Hello Bee-L,
We have been having something of an epidemic of aggressive bees this spring. I’ve been looking through the archives to see what I can learn but I’m wondering if I could ask for your wisdom now. I hope that the subject line is clear and will be easy to find in the future.

We are in Philadelphia, PA. We had an extremely mild winter with no snow and warm temperatures through February. It got colder in March and April has been mixed so far. Most of our blooming seems a little early although not extremely early as it looked to be before things cooled off in March.

In our club apiary we brought six hives through winter with no losses. These hives got very strong, very early and started wanting to swarm by the end of March. They’ve also been very nasty. Our apiary is in a shared space with gardeners on either side and various urban farmers all around. In some cases these neighbors have been chased out of their gardens by our bees.

These hives were placid last year, several of them started from packages. They have a few beetles, but not that many. They have been inspected and managed but not brutally. We had to move two of them out, we requeened two in place, and  we have to move two more out tomorrow. I’m moving them to a different apiary where there are fewer civilians nearby and I am requeening them there.

In other apiaries I manage I have had problems as well. I’ve heard from others in the area that they are seeing unusual defensiveness too.

Weirdly, this week most of these have become quite calm. It’s a bit uncanny. Hives that I was afraid I’d have to euthanize last week have been peaceful and patient this week.  The only thing I can point to as a difference is that this week has been cool and sunny while last week was quite warm. We’re also another week into our nectar flow and maybe there’s more to forage?

I’m really at a loss. We can’t have bees chasing people away, but I can’t tell why they’re doing that.

Has anyone seen aggressive behavior when swarming starts? I know that external disturbance like animals or even beetles can make a hive defensive but I’m not seeing much of that and I am seeing a lot of swarm cells.

Any ideas? Any good guidance on requeening or otherwise mitigating a nasty hive? Any advice on identifying which hive the nasty bees are coming from?

David Harrod (he/him)
[log in to unmask]
             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html