Small Hives are Vulnerable

Beekeepers can establish or expand their bee yards by purchasing hives from other beekeepers, purchasing nucleus hives, dividing existing colonies, catching swarms, or raising bees in queen mating nucleus hives. Beekeepers trying to expand their bee yards start with small populations of bees. Often nucleus hives smaller than full-size hives are used for expansion. These hives are especially vulnerable to a number of pests. As each of these new hives builds in population it is subjected to attack from numerous pests. Weak hives are regularly approached by wasps, yellow jackets, hornets, wax moths, small hive beetles, and mammals. However, the most persistent attackers of bee hives are often worker honey bees from other colonies in the area that attempt to rob honey stores. The best defense against bee hive pests is a strong population of honey bees. Bees can drive away intruding wasps, yellow jackets, wax moths, dogs, and other mammals. They remove the larvae of wax moths, and drive adult small hive beetles to the corners of the hive. Guard bees trap small hive beetles in propolis “traps” that the workers build. Small hive beetle traps often line the ends of bee hive frame top bars. Here, many beetles die of starvation. The bee populations of expanding colonies often fare better in small-sized hives because there is less open space for small hive beetles to move freely and lay eggs.

Our experience in rearing queens and expanding colonies at Peace Bee Farm is consistent: We have considerably greater success in rearing bees in nucleus hives than in full-size hives. Today’s photo shows worker bees returning to their small, expanding colony in a queen mating nucleus hive fitted with an entrance reducer and a screen to restrict robber bees. Bees from the colony learn to negotiate the space between the screen and the hive entrance. Robbers are attracted to hive odors and fly directly toward the screen where they are challenged by guard bees poised on their hind legs.

--Richard

Robbing Behavior

A honey bee colony seeks out sources of carbohydrate to make honey anytime that conditions are acceptable for the bees to fly, and bees fly during daylight hours whenever the temperature is above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Foraging worker bees collect most of their carbohydrate from flower nectar, a thin solution of sugar water. Bees also take unguarded honey from the hive of another bee colony that is too weak to protect its honey stores. This behavior is called “robbing.” For strong colonies, robbing is an efficient method of rapidly gaining additional honey stores, a definite survival strategy. Weak colonies are likely to starve after their honey stores are robbed out. This likely exerts selective pressure to remove weaker colonies or those prone to disease. Two honey bee colonies, even those sitting side-by-side in the same bee yard, do not share stored food resources. Every worker bee is a selfless contributor devoted to the care and protection of its own colony, but not to other colonies. While guard bees protect the hive from all intruders, their main duty involves protecting the colony from robbing by bees from other colonies. For the beekeeper, robbing is not a serious problem as long as there are numerous flowers in bloom. However, during times of dearth, like during the end of summer and early fall, robbing intensifies.

The harvesting of honey by humans has traditionally been called “robbing.” When bees are drawn to the smell of honey, harvesting becomes more difficult. If honey supers or frames of honey are left exposed in an opened hive or outside the hive, they readily induce robbing. The bees’ robbing tendency can be used by the beekeeper, as in today’s photo, to effectively clean honey supers after the harvest. Stack “wet” supers several hundred yards away from the bee yard, and bees will remove any traces of honey in a day’s time. To prevent robbing always reduce hive entrances whenever feeding, making colony divisions, and during the winter.

--Richard

Robber Attack

Honey bees evolved as consumers of food from flowers. Honey bees forage nectar from flowers to produce honey, the high-energy food they store to eat during the dearth of winter. Actually, they will forage from any available source of carbohydrate. The source may be flowers in bloom, or unprotected honey in another bee hive. Foraging worker bees learn to rob other bee hives, especially during times of dearth when little nectar is available from blooming flowers. Each honey bee colony protects its honey stores by stationing guard bees at the hive entrance to detect and turn away bees from other colonies. Robber honey bees attempt to fight their way past guard bees to get to stores of honey to carry back to their own hives. As the robber bees tangle with guard bees, they lose some of their body hair; thus robbers appear black and shiny.

Robbing often occurs in late summer and early fall; it can be especially troublesome to beekeepers during the honey harvest. If the beekeeper leaves hives open for too long or leaves honey supers exposed, robbing can start suddenly. When this happens, the air becomes filled with bees. Open hives or exposed honey supers become covered with bees. When robbing occurs during beekeeping operations, action should be taken to quell the frenzied bee activity. Reducing the hive entrances gives the guard bees an advantage over robber bees attempting to enter the hive, because the defenders have less area to guard. Today’s photo shows a bee hive under attack by robber bees. I helped this colony’s guards regain control by placing a brick on the landing board to reduce the hive entrance. Following the robbing incident, dead bees littered the ground. Robbing probably occurs more frequently in managed bee yards than in nature. Honey bees do not tend to nest in great numbers of colonies in close proximity. Beekeepers use the bees’ robbing behavior to clean the honey residue from extracted frames after the harvest.

