Angry/aggressive Bees

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als_bees

New Bee
Joined
Dec 26, 2009
Messages
7
Reaction score
0
Location
Lincolnshire
Hive Type
National
Number of Hives
5
Hi there I have no doubt every is busy bees at the moment. But I am a bit confused. A friend of mine has/had a real calm hive. But on Thursday we inspected the brood box and knocked of about a dozen queen cells. We could not find the original queen, but the hive was full of bees, we had one supper on but now have two.

The problem is the calm bees are not calm any more. We only need to go out into the garden and a bee will make a bee line in and attack us. They are now very aggressive bees. I thought that there might not be enough food but there is still six supper frames of food on the hive which we left on, so it’s not that. Is it possible that they have turned ferial?
 
Did you see any eggs during the inspection ?
Bees can turn aggressive if they are queenless.

Other reasons can be if they are near a mono-crop,oil seed rape being one around at the moment that makes them cranky.

Also its possible to have bees that as a smaller colony that covers 5 frames when acquired are fine but once they can fill a brood box can become very nasty.

Can they be moved to a new location away from the garden or if not requeened at least ?

Beekeeping should be fun and those bees if they have a queen have no place in the hobby.
 
angry bees

Thank you for your advice. I don't recall seeing eny eggs. So this could meen they are unable to make a new queen.

I am going to leave them for two weeks and then have another look. But I think these bees are for the chop in the end.
 
Thank you for your advice. I don't recall seeing eny eggs. So this could meen they are unable to make a new queen.

I am going to leave them for two weeks and then have another look. But I think these bees are for the chop in the end.

I wouldn't recommend you leave them that long, depending on the position of the queen cells you have been removing will tell you what they need.
You really need to inspect them again in the next couple of days and look for eggs or more importantly where any new queen cells are placed.

Is the colony is strong covering more than 7-8 frames ?
If they are aggressive now and they fail to requeen or they want to swarm you could end up with half your bees leaving the hive and causing a panic to local neighbours as they watch a swarm fly over.

Two weeks is a long time in bee keeping and if you delay taking control now they are likely to cause you a lot more problems than you really want to deal with.
bee-smillie
 
Hi als_bees

Were any of the Q cells capped ?
You may have lost the original Q to a swarm and by knocking down all the Q cells they have no way to recover which would probably make them bad tempered.
I would stick a frame of young brood in there to give them a chance to do their thing. They might settle down a bit if they know they`re not doomed.

Darren.
 
I agree with Darren, and probably with most of the rest, too.

Where in Lincolnshire are you? Presumably east coast? I am right south Lincs. Pretty sure that some added brood/eggs will quieten them but they may need moving to somewhere 'quieter' for a couple of weeks.

Regards, RAB
 
Before you knock off any queen cells you should be 100% sure there are eggs in the hive, the reason for this is that the queen could have left a few days earlier, and by squashing the queen cells they wont be able to make a new queen. So the only option is to give a frame of eggs from another colony to see if they start queen cells. It says by your name you have 5 colonies so giving them a frame of eggs shouldnt be a problem.
 

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