Aggressive bees

[Lynny]

Hi,
I am hoping for some help if possible. I am an inexperienced bee keeper in south london (SE20). I have kept bees for about 5 years and currently have 3 healthy hives.
My problem is my garden hive, which is strong and healthy but very very aggressive. I know I should re queen it but getting into the brood box is well nigh impossible. The hive is relatively calm when investigating and removing supers, but when we get to the brood box the pheromone smell is intense, and the bees get really frightening. Yesterday I sought the help and advice of a far more experienced bee keeper, who said he had never seen anything like it, retreated, and will not make the attempt again. To be frank, I think that this hive may be dangerous to my neighbors, and feel I need to take action. Any advice would be great, but I was also wondering if any expert bee keepers could come and inspect/ re queen the hive with me?

[NigelP]

Several solutions. If the brood box is proving impossible to examine you need to move it somewhere else in your apairy This will bleed off a lot of the forager bees (the aggressive bees) back to their original site.
Now you could move one of your other hives to aggressive hive site to take on the foragers as they return., or leave an empty hive there or you could buy in a queen and start a nuc and place nuc there and so on

Once your aggressive hive has been depleted of foragers...a day or two you usually find they are pretty docile as mainly nurse bees left and depleted numbers means easier to locate queen and squish and replace or whatever.

I'm sure others will be along with other solutions.

[Patrick]

I may be jumping to conclusion when you say you have a London garden with neighbours, but if you have another less built up apiary location for your other two hives, my first priority would be sealing up the problem hive at night, strapping it together securely and moving it to somewhere less sensitive whilst you sort it out and then return it.

If you don’t and your neighbours get hammered you risk a neighbour dispute you don’t need.

Is it suddenly aggressive or has it been a while? Sudden changes may indicate queenless ness.

Sounds like you need to bleed off foragers as Nigel suggests by moving brood chamber to one side and leaving supers on old spot with a new floor or propped up got them to return to, so you can have a proper look for eggs, drone laying workers whatever. Just requeen is the simple advice handed out by everyone in this circumstance ( including those who have never actually done it). Requeen a currently queen right colony is often easier than requeening a very aggressive long-standing queenless hive. Try and find out what is going on first and doing that in a bee blizzard is not practical.

[Alfred]

Having had the same situation
I would advise taking heed of Patrick and Nigel's advice asap -amongst others,they have helped me immensely.
Moving the box temporarily does allow an inspection- are you certain you have a queen?
Controversial practice is to smoke the entrance a few minutes before starting work then repeat for each layer through a gap allowing the smoke to perculate before removing.
Controversial but it works for me
Don't wear leather gloves triple latex with marigolds on top.
A requeen strategy if you can't re-site.

[Lynny]

Thank you all so much. I think I will go with Nigel’s idea of moving the hive and leaving another hive on the site for the foragers. I can’t move the hive to another site sadly. Re whether or not I have a queen- am sure I have, as have seen brood through the bee blizzard (lovely phrase Patrick!). The bees were fine until early April when they suddenly appeared to swarm. I was astonished as had seen no queen cells and it was far too early. The swarm settled in the neighbors tree for an hour and then returned to the hive. Any ideas? There was no apparent disturbance. Since then they have become steadily more aggressive, but only when the brood box is disturbed. I can mow and strim all round the hive with no problems.

[AdamD]

Rrequeening - as Patrick has said - is often spoken of in a glib fashion but can be difficult with a feisty colony. If you are told to "kill the queen" the colony could be worse if queenless so you don't want to be in that situation. There are many ways of re-queening. Here's one suggestion.

Move the difficult colony to one side. In it's place put a brood box with drawn comb - that you can borrow from your other colonies - and foundation on the site. Place a queen in a cage with candy plug between two frames of drawn comb/stores or sealed brood. (definitely no open brood). (Other frames could be foundation but not the two either side of the queen). Place a queen excluder on top and then the supers on that. Put a hive roof on the difficult colony. Flying bees will return to the old site over the next couple of days. The queen will be part-protected by the two frames sandwiching the queen cage (don't use a butler cage which doesn't offer much protection). There is a good chance that the queen will be accepted as the bees in the hive have no choice of another queen. Leave a week after which time we will hope that the queen is laying. If she has been killed, you still have a queenright colony to unite the bees to. If the colony gets horrible, there's a chance that the queen is no more.
Once the queen has been accepted, we can hope that the behaviour will have improved with her pheromones guiding the colony, although the genetics of the old queen will be present for a couple of months. For the difficult colony, you could move it to the other side of the newly-queened one to bleed off more flyers if they were difficult when opening. However you will need to kill the bad queen at some point after opening up and then put the hive crown board on. Then place a queen excluder over newspaper on top of the supers of the now, decent colony. Place the now queenless colony on top. (If you have pre-released the brood box from the hive floor during the day, it should lift up easily without sticking in the evening. You have done a newspaper unite.
The separation of the queen below and the brood in the top box will probably result in queencells being produced in the top box, so you will need to go in after a week, check all is well in the bottom brood box and destroy any queencells in the top brood box. I would be inclined to leave it on for another week or so before doing anything more.

[NigelP]

The swarm settled in the neighbors tree for an hour and then returned to the hive. Any ideas?

Yes you witnessed a mating "swarm" accompanying a virgin queen on her nuptial flight...and probably have a new queen in there. She will be unmarked (I'm assuming your previous queen was marked) and might explain why they have got aggressive...either her pheromones OR she never returned from mating flight and hive is queenless. If you are seeing brood suggests new queens a bad un.

[Patrick]

As Nigel - a mating swarm. Could well have picked up unhelpful local drone influences hence colony change in temperament.

If queens unmarked and or unclipped happens a lot more often than realised.

All it needs is someone with vicious bees leaving them to it (or more charitably a feral colony) and we all pick up the consequences. As Tom Jones says in his authoritative beekeeping advice - it’s not unusual.

[AdamD]

As Tom Jones says in his authoritative beekeeping advice - it’s not unusual.