Torching beehives is SO Cathédrale Notre-Dame.
My husband keeps bees here in central Texas.
We have some extremely aggressive Africanized beehives so keeping bees in our area is not for the faint of heart.
One hive of ours did abscond last month. They do that.
Or for the price of a beekeeping suit, some cash to the beekeeper on duty, and a few hours of your time, you join a swarm call or rescue, can get some rescued possibly feral bees and help everyone: win-win.
There are listservs (email lists) you can join that basically coordinate bee rescues in some parts of the U.S.; some examples in our area:
http://traviscountybeekeepers.org/get-involved/volunteer/tcba-swarm-list/
- swarm removals
- colony removals
- “cut-outs” (when the bees have been living in a wall cavity of a building and a cut must be made to the wall or floor or ceiling to get the bees out)
Such email lists are the place to go if, for instance, some reluctant bug exterminator has been told to get out to a particular property and rid it of a hive living in… oh… the attic, the wall, the eaves, inside the water meter box (a popular choice for some reason), inside a bat house or owl house (another very popular choice here), underneath a house in the crawl space, etc. The exterminator will email the list and say something like “for the love of god please someone get the bees before I am forced to appear there at 4:59pm to do my job, which will involved killing all the bees.”
Feral bees are sometimes better at fending off diseases like mites, moths, etc.
YMMV.
11 Likes
Not usually. But in any community of humans you will find some who are ill-manered. One is enough.
2 Likes
(Small beekeeping discussion here, please ignore if this is not your thing).
Africanized bees are known to abscond more frequently than pure European breeds. But, if one of your hives absconded, please double-check for diseases, parasites, etc… Normally, the behavior is triggered as a response to the brood being sick.
Please also disinfect the boxes and melt the frames.
In Europe, particularly in large cities where swarms are a problem, we tend to take the view that swarming should be prevented. The easiest method is simply to divide the colonies.
I’ll give you a simple swarm control method that can be used with agressive bees and help requeen them.
Your hive should have two brood boxes and at least one honey box. It should be shortly before swarm season with enough nectar flow.
- On day 1, put an excluder between the two brood boxes (and leave the one for the honey box).
- On day 9, check which brood box has eggs. That is where the queen is.
- Move the box with the queen to a second place, that will be your new hive. Add foundation to build.
- The rest of the hive does not have any larvae because of the excluder. Add a frame with larvae from a gentle hive (or a queen raising frame, if you want to produce more queens). The bees will raise a queen with that.
- After one or two days, look at the new hive with the old queen. It will be quite empty and manageable (because the old bees flew back to the old place which is the only one they know). That is your chance to find that queen and mark it or to requeen if you have an extra queen handy.
- After a month (not before!), check the old hive for eggs. If there aren’t any put a queen testing frame and if the hive thinks it does not have a queen, queen them or reunite the two hives.
5 Likes
It was an egregious form of animal abuse.
3 Likes
Texas, Iowa, California, hive vandalism is a thing now. Makes you wonder if there’s some reddit/4/8Chan anti-conspiracy conspiracy ala Pizzagate.
1 Like
Thank you!
And…
Oh no!
Many of our feral rescues are some percentage Africanized. The really intense hives (that don’t pacify–not with smoke, not with begging and prayer, nada) are of course majority percentage Africanized. Fun times during hive check! After the first few times my husband has had to do this, it’s now not unusual for other beekeepers to pay him to do their hive checks where the bees are very feisty and full Africanization is suspected.
I will remind my better half.
He often prefers to put the entire works (frame, comb, everything) in the freezer for weeks, cut out the comb (and melt it), bleach-soak the frames, then reuse. I am… less sure that this is an ideal procedure but I am not the boss. (I am however still married, so there’s that.)
We’ve got queen excluders. Pretty sure he put those in place last weekend. I can ask.
Here is Texas, it is still very much the wild wild West at least in the non-urban parts, and we are way less organized than y’all, I would guess. There are a lot of feral bees, and our warm season is often 10 months/year.
