Vicious bees

[Erichalfbee]

Thank you for your not so dismissive and non-authoritarian adult post.

Can you please stop prefacing every post with these asides. They can be inflammatory. Thank you

 

[ShinySideUp]

And back to the OP. For a considerable time I had a rather defensive hive and I did nothing, and now they are not defensive. I mentioned this to the old beekeeper at my club and he said that it is not only the queens that can breed defensiveness. When the queen mates, she mates with up to twenty drones which can come from different hives and if one or more of those drones come from defensive hives then for that period of egg laying using that particular sperm then those bees can be defensive. Once the queen moves onto the next lot and the first lot of bees die out then the hive calms down again. I can't confirm this is the case but give it time, you never know.

 

[pargyle]

Can you please stop prefacing every post with these asides. They can be inflammatory. Thank you

No ... if you want really inflammatory ....

I remember telling the story, in a pub in Portmouth, when the USS Nimitz was blocking the view of the Isle of Wight and 1500 or so neanderthals were on shore leave, about how, when Noah had built his ark and had filled it with two of every kind of animal and bird on the planet and the flood had come upon them and they were sailing high on the newly created ocean.

Noah and his wife and sons had been floating around for a week or two looking for a place to land without success and there were no signs of the waters receding ... anyway - it was all getting a trifle smelly and congested on board with all the accumulated dung from the assembled creatures so Noah called his sons up to the deck and said ... Shem, Ham and Japheth, look 'ere Lads ... wiz gunna have to do sumat abaht this pile of manure 'ere (As you may have gathered, Noah came from good Yorkshire stock) ... get yer shovels aht and we'll eave this load of **** over the side ... and so with no more ado that's what the four of them did, leaving behind a huge stinking pile in the middle of the ocean ....

And in 1492 Christopher Columbus came along and discovered it ....

Now that's inflammatory .......well it certainly was in the Timber Tavern, Southsea, in 1968 !

 

[drex]

And back to the OP. For a considerable time I had a rather defensive hive and I did nothing, and now they are not defensive. I mentioned this to the old beekeeper at my club and he said that it is not only the queens that can breed defensiveness. When the queen mates, she mates with up to twenty drones which can come from different hives and if one or more of those drones come from defensive hives then for that period of egg laying using that particular sperm then those bees can be defensive. Once the queen moves onto the next lot and the first lot of bees die out then the hive calms down again. I can't confirm this is the case but give it time, you never know.

It is my understanding that the sperm is mixed up before being stored in the spermatheca, so sperm released for fertilisation is random. It is not used in sequence, so the worker population at any one time will be a cross section of drone genetic material.