Thanks to everyone on the list who responded. I thought I would post about my progress with the nasty hives I’ve been working with since I started this thread.

Our apiary is part of an urban garden with various tenants. Our yard is about 60’ x 80’ with a road on the South side, neighbors on the East and West, and trees on the north.

We had 14 hives in here. 10 overwintered and 4 packages, eventually one swarm. Three of the overwintered hives were packages last year, two were at least 2 seasons old, and one was a late swarm from Sept. ’22 that somehow survived in a nuc.

We had a two hives that we decided were too aggressive based on their response to inspection and on reports from ‘civilians’ who were chased away from the neighboring gardens. We moved them to a more isolated location but one of the two has stayed very defensive while the other one has calmed down. It’s been difficult to requeen them and I’ve tried several different approaches. These were both Georgia packages last season; I think they’re the original queens.

However, we continued to receive reports of aggressive bees including one from an apiary volunteer who saw bees pour out of two hives in response to some weed trimming with hand tools around their hive stands. These bees didn’t sting but chased away the gardeners next door. Since the big Earth Day celebration was coming up we decided to move these bees too even though I had been able to kick these hives without a reaction the day after this attack situation. One of these was a 2 season overwintered hive, self-requeened last year, and the late season swarm.

After moving them I went through them to verify whether they had queens or needed space. They were not at all troublesome when I did. I am probably not going to try to replace their queens.

We did have a very peaceful earth day with no problems from the bees, so the moves seemed to work.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. I don’t think we need to euthanize any of them. I am hoping that the one that has been really aggressive will calm down when they have a queen.

I have been in touch with Dr Harpur from Purdue and am planning on sending him samples of this persistently nasty hive.

I guess that at this point I am concluding that swarm prep does in fact lead them to be somewhat more defensive but there may also be a limit to how many hives we should have in our space. It seems that a nasty hive can become extremely nasty at this time.

I’m not sure if any of the discussions of genetics are helpful to me at this point. We don’t keep very tight control on who is the queen of our colonies. That may be a take-away. We may want to systematically replace queens in the spring if they’re more than a season old.

I also wonder if stimulative feeding would make this better or worse. We have had a very variable spring weather wise with very warm periods followed by several days of cold. The swarms seem to happen in those warm stretches after the bees are cooped up for a few days. I wonder if they’re getting hungry and if some syrup would help.



David Harrod (he/him)
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