What makes it all worse is the extremely rapid and widespread “habitat shrinkage” (land clearing and development) that central Texas has had for 10+ years. Austin continues to grow, explosively, and is at the very center of this all.
In my own county, adjacent to the City of Austin, very little land is set aside by local governments, or protected by state or federal agencies, for habitat for any wildlife–even less so for the bees. The exception is a few private landowners who are good stewards and understand whole systems thinking. We don’t have many of those people, and land prices are so compelling that most choose to sell out, in every sense of that phrase.
Thank you for taking the time.
We are grateful for your support of bees everywhere!
5 Likes
I agree that this kind of hive destruction sucks, because bees are important to crop pollination. But, while we’re having this conversation, I would like to take the opportunity to point out that the bees that are the most in danger of being wiped out are the native bees. People don’t often think about the fact that the bees that we talk about saving the most are bees that were imported from Europe. Technically wild swarms of European honeybees are invasive and they compete for food with the native species of bees; the ones best adapted to pollinate their local environments. And, the ones least thought of when discussing protecting and saving the bees. Just some food for thought.
8 Likes
Well that bee looks simply fabulous!
4 Likes
All hail his majesty, the BumbleBear…come and fuck with his hive, if you dare!
1 Like
There is this article that seems to suggest the threat of colony collapse disorder is overstated:
Not that this means that vandalism is okay or that we don’t need bees or something. (That would be absurd and I don’t know why anyone would say that.)
Going on my list of electronic band names.
5 Likes
I am fortunate that (so far) in VA winters are generally too cold for Africanized bees to overwinter. My hives are fairly calm (all things being relative, I would never work them without a bee suit!)
5 Likes
Truth.
Agreed.
We plant these native flower mixes as much as possible… also: pretty!
And we encourage lawn rebellion:
Shout out to these folks, excellent solid work:
2 Likes
That should work. I use acetic acid myself (which as you may know is concentrated vinegar). You’ll need hand and face protection and not breath the stuff, of course.
Yes, that is the major problem.
2 Likes
In Europe as well. Europe has several hundreds species of wild bees, most of which are solitary bees. They are more threatened than honeybees.
I think I said so earlier in the thread. I also suggested planting kitchen herbs on balconies or windows sills. Certainly, endemic plants are better if you can as they are more adapted to wild pollinators. I still insist that several kitchen herbs are doing surprisingly well with a variety of wild bees, are easy to buy and to maintain. It simply is an ad hoc solution for someone who, for whatever reason, cannot use endemic plants.
1 Like
This thread is simply chock full of great band name candidates.
6 Likes
This.
Include basically all Diptera (flies and the likes, even mosquitoes), Lepidoptera (butterflies, moths and the likes) and hymenoptera are more important than honeybees.
As for your suggestion of planting herbs, kitchen herbs are a start. However, don’t stop there.
Ask your local gardeners (and the city council, or whenever body is in charge of public greens) to keep some pollinator-friendly spots in your neighborhood. In some cases, just less intense management (read: leave parts of the stuff growing instead of cutting the whole lawn every few weeks) helps.
Insects need places to roost, hide, and reproduce.
Management does not stop with this, but it is a start.
3 Likes
I hesitated to suggest to build a bee hotel, because its usefulness probably depends on where you live. I have several pieces of wood drilled with holes and they attract mason bees even in the center of large cities. Some info on bee hotels:
I suggest a simple bee block with various hole sizes. You just need a drill and several small bits. Use hard wood, not pine and keep in a dry place:
http://www.foxleas.com/uploads/images/15-Bee-post-150.jpg
Basically, lots can be done with very little effort. Ideally, everybody in this thread would go to a well versed entomologist and devise a system adapted to the particulars of the area where they live. In practice, however, not everybody has a full garden, entomologists already informed local authorities, etc… Kitchen herbs are pretty safe and easy for a start (and surprisingly efficient… really!). A small bee hotel can also be tried. If you have a garden, leaving a small part to grow semi-wild and a part with dead wood also helps a lot.
Starting large scale action, even with so called “native” plants is better left to the people who really know what they are doing. It has a real potential of doing more damage than good. Ecology is complex.
3 Likes
