Really angry bees - appear to have queen

[banjomorris]

I wonder if you can help? I have four hives, two of which are the collected swarms of the others and all four appear to have a queen - on inspection today, eggs visible in two and young larva in the others. However, the last couple of visits, the bees have been extremely angry and have readily launched at my hand to cover it in stings. The noise is phenomenal too. The two swarms were collected over a month ago and I imagine the new queens would have mated by now and calmed the colony. (One old colony had noticeably more drones coming in and out today, co-incidentally)

My intention is to unite the four into two using the newspaper method but without being able to find the queens, this is not viable at the moment. Can you offer me some comment please?

 

[Poly Hive]

Read the queen finding threads.

PH

 

[oliver90owner]

Were these prime swarms or casts?

The history of the queens might be enlightening. Tell us more about this.

The queens will surely have been mated - unless your brood is all drone - but I can see no reason why the temperament should improve considerably now that they are laying. A little perhaps, but not so much.

RAB

 

[Midland Beek]

If you puff smoke into a beehive the bees gorge themselves on honey and become less inclined to sting. However, this does not work if your bees are starving and have no food to gorge themselves on. And it doesn't much work if the bees in question are naturally aggressive.

 

[Simon]

We had a speaker at our branch meeting last week who says that if you unite two queenright colonies, the queen in the top box will tend to survive the experience. Therefore, if this is right, put your nicer queens on top and hope she/they take out the nasty ones.