Heard something new yesterday when I was talking with an experienced
beekeeper.

One of my hives has become a bit aggressive by buzzing me when I come near
it and gets more so when I open it. When I encounter that behavior I will
wait a bit before doing anything like re-queening because it is often
situational (skunks, dearth, whatever).

As noted in prior posts, I am not big in swarm control as my bees are more
for pollinating my fruit trees and veggies and not the honey which i still
have buckets of in my basement. The other beekeeper  said that my allowing
swarms was the reason for their aggressiveness and that after a hive swarms
three times it gets aggressive.

I think that he is confusing Brother Adam's Buckfast bees behavior and
transferring it to all bees. They seem to turn bad after about three swarms.

I continually select for the best bees that come out of winter and will
re-queen a bad aggressive hive.but have only had to do that once and that
was a first year store bought queen, not one of my grow your own walk away
splits.

I define a bad hive as one whose bees will seek you out in the back yard
and sting you for no good reason.That is what the store bought queen's bees
did. It was an Italian and well before AHB.

So, is aggressiveness a regressive trait in all honeybees? In other words,
do easily manipulated hives go bad after only three swarms, which might not
be three years but less or more than that?

If so, then growing your own queens would also lead to such regression, but
that also does not seem to happen.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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