Rick said:
These ugly, ugly bees came from Georgia.

Because you have seen fit to point the finger in a certain direction please
send a sample to one of the two places which were posted and report back.
Many excellent queen raising operations are in Georgia.

To be fair I have heard reports of aggressive bees coming from the other two
main queen rearing areas also (and have even before the entrance of AHB).
The cases tested were not AHB but other cases I do not know about might have
been. Maybe a member of the bee lab will comment?

The possibility of a AHB drone mating with a European queen is always a
possibility. In fact research has shown in an area of known AHB the AHB
mating is the most probable!
Georgia is not an area of known AHB (at least not yet) .

I believe what you are seeing (and will be shown by the testing but I could
be wrong) is a hive of bees with the combination of aggressive genes which
researchers have found to be the same ????? or at least very similar to the
aggressive genes the AHB carry.

True AHb as reported by Dr. Orley Taylor ( five years research on the Mexico
border)  and others carry other undesirable to beekeepers genes such as:

1. running on frames

2. sending out many swarms

3.absconding

4.pseudo queens

Although rare I see a hive or two similar to what you describe every so
often. Mostly with supercedure queens. Color has little to do with their
aggressiveness.

I have kept aggressive hives around in remote areas before requeening if I
needed the hive production. I had a couple side by side on the same pallet
which were yellow bees and like the hive Rick describes. Smoke only made the
situation worse and even removing the lid caused an uproar. They produced a
large honey crop and then I requeened by dividing into three nucs.

Strong two queen hives with populations approaching 100,000 bees at the peak
of the season can react very quickly to venom so a couple sting incident can
escalate fast. One reason combining at the right time so population does not
increase past the time the emerging bees are needed for the flow is
important as hives with huge populations can be hard to work after the honey
flow is over and the floral sources are gone .

Bob

Ps. I will be out of the state for a few days but will answer email on my
return.

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