> This fellow can be presumed to be a competent beekeeper,
> and he said: "I can't get into the remaining hive to kill &
> replace the queen.  Just too aggressive."
> Get real.  If he could "work" the colony in any way, he would have
> never asked the question.  The colony must die...

Well, maybe you are right, or maybe he just needs a bit more info.  That
is a decision only the original writer can make.  He asked: "  How can I
get rid of the queen, preserve as many workers/brood/honey, & repopulate
with a package & new queen without destroying the current brood or
poisoning the comb & honey stores?".  So that is what we are
considering.  Death of the colony as an option is obvious and final, and
fairly simple, so, if the writer was ready to go that way and did not
know what to do, I am sure he would have asked us how to kill the bees.
He has not -- yet, anyhow.

This is the internet, and reading a few words is no substitute for being
there.  The rest of us can only make assumptions, visualise, and guess.
For most of us, this is merely an interesting discussion of the range of
possibilities, and a chance to consider the little technical details we
all need to know to manage a situation like this.

This topic -- handling mean bees -- has been covered in depth in the
past here on BEE-L, and the only wrinkle that is new is that the owner
thinks the hive may be Africanised.  That being the case, it is of
interest to us all to reconsider all the possibilities.  The most
extreme of those possibilities -- and least interesting to real
beekeepers -- is the execution of the colony.  Execution is a common
solution in central Arizona, I was told by some commercial beekeepers
when at a meeting there, yet Lusbys and other Tucson beekeepers
routinely manage bees that must have at least some AHB and don't seem to
have problems with agressiveness.  I understand that the bees at the lab
in Tucson are AHB, and are manageable.  They are in the city, near
buildings and the street with people coming and going.

AHB is managed routinely in many parts of the world, and AHB behaviour
seems to vary widely with locale and other factors, including colony
size.  Moreover, AHB is actually indistinguishable from EHB  in the
field by any criterion than behaviour, and it seems to me that -- for
many -- if a hive is well-behaved that it is designated EHB, and if it
is acting out, it is tagged AHB.  This is obviously ridiculous,
especially considering that many knowledgeable beekeepers and
researchers have reported EHB that are as bad as AHB at its worst, and
they or others have also reported AHB that never acts out.  Neither AHB
nor EHB is a homogeneous population, nor is either entirely consistent
in behaviour.

So, we have not finished considering remedies that come short of death
to the bees.  I'll add two more (that are in our collective memory
bank -- the archives) :

1.) A spoonful of ammonium nitrate in  the smoker
2.) Moving the hive to a new location to see if the temperament
improves.

There are more...

allen
http://www.honeybeeworld.com/diary/

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