zap bam OUCH! I got stung on my ear. Now the right side of my head looks like Prince Charles, all Dumbo'ed out.

I'm not sure why they're being so aggressive. It could be the time of year, it could be that I added a box of bees last week and that left them agitated, it could be that the new bees are just bitchier.

Well, I gave up on trying to turn the garden bed (I'll do it by floodlight at night some time this week), but I did suit up and check the hives. Hive 1, the more aggressive one, is thriving. I was a bit worried because I didn't find any brood at all in the bottom brood chambers (which would mean there wasn't a fertile queen in the house), but on second inspection, I found a bunch of freshly laid brood in an upper chamber. I missed it the first time around because it was brand new. In the first few days, it looks like tiny grain of rice, smaller than a poppyseed, right in the middle of the cell. It made sense that it was in the upper chamber, because that's where I left the queen.

I had actually intended to take out the uppermost chamber, because I put it in kind of by accident. Usually you only have two brood chambers and the rest are honey supers. They all look the same, boxes with frames in them, but the brood chambers are taller. The honey supers are shorter so they're easier to move around when they're filled with delicious, sweet honey.

In any case, I couldn't take it out because it had brood in it, so now I have three brood chambers and I'm not quite sure what to do about. Advice, anyone?

Hive 2 also looked good. Nice solid laying pattern, and they're making headway on their first honey super. Hive 1 had gone through all the sugar syrup I had left them, but Hive 2 had only gone through about half of it, so I gave the three leftover jars I had to Hive 1.

Oh, and I got stung. Again. Through my pants.

Bitches.

As far as your 3 brood chambers, if you can determine where the queen is, move that super to the bottom. Of the remaining 2, put all the brood into one and remove the other. If you can't fit all the brood into one, put an excluder between 2 & 3 until the brood in 3 hatches, then remove it. If you can't locate the queen, throw on an excluder and check back in a few days for new eggs. You will at least be able to narrow it down to 2 of the brood chambers.
Or just let them go with 3, many folks believe in unlimited brood chambers.

# posted by robo : May 04, 2005

If you just found eggs and small larvae then you can remove that super, after putting the queen below, into the brood boxes. You can move the queen and nurse bees by either smoke or finding the queen and herding her or placing her on the lower combs. Then gently brush the nurse bees off the young brood and into the lower brood boxes. You will have set them back only a few days (3 days to hatch an egg). If you are loath to remove the brood you can take out deep frames and replace them with the shallower frames that have the brood on them. Later when that brood is capped you can scrape off the comb built below the shallower frame (mostly drone brood) and put it in the super above an excluder. OR you can just put the shallower box on the bottom of the stack and the queen above an excluder with a corner of the inner cover propped up to let out the drones. Depends on whether you need that shallow box for honey or can allow it to be used to raise brood. Two deeps for brood is plenty enough! Bees are often cranky when they are queenless. Can you move them? Or face them away from the house? Even facin a hedge or fence? Or put a small flag near them to acclimate them to movement. Have varmints been bothering them at night? I guess they've requeened themselves. Get marked queens and you'll know. Good Luck!

# posted by Susi : May 15, 2005

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# posted by Anonymous : October 23, 2005

Give me 50 dollars.

What?

Give you 50 bucks.

OK.

Now give me your paycheck?

What?

Are you crazy or something? I worked 50 hours to get that paycheck.

I think he is stupid.

That is what the bees and cows are trying to tell mankind. You know with the honey and the milk and stuff like that. See the bees {madumaki) toil day and night to create that honey for their own consumption and give some to humanity. The milk that the cow produces is for it's calves (bachada) consumption. The cow willinging gives humainty some of that milk.

# posted by Bubba : November 04, 2007