Swings and Roundabouts ...

[Little John]

"Swings and Roundabouts ..."

(for the benefit of non-English speakers, this expression means 'what you may have lost in one regard, you may have gained in another').

I have one hive which entered winter with lovely gentle grey bees, and I had great hopes of breeding from this stock - but - as with the best laid plans of mice and men, this wasn't to be, for come spring these bees had changed into the familiar striped sweaters of the Italian mafia. Along with this change in team colours was a marked change in attitude - for these have become the meanest and most spiteful of bees, with their worst trait being that of 'following': after each inspection half-a-dozen or so bees follow me back to the house, and lay seige to me there. Up to two or even three hours later, these bees are still circling around the doorway, waiting for me to emerge. At first I thought this was a touch of paranoia, or maybe a chance event - but every inspection results in exactly the same behaviour. It's driving me nuts.

Now the grey bees wouldn't set foot outside the hive if there was so much as a dark cloud on the horizon, but I've just passed this hive, and the current residents are quite happy flying in the rain. We're not talking showers here, so far it's been raining steadily all day. I dunno what's the attraction for them out there, but it must be very tasty.

So - decisions, decisions - do I re-queen or just move this particular hive several hundred feet away from the house, and live with this trade-off ?

LJ

 

[busybee53]

Re queen.

 

[itma]

Sounds like they have requeened earlier, but not nicely.

If you requeened ASAP, you'd probably still have all-weather (and mean-spirited) foragers for most of the rest of this season's crop.

Something else worth doing would be to enthusiastically cull drone brood in the nasty colony ... until after you have requeened.

 

[meidel]

"Swings and Roundabouts ..."

(for the benefit of non-English speakers,
LJ

are sure to have trouble following this forum altogether

 

[itma]

are sure to have trouble following this forum altogether

¿Que?


https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/173424?hl=en-GB

 

[Chris Luck]

I would keep them if they are productive, nothing wrong with bees that can handle themselves from my perspective - just move them away from other people.

Chris

 

[For want of a better word]

¿Que?


https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/173424?hl=en-GB

Jag can inte forstor dig !

 

[Margaret Elisabeth]

Is that meant to be on the Welsh beekeeping forum.

 

[Little John]

I would keep them if they are productive, nothing wrong with bees that can handle themselves from my perspective - just move them away from other people.

Chris

Thanks for your comment, Chris - this indeed has been my dilemma: the snuffing out of a genetic line (a touch of eugenics there, methinks), just for human convenience ... is this really justified ?

More delving into this issue has uncovered the paper:
'Collective personalities in honeybee colonies are linked to colony fitness', Wray, Mattila, Seeley. The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour, 2010

Extracts from which read:

Relationship between Colony-level Personality and Fitness

We found that differences in our colonies’ collective behaviours (defensive response and foraging activity) were related to differences in their subsequent fitness (productivity and survival).
Colony productivity was more strongly correlated with foraging activity, whereas defensive response was a better predictor of winter survival.

Interestingly, there is some evidence for a correlation between aggressiveness and colony fitness across races of bees, with Africanized honeybee colonies behaving more aggressively and also tending to outcompete colonies of European honeybees (Fletcher 1991). However, ours is the first study to show a positive correlation between aggressive behaviour and subsequent growth and survival among colonies of European honeybees. Exploring the causes for this relationship
should be a promising area for future studies.

Hmm - some food for thought there. That paper certainly lends some scientific weight to what would otherwise be only an intuitive hunch that hybrid vigour, expressed as defensiveness raised to the level of outright aggression, is actually a positive trait in terms of future colony survivability. And that by continuing our obsessive selection for traits such as docility, and other expressions of 'tameness', we may actually be doing the bees a great disservice.


Soooo - as the aggressive behaviour only follows-on from intrusive inspections, I've decided pro tempus to house this colony in a Warre-style hive, in which inspections will be minimal, and we'll see how things pan out from there. In the meantime I'm raising a few extra queens which I'll bank, just in case.

Thanks to all for helping me reach this decision.

LJ