--Richard

The Beekeepers' Helpers

Things don’t always go as planned. Tod and I harvested a truck load of honey from one of our bee yards and then headed for the honey house. A short time later, a hose fitting broke; and engine coolant started gushing out. With the truck disabled, we stopped and called for a wrecker to take the truck the short distance from Memphis to a repair shop in West Memphis. Loading the truck, the wrecker driver accidentally knocked over a concrete street light, which crashed onto his wrecker. The electric company’s lineman responded to handle the exposed wiring. Police officers arrived to investigate the accident. Another wrecker was called in, and the truck was transported to West Memphis and remained safely in the garage overnight loaded with supers full of honey. The following morning, the mechanics ordered parts and pushed the truck into the parking lot where it remained throughout the day. While the truck was in transit, covers protecting the honey supers had shifted enough to allow robber bees to enter. They carried away about three hundred pounds of honey before the truck was repaired. We shouldn’t measure the harvest until the honey is extracted and stored away.

Meanwhile, the beekeepers’ helpers, Ethan, Ashlyn, and Erin, proudly display a home-made pizza before placing it in the oven. Our grandchildren spent the night with Rita and I. They planned and assembled pizzas, played Boggle, watched Jackie Chan movies, fed ducks, geese, and chickens, and visited the honey house. Each of the children participates in various tasks involving beekeeping. Their other set of grandparents keep bees in Tennessee. Ashlyn’s parents moved a Louisiana bee yard damaged in Hurricane Katrina into new hives. Just as the children enjoy planning and making pizzas, they also help create honey soaps that are quite popular at farmers markets. The children help by suggesting mold shapes, textures, colors, scents, and names for the products. Their soaps make an attractive presentation along with honey and other bee hive products.

--Richard

Honey Bees are Survivors

Through the colony’s social structure, honey bees are highly adaptable. I am getting reports from across the Mid-South of bee colonies responding to the unseasonal cool and damp weather we encountered during this spring and summer. A number of beekeepers report honey production is far below that of past years. It appears that the honey bees are utilizing survival tactics as a result of the diminished nectar flow. I have observed some queens stopping their egg laying. The colony controls the queen’s egg laying by restricting the queen’s diet. I have also observed colonies killing off their drones earlier in the summer, an event that usually doesn’t occur until the frost of late November. Beekeeper Shirley Murphy reported robbing of her Tennessee River bees. She was able to control the robbing behavior by placing an entrance reducer in the hive. The reducer gives the colony’s guard bees the advantage over the robbers, because the guards have less area to defend. The colony that was being robbed also appears to have resorted to cannibalism of the drone brood. This behavior makes the colony more survivable by returning nutrients to the colony and reducing the feeding requirements for the brood. The honey bee’s social order is thus capable of adjusting the colony’s population and food requirements in response to the reduction in available food.

Today’s photo is of false indigo, a member of the important bee plant family, the legumes. If you click on the picture, you can see that it is being worked by one of the native pollinators, a bumblebee. Even though the false indigo grows in one of my bee yards, today I found it being worked by bumblebees and butterflies. Honey bees forage wherever there is an abundance of nectar and a concentration of sugars. They will choose to forage the strongest nectar sources or rob a weakened hive.
--Richard

Robber Bees

Honey bees gather nectar secreted from flowers to make honey. The nectar is a liquid composed of sugars and water. Scout bees are constantly searching for new sources of nectar. They report back to the colony on the quality and quantity of their findings. If they find a large source of a high-quality, sugar-rich nectar, they will recruit a large number of foraging worker bees to gather this nectar. They recruit the foragers by doing a dance in the hive, giving the direction and distance from the hive to the nectar. While most of the nectar brought into the hive comes from flowers, the bees will take advantage of any other source of available sugar. They will rob the unguarded stores of honey from a weak colony or gather from any unprotected source of sugar. This is called robbing behavior.


In the photo you can see the results of my leaving boxes of honey unprotected for just a few minutes. I unknowingly induced robbing behavior in one of my bee yards. Scout bees found the frames of honey that I was using to feed bees in small hives used for queen breeding. They entered the boxes of honey in my truck and carried away a considerable amount of the honey. The honey bee can rapidly call up great numbers of foragers to take advantage of a good source of sugar.
--Richard