>  Good news I have figured out which hives they are, and requened a cpl as I am not fond of super mean either.

We used to have very bad bees - and there are still members of our association who are afraid to work their colonies!

Only way that I could see of solving it was to raise some good queens and mate them in an apiary with plenty of good tempered bees - and no bad ones.  We then used good queens to replace the bad ones doing a whole apiary at a time.  Any queen with a bad colony was killed and the colony re-queened, no matter what crop they had produced - and some of the bad ones had done very well.  No point in keeping some bad ones to keep spreading their genes.

It has worked well.  Now it is a rare event to get stung - and our crop remains well above average.

It is very satisfying to raise your own good queens - I just cannot understand why people buy in queens (except perhaps for commercial operations where it may not be practical).

Best wishes

Peter 
52°14'44.44"N, 1°50'35"W

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